If You Ask Me/By Martha Knight

There are some advantages to having a weekly publication cycle. There are advantages to being, or having, a local paper. Every so often I am reminded of the differences, one way or another.

Last week you saw a photo of a lovely local lady who was seated in a wing chair at the Senior Center with a daughter, granddaughter and great-grandson arrayed around her. Her family was celebrating her 95th birthday.

Folks had asked me, months earlier, to attend, and take some photos. Was it only five years ago they had had a big celebration of her 90th birthday, at a camp out in the woods? I remembered that event, and having made an album. The guests would be five years older now! The little kids would be tweens and teens. The guest of honor—well, she seems ageless.

So there I was, taking a few photos, and someone came up and asked me to take a four-generation picture. Sure. Someone rounded up suitable representatives of the generations, and they gathered around Mom/Gram/Great-gram and posed nicely. Fine looking bunch, didn’t you think so?

That was a Saturday. I submitted the photo to the weekly you are reading, and to an area daily which shall be nameless.

The photo did not run in that daily. Wednesday someone on that paper’s staff emailed me saying they could not use the photo—their Lifestyles guidelines require at least five generations in a multi-generation photo.

Yes, at least. We can have five or six generations, see, but not four. I had not checked that rule lately. I thought this lady had done very well, but must be that daily paper thought she should wait until that junior-high great-grandson had presented her with a great-great-grand? Have mercy! She is 95. Let him finish school.

It is my impression that we could have sneaked the photo in with merely four generations if we had called the people in the photo “friends” or “well-wishers,” and not admitted that they are in the honoree’s line of descent. This month there will be a batch of folks in a photo I’ll take at the June Birthdays party at the Senior Center, and chances are we will be able to get them in whether or not some of them are related. Probably only two generations will be represented: you have to be 50 to join the Fifty-Plus Club, local sponsor of our Senior Center.\

How long does it take to assemble five or more generations of family? According to TIME (and who should know more about such fine points of timing?), there have been seven generations since 1860, and those generations have been The Missionary Generation, The Lost Generation, The Greatest Generation, The Silent Generation, The Baby Boomers, Generation X and The Millennials. The current generation, born since 2000, may be the Me Generation or the Me, Me, Me Generation. But we hope they are not reproducing in large numbers, not quite yet.

TIME indicates that the most recent namable generations have lasted 22, 17, 23, 17, 17, 19 and 20 years. Those generations do not correspond to the number of years it would take to beget/bear another set of kids, but, rather, they refer to a cultural era. But maybe they will help us arrive at how that daily paper’s Lifestyles calculations of generations work, for purposes of photography.

I tried to figure out the minimum ages of the mothers who would be required, and the maximum number of generations feasible for multi-generation photos for that daily’s Lifestyles timing. Amazing efficiencies can be accomplished if marriage is dispensed with, what with the laws governing licenses, and the time required for lining up the parson or magistrate.

Giving birth at age 13 would qualify a precocious girl as a Teen Mom. Very young single mothers’ children may be predisposed to continue the practice of children having children. I can recall that CYS used to have a policy of putting girls in “placement” on birth control as soon as they reached puberty, and I have some documents in my files laying out this policy as it pertained to some of my clients.

So let’s say fecundity is not barred by practices some would legislate against firmly, especially if such measures were taxpayer supported contrary to come church teaching; and let’s say and the people in our hypothetical multi-generation photo have these ages: .1 (the newborn), 13, 26, 39, 52, 65, 78, 91. See what the Lifestyles mavens mean by “at least” five generations? With a little planning, or maybe a total lack of family planning (especially at public expense), you can accumulate eight generations in less than a century.

Say some families prefer something a little slower, but still worthy of Lifestyles recognition. Ages in the photo could be .1, 15, 30, 45, 60, 75 and 90.

Along in the 1940s it was fairly common for women to be parents by age 18. So the photo could include persons aged .1, 18, 36, 54, 72, 90. See, we still have that “or more” accomplishment.

Young women sometimes got in a year or two of secretarial or nursing school before commencing the noblest career, motherhood, back in the 1950s and 1960s. So those generations stretched in length, and the total would shrink for photographic groupings: .1, 20, 40, 60, 80. We still have the “at least,” don’t we?

For that matter, now and then we might have a laggardly reproducer who would not provide someone for the photo until age 21, or even older. The current trend is not to marry until mid-twenties, and some people don’t have kids until even later. You still can get five generations in if nobody lollygags around too much.

There’s another problem, though. There are those other Lifestyles regulations against having too many people in a photo. (Sports can have as many as they like. Ordinary news sometimes gets away with quite a few, as long as they are in uniform or are prom royalty or are graduating.)

Thank goodness we of the weekly press are more reasonable.

Peace.

Drymar@gmail.com. 642.7552.