Cuspy.
I feel cuspy. My birthday is on the Aries-Picses cusp — the cusp, the one between the end and the beginning — and I was born in 1961 on the cusp of two generations, too young to be a Boomer, too old to be Gen X. (I call it the Captain Kangaroo/Sesame Street cusp.) Demographically, we’re usually lumped in with the baby boom generation, but culturally we have little in common with the group that came of age in the Vietnam/Civil Rights era, but also little in common with kids born starting in the late 60s (Gen X) who came up into a world full of new technologies that now dominate our world.
You could probably take any span of 5 years and make a first/last list like this — the 20th century is full of big and small shift moments. I don’t know. Here’s a list off the top of my head for my cuspy cohort of babies born 1960-1965. Ish:
* We were the last to grow up without home video, personal computers, and video games.
* We were the last to grow up mostly without microwave ovens.
* We were the last to grow up with returnable, refillable glass beer and soda bottles (plastic soda bottles were introduced in 1970) and the last to grow up without bottled water (Perrier came out in 1977).
* We were the first to grow up with diet soda (Diet Rite came out in 1958, Diet Pepsi in 1961).
* We were the last to grow up with tricycles (Big Wheel was introduced in 1969). And for the most part the era of ubiquitous big plastic lawn toys came just after our childhood.
* The shift of popular music from AM to FM radio happened during our most formative years. (Studies show that the songs we love as young teens set our musical taste for life.)
* This is less about our childhood, but we were the very last to come of age before the AIDS pandemic. I guess this one was most acute if you were a gay kid. It’s hard to beat that for a before/after marker.
* We were the last kids to have the “duck and cover” drills at school (in case of nuclear attack) that were standard in the 1950s but waned in the mid 1960s.
I’m sure there are many others.