Say goodbye to your 80s childhood (before it leaves the museum)
Notes on "Growing Up X," even if I'm not sure I really did
Earlier this summer, my sister wanted to do something for me for my birthday, so she suggested Growing Up X, an exhibit at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, (near where she lives) that showcased ephemera from our shared childhood.
I readily agreed to go view artifacts from my youth now being encased behind glass. (Isn’t that what everyone wants when they’re fretting about another smurfin’ year having rolled around?)
As described on the museum’s website, the Growing Up X exhibit explores “the toys, technologies and cultural touchstones surrounding Gen Xers in their childhood.”
“Museum visitors will see items familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, from telephones with cords, record and cassette players, and an Apple IIe computer to Teddy Ruxpin and parachute pants. Additionally, they will learn how growing up in the shadow of the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the AIDS crisis and the War on Drugs shaped Gen Xers as individuals and a generation.”
And see familiar items we did. It was a bit like going back into that part of the closet that your mom never cleaned out when you left for college. (Or should I say the vanity: check out the awesome pack of banana clips in the pic below.) Seeing a crimping iron triggered a bit of trauma as I remembered the day in sixth grade when, thinking I finally looked cool and trendy for the first time in my life, one of my classmates in P.E. called out “Waffle Iron!” each time he ran past.
Hair-related horrors aside, I’m one of the incredibly lucky people on this earth who can say I had a happy childhood. My days of youth were filled with trips to the roller rink (largely because it was the sole source of entertainment in my tiny town), reading Babysitters’ Club and Sweet Valley Twins books, playing with Barbies and Hot Wheels cars and Rainbow Bright dolls. My sister and I were forced to use our imaginations — whether in the form of daydreaming, writing short stories (me) or creating plays and Little House scenes in the yard or the pasture (her) — not only because we didn’t have iPads and cell phones, but because we lived in the country. We often pretended to be newscasters reporting on school gossip, or radio hosts doing a Top 40 countdown. (I can still remember her very professional intros for “Say Say Say” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”)
A few years ago, I’d seen a post from a Springfield media outlet stating that Gen X memorabilia was being sought for an exhibit. I sent it to my sister with a comment like ha ha you and I are such hoarders, we could totally help put this together! She knows I still have containers filled with diaries and cassette tapes. I know she still has her skate pom-poms, sticker album, and much more.
On the day we visited, now seeing the results of that call for items, I realized one of the things I was enjoying most was the collaborative feel, because almost the entire exhibit had been crowdsourced. Not only had people our age contributed their items, but the curator had included people’s reflections — on everything from lack of diversity in popular media of the time, to how deeply we were indoctrinated in the “Just Say No” era. One of my favorite contributions was the framed piece of childhood artwork a woman had sent in — the melodramatic drawing for which she’d won her school’s D.A.R.E. poster contest. (Also: my sister and I aren’t the only ones who’ve hoarded. Good to know.) The signs featuring written recollections from people our age, though we’d never met them, created a collective sense of shared youth and history.
In the section highlighting the music of the era, I got the opportunity to pose next to a giant replica of a blank cassette tape. I appreciated the cleverness of this graphic element, and borrowed one of the available dry-erase markers to add titles of a couple iconic songs from my childhood: “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me).” Seconds later, I drifted over to the display on grunge, while my went over to the jukebox (although a digital one, not one that required quarters) and selected “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” In that moment, hearing that song while looking at favorite ‘90s album covers, and feeling a visceral pull toward everything mentioned and depicted there, it struck me: almost nothing could define my youth — or maybe even me as a person — better than the drift from worshipping Whitney to loving Courtney Love, and all in the span of a second.
And by the way, in case you haven’t figured this out from my musical mentions: when it comes to the timeframe constituting Gen X (1965 to 1980), I’m near the butt-end. For years, I actually thought I might be considered part of some other group. Whenever I heard about Gen X, I’d picture people older than me — the cool, post-college hipsters who were depicted in Reality Bites, (which came out when my friends and I were still in lil’ ol’ high school). So I still find it somewhat hard to identify with the Gen X label — although what other group would I belong to? Because I myself was a post-collegiate searcher and newly hired “adult” when the millennium rolled around. (In other words, no accusations of loving avocado toast are ever made about me or my kind.)
Near the end of the exhibit, in the section highlighting technology, we watched a kid experiment with trying out the dial of a rotary phone. (Weird.) We saw a copy of Oregon Trail, the game I can vividly remember playing in fourth grade on what I truly believe was my class’s one and only computer.
But, as with any generation, not everything was fun and (literal) games. The exhibit took care to include framed headlines and video clips highlighting the Challenger explosion, the death of Ryan White, the rise of “latchkey kid” life and kidnappings and more. I enjoyed the weightier elements, and the thoughtful commentary that had gone in to each of the placards, along with the pop-culture elements. If I were to go back again, I’d spend more time carefully reading and pondering those mini essays about “our” time. (Oh, and a word about going, if you do: it’s free.)
It might be a fair question, depending on where you live, if it’s worth traveling to travel Springfield to see it for yourself. But I will tell you this: the whole thing was worth it for the entry written in this diary, which encouraged people to confess their “Gen X Secret:”
The Inquisitive Quad Citizen is a proud member of the Iowa Writers' Collaborative, a service created to link readers and writers who share an interest in our state. Please support these writers by subscribing to their columns and sharing their work, or signing up to get the Sunday morning roundup of all their columns in your inbox.
Totally makes me want to make a trip to Springfield. Love the review!
I came before the X'ers but I still enjoyed your romp through the memorabilia of your childhood. I'm one of those, too, who had a wonderful childhood, though, at the time I thought it was horrible. :) I'd like to see a museum of Boomer memorabilia. I wonder if others have rooms full of stuff like I do - and I've been trying to downsize!