The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  Meredith and I have been physically fit since our twenties when we both gave up smoking and began a regular exercise regimen, so our grandchildren have no reason to focus on our diet. I suspect, however, that they may be aware of our appetite for “things.” As a result, and for our own ease of mind as well as setting the right kind of grandparent example, we’re shrinking, not expanding, our material world.

  Our generation has not been a model of temperate materialism, even as we embraced and initiated what has come to be known as the environmental movement. “Reduce, reuse, and recycle” should become our mantra when organizing the next stage of our lives, as an example to the generations that follow.

  The psychic and physical energy required to manage too many toys can drain the pleasure of having them.

  There is a form of schizophrenia that comes with having grown up with the sensibilities of Great Depression–era parents and the acquisitive traits of my generation. I sometimes open a cabinet filled with seldom-used dishes or sweaters or whatever and feel a wave of guilt, thinking, “We must eat dinner off those plates tonight and I’ll wear two of the sweaters!”

  “Need” should overwhelm “want” in these years, and our needs should grow smaller and smaller as we advance in age. For too many baby boomers, however, need has taken on a new meaning in the Great Recession, which came along at exactly the wrong time in their lives. As a group, boomers have been on a long joyride of “spend for today and worry about tomorrow two days from tomorrow.” It was not only the largest generation in American history but also the wealthiest and most determined to spend, spend, spend.

  When the economy took a steep dive, so did the assumptions of baby boomers, now grandparents. Their home values plummeted, their retirement accounts dried up or were greatly reduced, and their expectations for the future took a dark turn. Even financially secure boomers were unsettled by the speed and the reach of the downturn.

  It has been, at best, a sobering experience and I do not mean to diminish its effects, but it can also be an instructive lesson to future generations. With our help, grandchildren can learn from our experience. At their age, net worth has little real meaning. It is our love and life they want to share—but we can impart the lessons of managing for the future and not just for instant gratification.

  For those of us who were lucky enough to catch the wave of financial security, we can give up a lot and continue to live at a standard unimaginable when we were starting out. It is a matter of reordering priorities.

  For me, I was helped, as always, by my mother, Grandma Jean, a child of the early twentieth century, a survivor of hard times, and a living exemplar of everyday wisdom.

  When she was ninety-three years old Mother spent a few days in Montana at a family reunion at our remote ranch. It wasn’t an easy trip. She has limited mobility because of arthritis in her spine, so we borrowed a wheelchair and made some modifications in her bedroom of our hundred-year-old farmhouse.

  It’s a small house by modern standards, just two bedrooms—one up and one down—but a wraparound addition on the river side added a dining room, fireplace, and sitting area. The kitchen is functional but not a candidate for a Martha Stewart taping.

  Altogether I doubt the original house plus the addition add up to 1,100 square feet, including the porch and what we in the West call the mudroom, a back entry where muddy boots and wet jackets are shed.

  Mother appeared every morning at the kitchen table, dressed in a light robe, complaining mildly about the cool Montana dawns and sometimes asking, “Where am I?” To help her through her confusion I would quickly ask questions about her childhood on the South Dakota farm where she started life.

  THE PAST

  She’d pause over her scrambled eggs, look to the distance, and say, “My father made me eat oatmeal every morning in front of the big black kitchen stove where my mother made toast. I hated the oatmeal—still do—but we made wonderful ice cream.”

  And she’d be off, recalling horse-and-buggy trips to town to buy blocks of ice and the hurried trips back to the farm to store the ice in an insulated icebox that had no electrical refrigeration.

  “It was a lot of work,” she’d say. “We’d have to chip away at the ice with a pick and hand-crank the real cream and sugar we used, but it was so good.” Her expression would become puzzled and she’d say aloud, to no one in particular, “What were the names of our horses? I used to remember them all. I think Gladys was the horse that drank from the stock tank and then leaked all the water out of her mouth all the way back up the hill.”

  Her gaze would drift to our modest kitchen and she’d say, “Our house then was about the size of this room and maybe one other,” then she’d return to her breakfast, shaking her head slightly.

  I’d sit and watch, occasionally prompting her with questions but mostly trying to see in my mind’s eye a slide show of her life.

  With my father, she got through the Depression and World War II by getting up every morning with the same set of values as the day before: family first, hard work, faith, thrift, moderation, and community.

  Mother, particularly, was interested in politics, an admirer first of FDR and then Harry Truman, who physically resembled her father. Mother and Dad were registered Democrats but skeptical about John F. Kennedy’s stylish ways; Hubert Humphrey was more their kind of guy, a native of South Dakota who took Main Street with him wherever he went.

  The fifties were boom years for my parents and other working-class folks. They bought their first home and first new car. My father was making respectable wages as a hard-hat-wearing, lunch-box-carrying foreman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the big flood control and hydroelectric dams being constructed on the Missouri River.

  They were saving money for my college education and spending Saturday nights having dinner, drinking a few highballs, and dancing with friends at the local Elks Club. Life was good.

  Like so many members of their generation, they were unprepared for the upheaval of the sixties. They were opposed to the war in Vietnam but even more opposed to the idea of college deferments from the draft. When my brother shipped out as a marine, headed for Vietnam (he made it back), my father called me to rail against college boys getting a pass.

  I initially made a feeble defense but quickly conceded he was right. We had equally spirited arguments about hair length and militant movements.

  The night Mike left for the war, Mother and Dad were on a road trip back to South Dakota from visiting us in Atlanta. They stopped in Tennessee and, anxious about their youngest son’s safety, they uncharacteristically hit the hotel bar for a couple of belts.

  Mother had her first taste of Jack Daniel’s, Tennessee’s homegrown sour mash whiskey.

  Years later she would remember that stressful night and say, “But I was helped by that good whiskey—what do they call it? Tennessee walking horse whiskey?” The Brokaw boys would tease her about her drinking naïveté. She never did become a Jack and Coke kind of mom.

  When my father retired in the early eighties he and Mother moved into a two-bedroom condominium surrounded by the lush vegetation of Southern California in a large Orange County retirement community. They’d return to South Dakota for the summer months, but it was clear California was becoming a large part of their lives.

  Dad would spend his weekdays as if still on the job, in the community woodworking shop, making traditional baby cradles for younger friends who were giving him a growing brood of surrogate grandchildren to go with his own. Winter evenings he’d often step out onto his balcony overlooking the flowering trees and sun-washed bougainvillea bushes, laugh, and say aloud, “If the boys in Bristol could see me now,” a reference to his hardscrabble hometown on the northern prairie of South Dakota.

  In 1983, his journey from a childhood of deprivation and despair to working-class prosperity, respectability, and real, measureable accomplishment came to an abrupt end. He died of a massive coronary at the age of sixty-nine the week before I was to begi
n anchoring the NBC Nightly News.

  Mother wisely concluded, “South Dakota doesn’t need another widow.” She moved permanently to California and for the next thirty years she had a life she never could have imagined as a young woman.

  She returned to Europe for a second time, cruised through the Panama Canal, and found a male friend in her bridge club. Together they sailed the Alaska coastline. She went to concerts in Los Angeles and became an enthusiastic fan of the Angels of the American League and the Lakers of the NBA.

  When I got her an autographed picture from Kobe Bryant she was thrilled, until he got in trouble in Colorado. Then she took down the picture but did not throw it away. When the Lakers began to win championships again, she put Kobe back on the wall and never conceded that she might have been guilty of a sliding scale of worthiness.

  When age and infirmities began to overrun her enthusiasm for an active life she retreated to her assisted living apartment without rancor or complaint. She would occasionally say, matter-of-factly, “I’ve lived long enough” or “I never expected to live this long.” Yet she would soldier on, and made a difficult trip to Montana for a gathering of her boys and our families.

  She’d sit in her wheelchair at lunch in our rustic lodge, gazing out at the river running through the property, the thick, golden grass on the hillsides, the stately cottonwoods, Douglas firs, and aspen trees framing the distant mountains, and ask, “Now where are we?” When I answered, “We’re on our ranch, Mom. Remember, Meredith and I bought this twenty years ago. You’ve been here before.”

  She’d shake her head slightly, pat me on the hand, and then, noticing I was wearing my fishing cap indoors, she’d silently gesture with her arthritic hands for me to take it off.

  In her nineties, Grandma Jean remains the family role model. (Photo Credit 18.1)

  No caps at lunch in her presence, ever.

  When she returned to California, Meredith and I reflected on the lessons of our grandparents and how they have stayed with us.

  Meredith’s paternal grandfather, a no-nonsense but lovable country physician, was known to everyone as simply “Doc.” He taught her to drive on isolated rural roads when she could barely see over the steering wheel and played daily word games when she visited him and her grandmother Bird during the summer.

  Doc was an amateur geneticist and such a wise observer of the political world that George McGovern, South Dakota’s liberal senator, always made it a point to stop for a visit when he was in the vicinity, even though Doc was a card-carrying Republican.

  Doc’s been gone for more than half of Meredith’s life and yet she remembers his many influences on her as if they were passed along yesterday. Her maternal grandparents, Gramp and Nan, were equally important to her formative years, in part because they shared Doc and Bird’s values, if not their politics. Gramp was a populist Democrat when he met Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a vice presidential candidate in the twenties.

  They got along well, and FDR appointed Gramp to New Deal–era commissions during the Depression and World War II. When Meredith’s father was gone for five long years during the war, she lived with Gramp and Nan in their home next to the Masonic lodge where he was executive secretary, a position that paid little but perfectly positioned him as a wise counselor to what passed for the community’s power structure.

  Guy and Edyth Harvey, Meredith’s maternal grandparents (Photo Credit 18.2)

  It was in their home that Meredith developed a lifelong interest in politics and the news of the day. Meredith, Gramp, and Nan would gather around the large cabinet radio in the living room with Nan’s doilies draped over the sofa and Gramp’s White Owl cigar burning in the standing ashtray.

  Like Doc, his good friend and a favorite political debating opponent, Gramp was revered for his tireless enthusiasm for good works and pride in all things South Dakota. Thanks to his FDR connection, he was a ranking official in the March of Dimes campaign, the crusade to find a cure for polio.

  Gramp was literally larger than life, at six feet five and close to three hundred pounds, always with a black Stetson and, until late in his life, a lit cigar in his hand. He liked a shot of whiskey and a beer chaser, the cowboy cocktail known as a “bump and a beer.” His childhood was shaped by the calloused-hands way of life of West River country, the rolling grassland and badlands west of the Missouri River.

  Nan, a quiet, diminutive woman, was raised in the same area on a remote, economically marginal ranch. During the deathly flu epidemic of 1918, she rode on horseback from ranch to ranch, doing what she could to help families who were losing members to the lethal strain of influenza.

  She would recall with a small smile how she and her sister would help with haying in the summertime. Often when they would buck up a load of fresh-cut hay the air would fill with rattlesnakes that had been caught in the harvest.

  Gramp had an extensive vocabulary in Lakota, the language of the state’s Sioux tribes, and taught Meredith to count in the Indian way. As a ten-year-old he met Calamity Jane on a Sunday morning in a Fort Pierre bar. He was on his way to Sunday school when he found an empty whiskey bottle, which could be redeemed for a nickel.

  “There was this rough-looking woman at the bar on Sunday morning,” he liked to recall, and “she made fun of my tie, grabbing it and cutting it off with a big knife. I began to cry and she felt bad so she handed me a silver dollar. That’s when I found out it was Calamity Jane.”

  My favorite Gramp story, however, involved the death of his hero, President Roosevelt, in 1945. Think of the timing. The end of World War II is in sight. The promise of prosperity is bright after fifteen years of economic depression and the trauma of war. Suddenly, the great man who led the nation through all of that is gone.

  For Gramp, it was also a deeply felt personal loss. “I locked myself in my room for two days,” he said, “smoked cigars, drank whiskey, and cried. Finally, I came out”—and here his voice would drop an octave as he said, “and Edith [Nan] understood.”

  Those stories and the influences of Doc and Bird, Gramp and Nan, have stayed with Meredith for more than sixty years.

  There were no trust funds or European junkets, no new cars at graduation or fancy watches. Both sets of grandparents would take the grandkids for a week to a rustic cabin on a Minnesota lake in the summer or on a train ride across Canada. Maybe they’d slip a five-dollar bill in a card on a teenager’s birthday, but that would be the limit of material gifts.

  Meredith’s grandfathers, Guy Harvey and Clarence “Doc” Auld: One was a Democrat, the other a Republican, but politics never affected their deep friendship. (Photo Credit 18.3)

  In remembering them and my grandparents, Meredith and I both have the same recollections: They were always engaged citizens, attentive to local and national politics and international affairs. When I was too young to fully comprehend what he was trying to teach me, my grandfather would open Time magazine to trace the maps of World War II. He also suggested to my mother that she keep the encyclopedia in the bathroom so we could read while in the tub or on the john. She resisted, but somehow we all turned out okay anyway.

  I like to think that if Doc, Gramp, and my grandpa were still with us they’d be asking, “Have you thought about learning to read and speak in the Chinese language? Or Arabic?”

  Meredith remembered her grandfathers getting together and promising not to argue about politics but failing. “Doc and Gramp always had heated but respectful discussions about politics when they got together and they weren’t parroting someone else. They did their homework, and anyone listening would be enlightened. It was just part of my growing up.”

  THE PROMISE

  We were blessed to be surrounded by elders who were always active, involved citizens in small ways and large.

  What better legacy for one generation to pass along to another? Meredith and I have tried to keep that perspective in mind. If we can have the same influence on our grandchildren as our grandparents had on us, that will be reward enou
gh.

  We learned early as grandparents that close-to-the-ground, very personal excursions can lead to some essential truths. A few years ago, Meredith and I took our San Francisco granddaughters on an overnight camping trip to a backcountry cabin in the Montana mountains. It was not an easy hike, leading through trackless timber and up steep slopes, but despite some small-bore protesting about the bugs and the isolation, the girls made it.

  After a cookout we explained to Claire and Meredith, then nine and seven, that they would be sleeping inside the darkened cabin, which had been a cowboy’s one-room shelter during roundup time. Meredith assured them, “Tom and I will be right outside.”

  We slipped into our sleeping bags under the stars and listened to the girls’ whispers from inside the tiny cabin. Suddenly, the youngest of the two appeared and said in a commanding voice, “Nan, we need an adult in here—NOW.”

  Don’t we all?

  Sometimes those reminders of adult roles and responsibilities come in unexpected fashion. In June 2006, I was in Montana on a bluff overlooking a grove of conifers alongside the west Boulder River, which was close to flood stage because of the heavy snowpack runoff.

  As I stood there a small herd of elk cows—mothers—emerged from the tree line with their new calves. They paused to look at me and apparently decided that I was far enough away to do no harm, and so they stepped into the raging river to lead their children to the grassy pastures on the other side.

  It was not an easy crossing. The calves struggled against the current and then had to thrash their way through thick brush on the far bank. One calf failed and was swept downstream, swimming frantically until he reached an eddy and was able to gain a sandbar on the side from which he’d started.