Phoenix, Arizona in the days of the Generation Gap


I'm a little bit too young to remember much about the Generation Gap, which was a popular term in the late '60s and early '70s. I was just an annoying little kid back then, in Minneapolis, but I do have some vague memories of it, and since those days, my interest in history, especially in Phoenix, has caused me to reexamine those days.

If you're not familiar with the Generation Gap, or have forgotten all about it, briefly it was a very wide division of political opinions between the young generation, such as the young man in the billboard up there who is enjoying drinking some whiskey with his dad. There really wasn't much agreement between the generations at the time.

The image at the top of this post, which I found on the Duke University website, which has a LOT of old advertising images, is from 1972. And if you time-travel back to 1972, you will find, generally speaking, that the young generation didn't support the president, and didn't support the war in Vietnam. Even as a little kid I had an inkling of a feeling that there was tremendous tension between the young and the old generation.

Two years later President Nixon would resign in disgrace, and the war would begin to end with the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. I turned eighteen in 1976, and moved to Phoenix in 1977, entering a world where the nightmares that caused the Generation Gap had come to an end. I don't recall really giving it much thought, but when I did I thought of it as a victory for the young generation, best exemplified by the lyrics from the Burt Bacharach song: "What the world needs now is love, sweet love."

The young generation were the Baby Boomers, who dreamed of a better world.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love.
It's the only thing that there's just too little of.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.

 - Songwriters: Burt Bacharach / Hal David
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