BABY BOOMERS BECAME YUPPIES

 Social media is full of baby boomer nostalgia. Many of us born between 1946 and 1964 enjoy trading stories of our youth. We fondly recall how we spent our time without modern conveniences. We love to post blurry photographs of our school days and of businesses that no longer exist. As young boys, we split our time between Little League baseball, Boy Scouts with the obligatory two weeks at Scout summer camp, and the neighborhood hangouts. In high school, we all found summer jobs.

Baby boomers like to remind today’s young people how quickly we left our childhood behind and became independent. Immediately following high school, some of us would go to Vietnam to fight in a devastating war, and others would stay home and protest the same conflict. While our paths took us in opposite directions, no one wanted to remain at home and live in their parents’ basement. With the acceptance of hitchhiking, inexpensive travel options, and the Peace Corps, we spread out across the country and the globe.

This month marks the 55th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival. Because the “three days of peace and music” occurred in 1969, the summer between my high school graduation and entering college, I attended. It was a pivotal event in my life. Open nudity, political act

It has always been interesting to me how little we baby boomers seem to reminisce about our late 20s and 30s. After all, during these years, we were coming into our own. Many of us were graduating from professional schools, starting families, and getting ready to make an impact. However, something happened in those years that was more cringeworthy than praiseworthy-too many boomers became yuppies.

Newsweek magazine named 1984 “the Year of the Yuppie.” The name was adopted to identify “young urban professionals” living in or near larger cities, an actual population of less than 2 million people. However, in 1982, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune coined the phrase, and like the present term, “Swifties,” the concept captured the imagination of the country

I have tried to repress these yuppie years from my memory but alas, a new book has compelled me to acknowledge this period of my life. Tom McGrath, former editor of Philadelphia magazine, has written the definitive yuppie history, “Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.”

What did it mean to become a Yuppie? An excellent example involves the early life of social activist and antiwar radical Jerry Rubin. Rubin’s favorite slogan was “Never trust anyone over 30.” In 1967, Rubin along with his fellow activist, Abbie Hoffman, pulled a prank at the New York Stock Exchange. They threw $1 bills over the railing onto the trading floor and watched the traders greedily fall over each other to retrieve them.

In the 1980s, however, Rubin went back to Wall Street, this time as a securities analyst. He was an early investor in Apple Computer and became a multimillionaire. Rubin wrote an op-ed for The New York Times explaining, “While politics and rebellion distinguished the 60s, money and financial interest will capture the passion of the 80s.”

Rubin’s prediction was correct. Many activists who spent their youth fighting for change took the same path. Yuppies by the thousands discarded their social values and then threw the working class and the middle class under the bus. McGrath believes that the Yuppie phenomenon radically altered American life between 1980 and 1990. On the positive side, Yuppies brought decaying cities that were losing population in the 1970s back to life. On the negative side, McGrath traces the rise of an elite, well-educated fa

The transformation from idealists in the 1960s and 70s to careerists in the 1980s was remarkable. Unfortunately, career success led to overindulgent materialism. Moreover, McGrath found that many of the tribal political divisions of 2024 can be traced back to this period. A self-satisfied Yuppie elite who did not care if the Rust Belt lost its factories, later became both wealthy Republicans and Democrats. The resentful working class became Trump supporters.

As a young adult, I was a yuppie. In the 1980s, downtown Pittsburgh was where I worked and played. Law school, marriage to a fellow lawyer, a home and a child removed all traces of social activism from my life. My world revolved around long workweeks, private schools, fitness centers, golf, networking, junk bonds, and expensive restaurants. President Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the welfare state did not concern me.

Years later, as a recovering lawyer, Barack Obama reignited my values and concern for others. If not for McGrath’s excellent study of the yuppie period, the 1980s would have remained a distant memory.

McGrath points out that the stock market crash in October 1987 marked the beginning of the end for yuppies. He writes, “The country was ready to slow down again, to get back to normal.”

The 1980s Donald Trump and his book, “The Art of the Deal” were symbolic of everything yuppies represented. Trump did not get the memo to change. Ironically, his continued projection of self-serving yuppie greed has attracted the disgruntled white middle-class.

Gary Stout is a Washington attorney