And, hey, I'm a dork. I write Excel macros for fun. So I took a little bit of my screen real estate and wrote up a little formula. I put my date of birth, approximately, and the beginning date of each decade following (not counting 1970, since that was only two years after I was born) across the top. I picked two dates which were very important historical milestones which were still considered quite relevant when I was growing up: Pearl Harbor and Armistice Day, the end of World War I. I added those dates to my column.
Just for reference, Pearl Harbor to me was an event that I read about regularly in my history classes. I knew people who vaguely remembered it as children, remembered the actual wartime panic, the chaos in the country. By the time I was in my teens, people who had actually fought in World War II, some of whom had been at Pearl Harbor and other important battles of the war, were in their 50s. My age range as I write this. Not so old that they were senescent, able to tell me their actual memories of those events and the aftermath.
Folks who had lived through the end of World War I were significantly older, obviously. Those people who were old enough to fight in the battles were born around the turn of the 20th century, and by the time I was old enough to have an interest in those events, many of those people were well up into their 70s.
In addition to writing silly Excel macros for amusement, I'm also a musician, and I enjoy studying the history of music, hence my conversation about the Rolling Stones and millenials. So I have a decent idea of Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Les Brown. Once you get back into the roaring 20s, I have less of a grasp on who were the real heavyweights of the music industry. Oh, I can go look up some names and I'm probably familiar with some of them, but they don't just come right to memory. So, that was kind of my perspective when putting together this spreadsheet.
So, what does all that mean? It means that someone who was born in 2000, so someone who is currently old enough to vote and have a job at this point in their life, would see 1973, the heyday of the Rolling Stones, in much the same perspective that I see Pearl Harbor, the heyday of the Big Bands. You can make your own additional observations based on the snippet of sheet that I pasted above. I don't have a real point to make with this, just wanted to kind of put that out there, because I hear those kinds of things a lot. "How can they not know who Jimi Hendrix is?" vs. "Who the hell is Jimmy Hendricks?"
