Greatest Generation: An Intimate Portrait

A generation is disappearing before our eyes, but Harry Stein has given us a portrait of them that may be better, and more inspiring, than any published to date.

Much has been made in recent years of the so-called "Greatest Generation," the people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II. They are now by and large in their 70s and 80s, and passing on at an accelerating rate. While some of them will still be with us for another 20 years or more, there will be fewer of them all the time. Their influence on our country, however, will be felt for a long, long time to come.

After all, these are not just the people who lived through the nation's worst economic downturn and who won the largest hot war in human history. They're the ones who came home and radically changed politics, for good or ill, for most of the last half of the 20th century. They produced John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. They gave us Social Security, Medicare, the nuclear arms race, and helped win the Cold War. They also gave birth to the Baby Boomers, rock and roll, and suburbia.

Yet for all their great accomplishments, what is so often missing in portraits of people of this era is their basic human qualities. Indeed, when their human qualities are discussed at all, they are sometimes sneered at and derided. Men of the era were supposedly unemotional, distant, bumbling when it came to matters of the heart, spent too little time with their wives and children, were sometimes abusive and neglectful, and were chauvinists. Women from the era were often derided as submissive housewives and often sneered at by the feminist movement (although a few of the early feminists were of this generation, the contempt they showed to the housewives of the era was still remarkably hostile at times).

What Harry Stein has done with his wonderful new book, The Girl Watchers Club, is given us a very human look at inner souls of the people (alas, mostly just the men--but what men they are and were!) of that era.

The Girl Watchers are a group of more than a dozen World War II era men who have been meeting together to joke, chat, and rib each other (the way men so often do) for decades. They started out gathering around a swimming pool to watch women, but soon evolved into a group that just got together socially for its own sake. For decades they've been doing this, involving themselves in each others' lives in a way that few people do today. They don't do much but talk together, but what they talk about speaks volumes.

While the Girl Watchers group actually comprises well over a dozen men, and has comprised dozens if you count its former and deceased members, Stein here opts to intimately profile only six of them, men he feels well represent the entire group. The men he chooses are all distinct in their own way: atheists and deeply religious, combat veterans and men who never saw combat, men who've had happy family lives and men who've had tragic ones, men who grew up in big families and men who grew up as only children.

Article Author: Dean Esmay

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