This digital story recording was created in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street program and its Stories from Main Street student digital storytelling initiative. The project encourages students and their mentors to research and record stories about small-towns and rural neighborhoods, waterways, personal memories, cultural traditions, work histories, as well as thoughts about American democracy. These documentaries, websites, and interviews are then shared on Smithsonian websites and social media.
Students in Marshall, Texas, worked in coordination with the Texas State Historical Association and National History to create multimedia websites that includes interviews with family, friends, and local residents. The work was supported by Museum on Main Street's Youth Access Grants in 2013-2014. In this project, a student interviews her grandfather.
Esther (00:01): Where did you grow up?
Paul Tapp (00:03): I grew up on a ranch in the western tip of the Oklahoma Panhandle. Part of our property extended up into Colorado, so we were far Western Oklahomans.
(00:17): In fact, we had a kind of an economic area all of our own called the Five State Area, which involved Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas because we were all encircling that Oklahoma Panhandle area there.
(00:32): Rode the school bus 70 miles a day, every day. So I had to get up early. I had chores to do before I caught the school bus and sometimes chores to do when I got home from school.
Esther (00:47): What kinds of chores did you do?
Paul Tapp (00:51): Well, we had to feed in water cattle. My early morning chores, I had to go feed the horses before their day started. And if in the night the stock tanks had frozen over, I had to chop the ice off the stock tanks so that they could have water to drink at the beginning of the day.
Esther (01:11): What did it feel like being a part of the baby boomer era?
Paul Tapp (01:16): Well, at the time we did not know that we were members of the baby boom. That was a phenomenon that they begin to recognize after the fact. The baby boomers are those who are born between 1946 and 1964. It's an 18 year spread. Soldiers returning home from the war are wanting to start their families, and so that was when the swelling of population began to happen right about that time.
(01:45): That was not the case in our family because I was the youngest of the eight boys, so I was not really "a product of the baby boom," although I was involved in it. But it was so real that in our community, our class was twice as large as any of the other classes that had gone through our school, and so they had to build a new first grade building for us and we were the first class to use that building. And then of course every year thereafter, there were two second grades, there were two third grades, there were two fourth grades, and so forth all the way through.
(02:23): As they begin to market specifically to these groups, when we were babies, that was the beginning of the Mattel and Hasbro toy companies and Johnson and Johnson baby products. Those industries were definitely impacted that year that we were born. And then as you go on the toy industry and then later on when televisions came out, it began to impact there. And then as this group continued to grow and they became teenagers, then the Ford Mustang and the Chevy Corvette, those cars were created specifically for our class. And then all the way through, and of course by the time they got ready to go to college, this was in 1964, there was a massive increase in college enrollments all across this country.
Asset ID: 2022.32.07
Find a complete transcript at www.museumonmainstreet.org
