Do Not Call Us Baby Boomers

My birth has always been defined by Sputnik. Mine. Spike Lee’s. And the four million and three hundred thousand other Americans born that year. Fifty years ago, on the fourth of October, a small round metal ball with a diameter only a few inches longer than most of us measured at birth hurtled through the Russian sky. It began its orbit around our world as our mothers stroked their bellies, mixed our Similac or pinned our diapers. And as its four trailing antennas beeped its presence to amateur radio operators across the continent, nearly twelve thousand of our mothers awoke from anesthesia to count our little toes and fingers. We were the inaugural babies of the Space Age.

For fifty years popular culture has told us that we were Baby Boomers. Yet we know differently. For we have never really been part of that generation. True we were the blessed offspring of the greatest generation. But it was our older brothers and sisters who were the boomers. Where were we when “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” first aired? Melanie Griffith, Judge Reinhold and I were all in our bassinets. We knew “the Beav” only in reruns after school.

Ours is a generation defined not by JFK, but by Neil Armstrong. Only Caroline Kennedy, whose father no longer hugged her, truly remembers that November day in 1963. Katherine Harris, Jim McGreevey and I were sent home from First Grade as we watched the flags lowered to half-mast. We remember that day. But for us it was a day swirled in adult whispers. The pink pillbox hat, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, the horse-drawn caisson and even JFK, Jr.’s brave salute entered our consciousness reconstructed—from television clips, news photos and our parents’ stories. That day lives in our memories, but only as recollected bits and pieces of another generation’s defining moment.

That “one giant leap for mankind” was to be our first significant collective memory. That hot July day, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, and I were budding adolescents, eagerly anticipating our first days in junior high school. But we stopped to look at the grainy images on our televisions, some of them color, along with 500 million others worldwide. We saw Neil Armstrong take that first step and plant that American flag. And we jubilantly drank our Tang and knew that America had won the Space Race. We were proud to be American.

The Space Age was integral to our lives. NASA was organized as we learned to take our first steps. As Kindergartens, Ray Romano, Nancy Cartwright, and I watched George Jetson commute to Spacely’s Space Sprockets in his flying saucer car on our black-and-white televisions. At school we were the first generation to watch the countdowns of Gemini launches and to add and subtract, not in neat columns as our siblings had, but on number lines that extended far into space. In third grade, we did our homework, memorizing multiplication tables and constructing Venn Diagrams, as we heard the Robot on television warn, “Danger, Will Robinson!” Time that should have been spent perfecting long division in fourth grade was wasted on learning to count in bases 6 and 8 and cheering as Scotty once again beamed up Captain Kirk just in time. Even as college students we spent hours waiting in line to buy tickets for Star Wars.

We have never felt like Baby Boomers. It was our sisters who swooned and our brothers who gyrated when the Beatles invaded America. Instead Donny Osmond, Gloria Estefan and I were learning to read. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Bob Dylan. It was our brothers who played their LPs. Where were we at Woodstock? Even the precocious Cameron Crowe was still in high school. We never learned to twist and shout, we danced to disco.

We watched from bedroom doorways as our siblings donned bell-bottoms, mini-skirts and peace symbols. We covered our ears when our fathers, proud GIs, yelled at our brothers to cut their hair and at our sisters to turn down their music. While our brothers burned their draft cards, we played with GI Joes. While our sisters burned their bras, we stuffed our training bras. As much as we wish, we are not Forrest Gump. We were not at the Lincoln Memorial with Abbie Hoffman. We were in fifth grade. Me. Susan Ford. And Andrew Cuomo.

Please do not call us, we who were born in 1957, Baby Boomers. Our culture is not theirs. We are the lost generation sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and Generation X. Historian Steve Gillon calls us Shadow Boomers. To marketing consultant Brent Green, we are Trailing Edge Boomers. At least social commentator Jonathan Pontell has the courtesy to abandon the term boomer when he calls us the Generation Jones. Yet we are not as nondescript as the surname implies.

We, for whom Gemini is not an astrological sign of the Age of Aquarius but a spacecraft, are a generation in search of a better moniker. A name that reflects our dreams of moon colonies and Martians. Of infinity and beyond. Space Pioneers is too outdated. The NASA generation, far too broad. For NASA’s history stretches far past the fringes of our generation. I say we embrace our inner cosmonaut. Call us the Sputnik Generation. After all the Cold War is over.