10.20.2026 – your generation’s

your generation’s
present is now another
generation’s past

Adapted from the passage in Baseball in ’41 by Robert W. Creamer (New York: Viking, 1991) where Mr. Creamer writes:

Middle age begins, I think, when you first recognize that events in your generation’s present are now in another generation’s past.

I became aware that I was edging into middle age when I was thirty-two, in 1954, the year I began working for Sports Illustrated.

I had seen my first major league game in 1931, and the baseball of the thirties and forties had always been part of my present.

But in 1954 the thirties were suddenly a long time ago.

I met people on the staff — my contemporaries, I considered them, although they were ten years younger than I — who had few, if any, memories of the years before World War II.

I had become part of an older generation, unable to share personal memories of twenty years before.

Now I am pushing seventy, and the 1954 contemporaries are pushing sixty, and I still can’t share my prewar memories with them.

What did a kid of eight know about the world an eighteen year-old lived in during 1941?

There are relatively few people out there with whom I can share memories of that vivid year.

What gets under my skin right now is the thought that trying to explain to anyone pretty born this century is that … it didn’t use to be this way.

There were rules to how the Government worked.

Yes there were times when folks played fast and lose with those BUT for the most part, both sides played by the rules.

The rule book was laid out in the Constituion and both sides had a level of respect for the playing by the rules.

Along came this feller who depised rules.

Who broke the rules.

Who spit on the rules.

Who spit on those who expected others to play by the rules.

It didn’t use to be like this.

I have become part of an older generation, unable to share personal memories of twenty years before.

There are relatively few people out there with whom I can share memories of the way it used to be.

That may be the biggest tragedy of all.