Have youngsters forgotten that there was a HUUUUGE recession after WW2?

Of course that's true, mainly because an economy simply doesn't rebound quickly from something so great as the Depression. What was true after WWII was that the economy got a big push in the right direction. As a result, things got better much more quickly than they did before the war under FDR. That's not to say that FDR didn't do great things (I think without the work he did to keep factories open and running, we wouldn't have experienced any economic gain from our manufacturing during the war), but it is to say that WWII did increase this country's prosperity mively. This continued afterward when we started helping build countries back up from the ashes, and only after that (as you say, about a decade later) were we in good shape again.