Why I am more comfortable writing to my peers

Two weeks ago, in my essay in the RVtravel.com newsletter, I wrote that after much thought I had decided to focus my writing to an audience of my peers — those of the Baby Boom generation now in their 60s.

A recent RVtravel.com reader survey revealed that 94 percent of the readers of the newsletter are older than 54. I noted that I sometimes feel that those younger readers — more than a decade younger than me — grew up in a different world. The popular culture of their youth is different than mine.

A reader named Sam responded: “I’m a younger RVer, 50 years old, and been telling my other friends about your great site. I always look forward to reading it and you always have great information. Please don't give up on us younger RVers.”

I wrote back to tell Sam that there will always be plenty of useful information to readers of all ages. It’s just that I am most comfortable writing my essays for my peers, who better understand where I’m coming from. We have traveled through time during a dramatic, challenging, fascinating, confusing and even scary period of human history.

My mother and our trailer, late '50s.

My experience, of course, was that of growing up in the 1950s in a white, middle-class family in a mostly all-white suburb of Los Angeles. My father was a hard-working executive, who had a few ulcers — common then, almost accepted as routine — an executive badge of courage. Like many of his generation, he had returned from World War II, where in his case he flew a B 24 Liberator on 35 missions over Germany. His mission when he returned home was to marry, buy a house in the suburbs and raise a family, providing to his children more than his parents had provided him.

So, that is where I come from. Many others, in at least white America, were raised in similar circumstances. My peers who came along a decade or two later entered into a different world. I was finishing up high school when today's 50-year-old was born.

Those Americans were toddlers in the turbulent '60s. They were not watching TV when Bobby Kennedy was shot on live television. They weren’t horrified when radio bulletins announced that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. They didn’t sit glued to their TV alongside their crying mother, waiting to learn if JFK would survive his gunshot wounds.

They weren’t an adult during the protests on college campuses for Women’s and Blacks' rights. They were not adults during the riots in Watts.

They were not young adults during the Vietnam War, when a very unpopular military draft took a lot of guys away from their lives, and ultimately snuffed their lives entirely — many of whom did not believe the war was just. They were not around when returning soldiers were treated (very unfairly) like second rate citizens, even spit on. Compare that with today.

A 50-year-old was nine when the last American was drafted into military service. He didn’t sit nervously by his radio to listen to live Vietnam-era draft lotteries to see if his number (birth date) would be selected, determining whether he would go to war or stay home if he wished.

Today's 50-year-old, and those younger, didn’t watch Elvis shake his pelvis or the electrifying, long-haired Beatles perform live on the Ed Sullivan Show. They didn’t learn how to kiss a girl from watching Ricky Nelson on the Ozzie and Harriet Show. They didn’t grow up thinking family life in America was like that of Ward, June, Wally and the Beaver. They didn’t grow up watching black and white TV.

Unlike me, when they were children their doctor did not charge their parents extra for a house call — $8 instead of $5 for an office visit.

They didn’t have air raid drills in their elementary school, where they ducked under their desk (like that would really protect them from the blast of an atomic bomb). They weren’t a teenager during the Cuban Missile Crisis when my peers and I went to bed frightened half to death that we would not survive the night.

They were toddlers when my peers and I sat spellbound at our TVs as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface of moon, biting our nails that they would make it. Nor did they scan the skies years earlier to see Sputnik, the first satellite, launched by our enemy The Soviet Union.

They were still kids during Watergate. Today’s 50-year-old was eight when Nixon stepped into the Presidential helicopter and waved farewell to America and his political career.

They were not camping on their own when camping was free in all U.S. Forest Service campgrounds. I remember as a summer fire fighter in 1968 putting up little boxes at campsites for campers to put in a dollar to stay. When I was young there was no such thing as a motorhome. The first Winnebago was sold the same year as today’s 50-year-old was born.

I grew up in a town with a Main Street. Malls were years away, Wal-Mart ever further into the future. My buddies and I could get into the local movie theater for a quarter if we got there before six. We could watch both films, and then again if we wished.

Someone who’s 50 today was not an adult before copy machines, faxes and answering machines. To make copies of what we wrote, we used carbon paper typed on clunky manual typewriters. By the time today’s 50-year-old entered the workplace, computers had debuted.

Most of my peers were 50 before we owned our first computer. If we had a few hundred dollars we could buy an external hard drive with a whopping 20 megabytes of extra storage. We grew up mailing letters. Email? What was that? If we wanted speedy delivery we spent a few cents more for an Airmail stamp. Fed Ex? Years away.

Today’s 50-year-old could use a hand calculator to solve math problems in school. We could only dream of such devices.

But, yes, Sam and I are both RVers and thus have one big shared interest. It’s just that as a writer, now in my “senior years,” I am most comfortable reflecting on what's happening with me as an older person and the world in a way that readers only my age can truly appreciate. The people who have traveled through time with me will understand my thoughts far better than those younger. Like I said in my essay, there are plenty of RVers in their 30s, 40s and early 50s who write on the Web, who can speak to their peers far better based on their shared interests and experiences.