Growing Up

by Russell Baker

This was an entertainingly written book (a Pulitzer Prize winner) about the author’s childhood to young adulthood.  (He was born in 1925.)  He didn’t have an easy childhood but the book wasn’t a pity party, either.

Quotes

“Sitting at her bed side [his mother with Alzheimers], forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my own children, and their children, and children in general, and about the disconnections between children and parents that prevent them from knowing each other.  Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.  If a parent does lift the curtain a bit, it is often only to stun the young with some exemplary tale of how much harder life was in the old days.”    p. 6  ¶2

“Uncle Charlie gave me my first real education in politics.  From Uncle Charlie I first heard the word “socialism,” a doctrine so evil, he gave me to understand, that it could destroy our country.  America, he told me, had been built with initiative and hard work.  Socialism, he told me, discouraged hard work and destroyed initiative.  And socialism was what Franklin Roosevelt was practicing.  Didn’t I ever look at the newspaper...?  Didn’t I realize that millions of people were being given money by the government for doing no work at all?”
    p. 109  ¶2

“The changeover from knickers to long pants was the ritual recognition that a boy had reached adolescence, or ‘the awkward age,’ as everybody called it.  The ‘teenager,’ like the atomic bomb, was still uninvented, and there were few concessions to adolescence, but the change to long pants was a ritual of recognition.  There was no ceremony about it.  You were taken downtown one day and your escort—my mother in my case—casually said to the suit salesman, ‘Let’s see what you’ve got in long pants.’”     p. 159  ¶7

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