Born in 1945

If you were born in 1945, you arrived at the hinge of history. The first months were still deep war—casualty lists in the newspaper, gold star flags in windows, the unsettling quiet of neighborhoods missing their young men. Franklin Roosevelt died in April and it felt like the world had lost its footing; Harry Truman, the haberdasher from Missouri, was suddenly steering the ship.

Then came May and the bonfires in the streets for V-E Day—the war in Europe finally done—and neighbors who'd barely spoken to each other were dancing together on the sidewalk. The summer brought the unfathomable news from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in August, Japan surrendered. The noise on V-J Day was something no one who heard it ever forgot—car horns, church bells, strangers kissing in Times Square.

The boys were coming home on troopships, thinner and quieter than when they'd left, blinking in the sunlight of peacetime. Factories were already reconverting—making refrigerators instead of bombers, Fords instead of jeeps. Ration books were torn up.

There was nylon and sugar and real butter again. The jukeboxes were playing "Sentimental Journey" and everybody meant every word of it. America was exhausted, grateful, and charged with an enormous hungry energy—ready, after four years of sacrifice, to start building something new.