Those who were born at the top of 1965, and surroundings, are, perhaps, the last generation that played in the street, carelessly, a generation whose classrooms smelled like Imedio glue, while at recess cards of the Johan Cruyff league were dealt with. They are the generation of the ‘baby boom’, people who witnessed the prodigy of the transition from black and white television to color television, whose first broadcasts date back to 1972, when the Olympic Games at that time. That television had two channels, VHF, and UHF, and at times it had two diamonds, which was, perhaps, the only institutional prohibition of the Franco regime encountered by this generation that now worries, due to statistical overdose, before the
near future of pensions.
The ‘baby boom’ generation exceeds seven million Spaniards. There are fifty-year-olds, for short, that one day of their celestial childhood had a snack at Nocilla, while the tune of ‘Los chiripitifláuticos’, or ‘One balloon, two balloons, three balloons’ sounded on TV. Television then became an arbiter of family schedules, because set the time to go to sleep for the little ones, and at night he adjusted a program more for adults, although the ‘Un, dos, tres’ by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador was a great family sarao, high up on Fridays. Venial, or tenuous, eroticism came to the generation of the ‘baby boom’ with the visit of the hostesses of the ‘One, two, three’, and the winter visited life with a trenka for several cold ones. That, plus some katiuska boots, which were the ones that were enjoying the boom, at that time.
Of the generation of the ‘baby boom’ are Butragueño, García Ferreras, Aitana Sánchez Gijón, Juan Echanove. For instance. They come to remember the day Franco died as a day when there was no school, and the Alpino pencils as a wonderful homework craft in a time of series titled ‘Charlie’s Angels’, or ‘Mazinger Z’. I believe that this generation could be divided into those who enjoyed the BH bicycle as kids, which was the BMW of bikes, or those who had a ‘Torrot’, which was the neighborhood, proletarian, and cheaper sister of the previous one.
The bicycle was the ultimate gift from Reyes, and there were those who obtained a bicycle for the wealthy, and those who obtained a bike to go pulling. The bike came to be something like coming of age, before coming of age proper. The people of the ‘baby boom’ usually have in their common biography a scalextric for Christmas and a Leif Garret album in the summer, who was sometimes a disco player, or a hard-dancing disco. It was fan club time, with Bosé singing ‘Linda’, and with Los Pecos singing anything sugary.
The classrooms were waxed, and the blackboard of the classroom was for the children of that time a gallows or a podium. The teachers would take you out on the blackboard and you could show off giving the lesson in a row or be shot for ignorance, before the attentive and righteous class.
Of the generation of the ‘baby boom’ are David Summers, Dolores de Cospedal, Lorenzo Silva or Icíar Bollain. Surely all of them remember the study of the periodic table of the elements, the declensions of Latin, or the theory of sets, entering and leaving the classroom in pilgrimage of lines of rigorous discipline.
Icon generation
They and others are a generational census that perhaps proved the fear of mathematics, the rogue of the first menthol cigarettes, the August camps, the mass songbooks, and that historic day in which the schools dared, at last, to be mixed, one day in the sunniest of the days when “the girls brought us their breasts”, as Juan Echanove sometimes reminds me, from mischievous nostalgia, perhaps.
They went to school in uniform, did Domund examinations, and did or did not succeed in the Pretechnology subject, which is how manual work was called. The girls tried to thrive in sewing, and the boys in the use of a herringbone saw. We are facing a generation of icons, and not so much of flags. They all come from a time whose childhood played with the Madelmans, or Nancy, and killed the monotonous afternoon with the ‘Exín Castillos’.
Then came the adolescence of a video store, sex at last in bed, if the parents had left that night, the revelry in the Supertramp climates, and the song ‘I want her to die’, by Francis Cabrel, which was a great emotional hit from the dreaming, fragile and enraptured hearts of that time. In those days, a cassette was playing from some patio, and a Vespino was dreamed of. They smoked a lot, because the cigarette was a freedom, almost a rebellious gesture. .
There were those who arrived in time for conscientious objection to avoid the still mandatory military service. Those of the ‘baby boom’ have been growing while democracy also grew. They come from a lyric of cinexín, and from a disco gallantry, where Travolta was a poet.
www.abc.es
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism