You may recall Bob Denver as Gilligan from Gilligan's Island -- older folks and TV sitcom students will also remember him from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, on which Denver played a beatnik character named Maynard G. Krebs, the fifth wheel in a storyline that featured Dwayne Hickman as Dobie and Tuesday Weld as the unattainable Thalia. At some point in each episode someone utters the word "work," and Maynard always jumps as if startled out of his skin at the prospect of anything resembling a 9 to 5. Like the good beatnik that he was, Maynard preferred to get by with no money than consider the prospect of a j-o-b.
Though I lusted for Dobie's Thalia, I was more of a Maynard in my mind. I remember telling my mom that I wanted to be either rich or poor -- anything but middle class, having to grind away day after day just to make ends meet. Working wasn't cool back then, but something happened in the intervening years. Rather than taking time out after college to "find themselves," young people started taking internships and smoothly transitioning into the workforce. One of the reasons they gravitated in this direction is that they could. Jobs were plentiful, especially in the knowledge sector that attracted new college grads to the media, marketing and web-development opportunities incubating in hot cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Austin and Chapel Hill. While jobs in manufacturing were disappearing throughout the land, newly minted college grads came marching into the fray. Others pursued a career path into banking and finance, which dovetailed nicely with the nightlife scene of bars, clubs and restaurants, where the combustive combination of play and money proved satisfying both to the young professionals and the businesses that catered to them. And then we know what happened after that.
RSS