Morning In America: Growing Up In The 1980s

I was born on April 4, 1977 at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, CA. My parents – Robert and Diane – were the first generation children of Jewish mother immigrants from Europe. My grandmother on my father’s side, Ethel, came over from Romania in the 1920s, I believe. My grandmother on my mother’s side, Blanca, came over from Vienna in the 1930s to escape the Nazis.

My Dad was born on November 22, 1942 and my mother July 20, 1946 in New York and they came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. My father grew up extremely poor. My mother was a little better off. But both of them imbibed the spirt of the times: If you wanted something, you worked for it. Nothing was going to be given to you. There was no sense of entitlement.

My father’s father struggled to hold a steady job and make a living when my father grew up. Times were tough and my father was determined to be financially successful, unlike his father. Intelligent, hard working and determined to make something of himself, Dad got an accounting degree at City College New York. Later, he got his law degree specializing in tax law. Mom went to the University of Buffalo where the winds were so strong that the students had to hold on to ropes on their way to class to prevent being blown away. Mom studied early childhood education and got a Master’s degree in the same. Intelligent and beautiful, she was determined to be more than just a housewife at a time when the role of women was just beginning to change. They were married after she graduated in 1968.

In the early 1970s, my parents left New York for greener pastures in California. My Dad got a job with a real estate company in the early days of the Silicon Valley. After learning the real estate game for a few years under his mentor Bob McNeil, Dad struck out on his own just before I was born. It was a risky move to leave a steady job just before the birth of his first child but Dad has never been afraid of taking calculated risks. Further, he never intended to always remain an employee. He was determined to be wealthy.

Fortunately, while the American economy was mired in the stagflation of the 1970s, the Silicon Valley was emerging as a center of innovation. Real estate prices were going up – and so were Mom and Dad’s properties. They were on their way. When I was a young child, we lived in a house on Las Piedras in the beautiful and wealthy town of Portola Valley. Unlike my parents, I never worried about money growing up. My parents provided me with all the opportunities I could have asked for and supported me wholeheartedly.

In his terrific book Glory Days: The Summer of 1984 and the 90 Days That Changed Sports and Culture Forever, the sports writer Jon Wertheim evokes that more innocent time. Ronald Reagan had beaten Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Presidential Election and ushered in a new era of optimism and patriotism. His reelection campaign theme in 1984 was “Morning In America. Wertheim also argues that the summer of 1984 was a turning point leading to the world of today in which sports is big business.

I was 7 years old in the summer of 1984. I remember hanging out at the Alpine Hills Tennis & Swim Club and singing along to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA”. My parents would drop me off at Alpine Hills in the morning and my friends and I would play tennis, basketball and swim all day. We would also order food from the grill using our parents code. (Ours was 318 and my favorite thing to order was a patty melt. My sister later used the code to get around Mom’s prohibition on soda). Then they’d pick me up in the evening after another beautiful summer day and I’d do it all over again the next day.

In tennis, 1984 was the year of John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova. McEnroe would go 82-3 and win 13 titles in 1984. And yet, as Wertheim writes: “At the time, McEnroe was only the second most dominant force in tennis” (149). Martina went 78-2 and won 13 of the 15 tournaments she entered. After thrashing Chris Evert 6-3, 6-1 in the French Open Final, she said: “I have transcended another level” (42).

In basketball, Magic Johnson’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics faced off in the NBA Finals for the first time. In Game 4, midway through the 3rd quarter the Lakers seemed on their way to a commanding 3-1 lead until Kevin McHale clotheslined Kurt Rambis as he attempted a layup on a fast break. Today, McHale would have been ejected and suspended for what he did. But back then, after a little dust up, Rambis simply went to the free throw line for two free throws and the game continued (Wertheim, 79). Boston won the game and the series in 7.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, however, the preeminent thing in sports in 1984 was the emergence of Michael Jordan onto the national scene. Jordan had just finished his junior season at North Carolina and led the US Olympic team to gold that summer in Los Angeles. But it was also the way he did it. Jordan could do things nobody else could do – and he did it with a smile. “Even then, Michael smiled while he killed you”, Charles Barkley later said (Wertheim, 20). In addition to his other worldly talent, Jordan had the “It” factor: charisma.

In 1986, my parents bought a large house on Pinon Drive in Portola Valley. Around that time, I did my first sleepover at my friend Brett Shepardson’s house. When I wanted to leave early the next morning, I simply walked down Meadowood, turned onto Golden Hills, crossed Westridge (a busy street that runs through Portola Valley) and turned onto Pinon. There were no worries about being kidnapped or hit by a car. It wouldn’t be safe for a kid to do that today. It was a more innocent time and I look back on it with nostalgia.

America has lost that innocence in the last 40 years and the world is a much tougher place for kids to grow up in today – and for all the rest of us too. The Culture of Nihilism reigns supreme and public life frequently feels like a war of all against all. The levels of loneliness, unhappiness, mental illness and “deaths of despair” have risen to epidemic proportions. Young people are really hurting as documented by Jeremy Adams in Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation (2021) and Abigail Shriver in Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up (2024). I feel extremely fortunate to have grown up in an America that still believed in itself.