Mukilteo Beacon - Your Hometown News Source

I’m old enough to remember when nostalgia was new. That’s how old.

The word has a Greek derivation, meaning “painful return,” which suggests that an evolution of the definition occurred somewhere along the line. This is what I’m talking about. It doesn’t make me feel less old.

This should be obvious to someone of my vintage, though. Other generations have had shared experiences, but the first postwar babies would find themselves immersed in a shared culture, all of it driven by a new player: television.

TV and baby boomers arrived at about the same time, which explains a lot, m...