The GI Generation
A Memoir
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
Frank Mathias was born in Maysville, Kentucky, (pop. 7000) in 1925 and grew up in nearby Carlisle (pop. 1500), where life in his small town was much like that in towns and villages all across America. He came of age in an era of total security; his parents never even had a key to their front door. Daily living was infused with gossip; no one had a secret, and everyone knew everyone else's business. Outdoor life was a vital part of growing up, and teachers and mentors instilled a sense of right and wrong in young people. Raised during the Great Depression, Mathias became a member of a fighting force the likes of which the world had never known, a legion now called "The Greatest Generation." The GI Generation tells Mathias's story of growing up with the sweet whistle of the L&N train and the summer-kitchen smells of hot salt-rising bread and blackberry cobbler, which could instantly halt even the most rousing game of cowboys and Indians. Much of community life focused on the local high school, which, in Mathias's case, was a tiny one with no chemistry courses, no drivers' training, and no guidance counselors. Yet the one hundred students who graduated between 1942 and 1944 became university professors, top executives, military commanders, successful investors, lawyers, and physicians. A vivid portrait of a bucolic pre-war boyhood, The GI Generation takes readers back to an era when boys rustled watermelons under the hot summer sun and young lovers danced to the sounds of farmhouse bands. Whether describing the unfortunate (but delicious) end of his brother's pet chicken, Don, or the ominous clouds of war, Mathias writes with humor, honesty, and compassion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although it meanders as a narrative, this vividly recalled, detail-rich memoir fixes its gaze on a vanished Kentucky Depression childhood in a telling resonant with the hardships and frail innocence of between-the-wars America. Mathias (G.I. Jive), professor emeritus of history at the University of Dayton, was born in 1925 and raised in a town of 1,500; his father was a traveling grocery salesman, and his early childhood was a marked mixture of the isolated, agrarian milieu and the deprivation that battered the nation. Mathias sharply etches details of this time: as with the New Deal programs that transformed his region, he notes the strange confluence of rurality with the fears and wonders provoked by technology, economic fluctuations and war clouds. Throughout, the author is understandably haunted by ex post facto consideration of how many of his pals and mentors would soon be devoured by war; he does a fine job of explicating how the triumph over fascism of these Depression-tested small-town lads ironically sparked the dissolution of their homegrown, wholesome ways. His book is good enough to make one wish it were better. Although the book's pace is rather sedate--and Mathias too often contextualizes his era through withering contrast with the two generations (Boomers and Gen-Xers) that followed--this remains a sobering, well-considered and engrossing portrait of ordinary life in a tumultuous era. 66 b&w photos not seen by PW.
