The Barrington Hills Observer

By Cory Franklin | JohnKassNews.com

The 80^th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy invasion approaches, the number of surviving soldiers who were on the beach that day dwindles, and the event is vanishing from living memory. In terms of important historical events, what does the phrase “living memory” mean? How long does it take for a living memory of an event to disappear from society?

Technically, living memory means everyone who was alive when a specific event occurred is now dead, so living memory could be considered 100-plus years. But simply being alive when something happened obviously does not mean remembering it; conscious memory generally goes back only to age five or six and memory for the details and significance of distant events often fades in an individual’s ninth and tenth decades. The stock market crash of 1929 can no longer be considered a part of living memory.

When there are only a few alive who remember an event and those people are very old, a society’s living memory starts to fade around 60 years after the event and generally does not extend to much more than 80 years. A small number might be able to recall events more than 80 years old, but at that point accounts start becoming sporadic and unreliable.

Consider Pearl Harbor, arguably the seminal event in 20^th century American history. The 1941 Japanese attack that brought the US into World War II is barely a part of living American memory; the last living survivor of the attack on the USS Arizona died earlier this year.

There are still many in their eighties and older who were born before that date of infamy, but to remember it clearly, you’d have to be at least 90 today and even then, you would have experienced it as a child. With fewer than 1% of the World War II veterans still alive and all of them in their upper nineties or older, the war itself is quickly disappearing from living memory. It will soon seem to us like the Civil War seemed to people in the 1940s.

Every baby boomer who was at least ten years old in 1963 can remember where he or she was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Along with the moon landing in 1969, it was the most noteworthy US historical event of the second half of the 20^th century. So, it was worth pointing out that on the 60^th anniversary of the assassination last year when a Secret Service agent confessed that he had found a stray bullet in the presidential limousine, it barely raised an eyebrow. For decades after 1963, an admission like that, which might or might not be true, would have sent shock waves  through the country either way. It indicates the JFK assassination, once seared in the public memory, is fading.

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