Classic? C’mon guys! I designed that suit in 1980, and that’s only... forty years ago.

Argh.

He accepted it only when told the award would be presented whether he was there to pick it up or not.

Harrison Ford, of course, famously referred to the same prize as the "Geezer Award."

Which reminded me of working on GENERATIONS, and trying to figure out when the various characters were born, based on their original timelines. Which had got me wondering just how old Ma and Pa Kent were, when they found Kal-El. They were described as "elderly", but the math suggested the rocket had landed sometime around 1913. What was considered "elderly" back then? The average lifespan for a white, middle class American was fifty-five(!!) for a man, so to be "elderly" Jonathan Kent wouldn't have needed to be more than sixty-five! Realizing that is what allowed me to do my Jonah Hex chapter.

American history is really SHORT!

Taking 72, for easy math, I got six years per month, making the beginning of September somewhere around our 50th year.

Really? When I was 15, my Dad was 45, pushing toward 50 and not seeming as old as the singer of the song. This was Hollywood at work, of course, with actors traditionally playing characters ten and twenty years younger than their actual ages, so 40, 50, sixty looked... old.

I remember "Life begins at 40" being a kind of meme-of-its-time, with a sad poignancy as it acknowledged that, yeah, at forty you were really pretty much done.

Times change!

Parents or parental figures tended to be portrayed as older than they really would be (Andy Hardy Syndrome), giving us a May and Ben Parker who seemed much older than Peter's parents would have been. Was Peter's dad a "miracle baby" born years and years after Ben?