Early in January of 2020, I heard a television newsreader use the phrase “Roaring Twenties” to identify the new decade. It wasn’t her fault that it sounded dopey; she was only reading out the words written by some dopey newswriter. Please, anyone who’s trying to make “Roaring Twenties” happen, stop. The world already had a Roaring Twenties – it started a hundred years ago, it lasted ten years, and now it’s over. Based on what we’ve read in books and seen in a thousand black-and-white movies, it was a pretty good time to be alive, except of course for the last few months of the final year.
Maybe a few years from now, let’s say 2026, we can look back to see whether the preceding years were ‘roaring’ or not, then decide if we’ve been in “Roaring Twenties II” all along. Until then, if it really needs a name, let’s just call the decade we’re in now “the twenties”, or “the current decade”.
I have several photos of my parents taken in the 1920s, when they were in their twenties and in full flower. The photos are puzzling – my working-class parents are wearing what look like expensive clothes, and in one case, special clothes just to ride horses. So, at one time there was money to spare – what happened? Did they go bust in the Crash, as so many others did? I’ll never know. Meanwhile, I love this picture and seeing how happy they were then.
Later, during the 1930s and 1940s, my family wasn’t ‘poor’ – we were far from being Dorothea Lange subjects. Even after my father flew the coop in 1943 and my mother had to go back to work, we got along just fine, maybe occasionally borrowing a scuttle of coal from the neighbors until payday and our next coal delivery. After the next delivery, we returned the scuttle heaped as high as possible. That’s what neighbors do.
I once emailed my brother a long question about our family, and part of his answer was that there was “a lot of history there that we will never find out about because everybody just came and went without doing much talking.” Yep, that’s my family.
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