My Ames High School Class of 1965 is having a 50-year reunion this fall, and many of us are trying to decide what our place in history will be.

Nobody talks about it much anymore, but we were the first class of baby boomers to graduate from high school. Our fathers came home from World War II in 1945, married their sweethearts, and in 1946 and 1947 began birthing the largest concentration of babies this country had ever seen.

It continued until at least 1964, which is the official cutoff date for the baby boomer generation. But the real spike in births was in 1946 and 1947. Our Ames High class was nearly 30 percent larger than the class ahead of us, and for many years we also outnumbered those that followed.   
Our parents, who are now known as “the greatest generation,” emerged from the war with a lot of pent-up social energy. And why not? Their youth was smothered by the Great Depression, and they’d spent their formative adult years fighting a world war.

Once those life-shaping events passed, Mom and Dad were ready to kick back, enjoy life and indulge us. They created the suburbs, interstate highways, shopping malls, TV dinners and much more. Not surprisingly, many of us boomers developed inflated notions of our own worth long before we had actually accomplished anything.

But it was a great time to grow up. Particularly in a community like Ames, a college town that was touted as the safest place in the world to raise children.

As children, we rode our bikes everywhere, to Carr’s Pool, the movie theater, Brookside Park, Homewood Golf Course and to Veishea, where we ran around the Iowa State University campus with bean shooters, sneaking up on friends to blow harmless beans at them from plastic straws. 

We were the first class to spend all three years at Ames’ “new” high school, which opened when we were sophomores in 1962. It didn’t have a gymnasium, or even showers, so the classes that followed PE were always a little rank.

While we were in high school, things began to change. The Cold War, which had begun about the time we were born, was getting hotter.

During our sophomore year, the Cuban Missile Crisis carried us and the rest of the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Then President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

By the time we were seniors, President Johnson had pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the civil rights marches were underway in the South.

The violence we saw on the nightly news shows was strange and unfamiliar. It seemed like the entire world was becoming smaller and starting to fly apart.

While we were in college, the Vietnam War heated up. Classmates were being killed halfway around the worlds in a war that made little sense.

By the time we graduated, society was pulling apart at the seams.

Some of us sucked it up and went into the military. Others, including me, looked for ways to avoid the draft and the war. Years would pass before we could talk about those events without shouting at each other.

In the meantime, both sides experimented with drugs.

Our generation produced two U.S. presidents of very different political stripes. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were born one month apart in 1946. Each had many flaws.

More interesting is the number of entrepreneurs who came out of the baby boom generation, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who were both born in 1955.

Ultimately we ended up being a lot more like our parents than we ever would have imagined. Maybe more so when it came to protecting — some would say overprotecting — our own children.