Before the Age of Demographics

There was a time, my little nippers, when the concept of 'demographics' was limited to dismal drudges called actuaries -- pathetic men who toiled over statistics and averages all day in an airless office in the bowels of insurance buildings for their rapacious masters, in order to inform them of how long an average white Caucasian male residing in Ohio could be expected to live before kicking the bucket. The dismal science of demographics was never applied to anything but selling life insurance. 

With no demographics to emphasize our differences, the world as I knew it as a child was as homogenized and undemographic as a bottle of milk from Ewald Brothers Dairy. Everyone looked alike, acted alike, and thought alike. Our duty as American citizens was to blend in. Niche marketing? Not likely! It was assumed by all parties that everyone wanted to be the same as everyone else. 

Advertising agencies figured that everyone wanted to smoke, so on television I could watch Jed Clampett or Fred Flintstone puffing merrily away on Winstons. Sub rosa, we kids took the Winston's jingle, which began "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" and burlesqued it thus: "Winston tastes bad like the one I just had -- no filter, no flavor, just cotton-pickin' paper . . . "

In the late Fifties not everyone and his dog had a television set. So on Sunday evenings my parents would occasionally host an impromptu gathering of neighbors who lacked a boob tube -- to watch The Ed Sullivan Show. That was a show that cocked a definite snook at the whole concept of demographics. It featured high brow opera selections cheek by jowl with Topo Gigio, while circus acrobats rubbed shoulders with the tone deaf Mrs. Miller or the trills of Tiny Tim. For my money, nobody could hold a candle to the Spanish ventriloquist Senor Wences.   

I took standardized tests in school. Lots of 'em. They had to make sure I was standardized, and that I stayed that way.

 Fathers worked. Mothers were housewives. Little boys had crew cuts. Little girls played with Chatty Cathy or Betsy Wetsy dolls. Deviations were not tolerated. I recall a poor kid in my fourth grade class who was left-handed. His parents put a soft cast on his left arm, forcing him to use his right hand for writing and eating. He cried a lot, and sometimes didn't make it to the boy's room in time.

Everyone had the same magazines on their coffee table: Good Housekeeping, the Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, and Look. 

Demographics played no conscious part in the immigrant background of everyone in the neighborhood. My best friend Wayne Matsuura's parents spoke Japanese when they didn't want us eavesdropping. My dad swore lustily in Norwegian, and my mother yelled "firme la bouche" at me so frequently when I was little I thought it was my first name. The Ciattis on the corner had so many pots of oregano and basil on their porch that it looked like a Jungle Jim movie set. We kids suspected their crabby grandmother was an Italian witch, who flitted about the night skies riding on a pepperoni pizza. They were all just our neighbors, some good, some pesky -- but we never divided them into demographic categories. That was census taker work -- those nosy Parkers who came by once every ten years, or so my mother told me.

Yet in my case I may be making too much of this staid amalgam and how contented I was with it. For I can also remember a Bing Crosby tune I heard as a boy that nagged at me all through grade school and then high school. It's called "Far Away Places." Here are the lyrics:

Far away places with strange sounding names
Far away over the sea
Those far away places with the strange sounding names are
Calling
Calling me
Goin' to China or maybe Siam
I wanna see for myself 
Those far away places I've been reading about in a 
Book that I took from a shelf
I start getting' restless whenever I hear the whistle of a train
I pray for the day I can get underway
And look for those castles in Spain
They call me a dreamer
Well maybe I am
But I know that I'm burning to see those 
Far away places with the strange sounding names
Calling, calling me

And I read a book as a boy, called "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeline L'Engle, from which my horror of conformity sprang. And so I joined the circus a few months after graduating from high school, to find those far away places and to escape the clutches of conventionality. And to make people laugh, of course. 

But all that was long, long ago, my poppits. Now I am trapped in the demographic group known as 'Baby Boomers,' and the digital marketers know exactly what I need. I get pop up ads for Preparation X, Caribbean cruises, Asian girlfriends, assisted living condos, and Metamucil. 

But I'll never give in to those cyber hucksters. I've made it a hard and fast rule to never click on any digital ad. Ever. But, of course, if they could somehow resurrect Senor Wences and he endorsed a product, well then I just might take a gander at it.