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I'm interested in learning about American living in the 1960s. Current events are easy to find; I'm looking for more day-to-day info. Specific areas of interest: wages/salaries; cars/transportation; fashion; home furnishings/decor; music/TV/film. Please share stories, memories, anything. No detail too mundane. Any and all info appreciated. C'mon, you know you had a lava lamp. Now it's time to admit it!
Wages? My first job was at age 16, clerking in a hospital pharmacy in Miami. I got minimum wage which at the time was $1.25/hour. It cost 75 cents to get into a movie at the start of the decade, and a buck fifty by the end.
The Ford Mustang was the coolest car for young folks to have, the VW Bug was the one the most could afford.
Your clothes were super tight fitting, a lung constricting shirt and pants which appeared to be painted on were required before you were willing to step out of your house. Pale/white lipstick was standard for women and many of them wore "falls" which were sort of half wigs designed to provide instant long hair.
Color tv came into being around '63 or so, but remained a novelty for several years after that with few people owning the new fangled sets and only a handful of programs being broadcast in color. Remote controls also were a rare novelty available only with expensive sets.
The program most families were likely to watch together was the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights. Ed was a dip, but he did manage to get pretty much every hot new performer in the nation to appear. And being on the Ed Sullivan Show was usually a career making break, it imparted an aura of legitimacy to the entertainer.
TV featured the three networks, one PBS channel and typically one local channel, except in the largest cities which would also have some uhf channels which came in snowy and broken. The uhf stations were the home to Roller Derby, local wrestling and fringe talk show hosts like Joe Pine.
TV commercial breaks were a minute long and most frequently it was one sponsor using the entire minute.
Contact lenses, cassette recorders and soda/beer cans with tab openers were all introduced during the decade.
Some random recollections: Early 60's was like "Mad Men". Parents smoking, drinking, having cocktail parties. I used to buy my mom an ashtray for her birthday. In the early part of the decade, divorce was still considered somewhat disgraceful. I remember asking my mom about Lucy and Desi getting divorced and she hushed me up, saying it was not a polite subject of conversation.
As a kid in the mid-60's, we were all about secret agents (007). We used to play spy games and I had a set of walkie-talkies. I was very disappointed when my parents wouldn't let me see "Goldfinger" because it was inappropriate. LOL considering what kids are exposed to these days on network TV. Also for kids, "trolls" or "wishniks" were a huge fad. I had a big collection.
I remember the make-up. Yardley of London was huge. As Grandstander said, pale lipstick was in, also lots of mascara and eyeliner, although by the time I was old enough to wear makeup (late 60's), the natural hippie look was in. To this day, I don't like wearing makeup. Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton were supermodels. The Twiggy fad no doubt contributed to a lot of eating disorders. Everything British was cool, as was the California surfer stuff. We all had transistor radios to listen to the hits on AM radio. I remember feeling so cool when I got my first transistor radio so I could listen to rock & roll. It's funny, there was such a cultural divide between parents and kids back then (the "generation gap") that really doesn't exist so much today.
45 records! I spent most of my allowance buying those things. Wish I still had them today.
Being born in 1955, I was a little young for Beatlemania but I remember my friends' older sisters were really into it. I remember seeing a sticker on a city bus saying "The Beatles are coming!" and asking my mom who the Beatles were. Among the trendier girls in my elementary school (I was not one of them), white go-go boots and Beatle haircuts began appearing by 1965.
The hippie/counterculture movement started around 1967. As a 12-year-old growing up in Chicago, I used to go to Old Town, which was the "hippie" neighborhood in Chicago and buy posters and buttons. I didn't know what it was all about - yet - but I was intrigued.
In the late 60's there were the anti-war marches. I went to a few, along with my mom. Martin Luther King's assassination - it was a few days before my 13th birthday and my mom wouldn't let me go outside because of the rioting on the West Side (we lived on the North side, but being a mom, she worried). The Chicago Convention - we were out of town and watched it on TV. I remember my mom crying. Mayor Daley saying (in one of his famous malapropisms), "The police are not here to prevent disorder; the police are here to preserve disorder."
It was an exciting era to experience. My 20-year-old daughter is jealous of me because I was there, albeit as a child and young teenager. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Not all young people were hippies, most were not. There were three elements to the counter culture.
One was the revolutionaries, those who perceived all authority and symbols of authority to be pigs which had to be overthrown by any means required etc. These were the Weathermen, the Chicago Seven, the Black Panthers et al, along with a fairly large number of Mickey Maoists who talked a good game about overturning society while simultaneously being completely dependent on the conveniences offered by modern society.
Then there were the dropouts, the ones with zero interest in politics who advanced a philosophy that one did not have to "do" anything, one simply had to "be." This was the Haight Ashbury group. These were the rather unrealistic sorts who formed the core of the hippie movement. It was a day to day sort of dynamic which never had a chance of lasting because there was no supporting economic basis for them. Some tried to go the commune route, but they eventually learned that farm work was even more annoying and difficult than any of the capitalistic pig jobs they could have taken. The American culture was not set up to support millions of candle makers love bead salesfolk.
The third element was the "mods"...who were primarily ordinary people who went trendy and adopted the whiff of the counter culture without adopting any of the values being promoted. You wore long hair because long hair was the style, you addressed all of your friends as "man" because that was the style, you wore bell bottoms...you get the idea. The best flash summary of "mod" which I can offer would be....think Sammy Davis Jr. in a Nehru jacket going "Groovy, Baby!" Or perhaps...."Easy Rider" was counter culture, "The Monkees" was mod.
One thing I have to agree with most historians is that it was around 1968 when this country started changing for the worse. It became the valuelesss society it is now days.
One thing I have to agree with most historians is that it was around 1968 when this country started changing for the worse. It became the valuelesss society it is now days.
You are speaking for yourself, not "most historians."
And values changed, they did not vanish. Today we value women as individual contributors rather than collective maids, today we value minority members as full citizens rather than lower strata menials to be "tolerated." Homosexuals need no longer live lives of hidden shame.
In short, you would wish to have us perceive the value of inclusiveness as being congruent with "valueless."
That is a political opinion, not a historical one.
It is also a bad political opinion, one advanced by those who are riding the north end of a south bound dinosaur.
As in the Wizard of Oz, it was the time when the world turned from black and white to color. A time when we started no longer accepting the fact that white males in gray flannel suits should make the rules.
Grandstander, I like your breakdown of the elements of the counterculture. The Weathermen (SDS) actually came to my high school in Chicago to try to recruit new members. That was in 1970, as I recall. Most of the potential recruits were more into partying than politics, so their efforts mostly fell flat.
Getting back to a less political subject, when I was a kid, CTA fare in Chicago was 12 cents for a child, 25 cents for an adult. A phone call cost a dime. When I was in high school, cigarettes were around 35 cents and I think the price of gas per gallon was about the same (this would be in the early 70's, though).
I used to love penny candy. A quarter would go a long way. My friends and I would go to Woolworth's after school and load up on flying saucers, wax bottles with "juice" in them, bulls' eyes and those candy tabs on long strips of paper. And candy bars were only a nickel, except for a few which were larger and cost 10 cents.
As for TV, I remember watching "Perry Mason" with my dad. He also liked Westerns, but I wasn't interested in those. For cutting-edge TV, my parents watched "That Was the Week That Was". Children's programming was mostly on Saturday mornings; Saturday a.m. cartoons were a ritual. I used to watch "Captain Kangaroo" and "Garfield Goose" when I was little. We didn't have get a color TV till the 70's. The channel knob fell off our old black-and-white TV and we had to use a set of pliers to change the channel - a far cry from today's remote control channel-surfing!
I'm interested in learning about American living in the 1960s. Current events are easy to find; I'm looking for more day-to-day info. Specific areas of interest: wages/salaries; cars/transportation; fashion; home furnishings/decor; music/TV/film. Please share stories, memories, anything. No detail too mundane. Any and all info appreciated. C'mon, you know you had a lava lamp. Now it's time to admit it!
I was six when they landed on the moon. I'll give you what the USA and the world looked like to a child in the middlest of middle America: Hutchinson, Kansas. I remember a lot of indoctrination. It amuses me very much now to recall it.
--Communists were evil and wanted to kill us. Communists didn't have free will, but were brainwashed by their government to believe that we lived like slaves dying for Communists to come save us. This wasn't hard to swallow, because I didn't feel like a slave, so it was reasonable to believe Communists were really that bad.. There were hippies, bad people doing drugs. Drugs were bad because once you did one, you were hooked on them all. Hippies liked to get children addicted to drugs, especially heroin (which you could never quit, too addictive) or acid (which would damage your brain for life and cause flashbacks where you might someday be in a business meeting and suddenly flip out).
--There was a war in Vietnam, and everyone was against it. On the nightly news it would give the day's casualties: 2 KIA, 4 WIA, 1 MIA. No one displayed their flag on their house or pickup truck or pretty much anywhere. Imagine today's preposterously obligatory hyperpatriotism and then imagine its equally stupid polar opposite, a time when to express national pride is to be jeered and mocked at. (That lasted through the 1970s, though I am trying very hard here to confine my recollections to the 1960s.)
--Too bad I was too young for sex, as there were no consequences of sex that couldn't be managed. Just my luck to miss the fun by ten years.
--I didn't know there was a civil rights movement but I knew that Martin Luther King was a black hero, and that some people were prejudiced against blacks, which was the very, very, very worst thing you could be; using the N word, the very worst thing you could say. I learned that it was bad before I learned the F word or how bad it was. I didn't disagree with any of this, because I had black schoolmates and they seemed like good guys, pretty similar to anyone else. Although when I went over to play with Mike, his father seemed to dislike me. Never learned why.
--Everyone was Christian. Unless they were Jews. But Jews were better than us anyway because they were chosen people. I didn't know any Jews so I couldn't verify this. They didn't believe in Jesus, but in their case that was okay; they had a good excuse. It wasn't okay for anyone else, but fortunately everyone else did, so this was not an issue.
--We landed on the moon, proving that we had the best science. Obviously it was a short step to a permanent moon base, then people on Mars. I knew what nuclear war was and why there was no real way to stop it, and it occurred to me from Star Trek (I just remember the last season of the original) that a better world was possible, where different cultures were too busy building and exploring other planets together to sit around and wonder when someone was going to launch atom bombs.
--Robert Kennedy died. Everyone was very sad. So was I, because I was supposed to be sad. Supposedly he was this wonderful person from an awesome family that had produced one of the best presidents ever who was killed when I was still in diapers. As for Chappaquiddick, no one told me about it.
--Educational films in school were very like the parodies you see of them today. You'd find out there was going to be a film, then it would be one telling you to brush your teeth at least three times a day. Or it would be an educational film about farming. They all seemed to start with the lines "On the farm..." In Kansas, of course, this was very germane.
--It was not harmful to play dodge ball, tackle football, wrestle or 'smear the (q-word)' at recess, though I didn't understand the implications of '(q-word)' and I don't think much of anyone else did either at that age. To be called a '(q-word)' was vaguely derogatory. It was not harmful for kids to explore, build tree forts, create engineering masterpieces in the garden with the hose, or ride their bikes without helmets. Nothing was really harmful except hippies and their drugs. Oh, and don't talk to strangers. (To a child of my day, modern school would look and feel like an icy prison. I completely understand why kids rebel against it. If I were in jail, I'd feel the same.) Stray dogs might attack you, and if you did, they probably had rabies and you would need really painful shots if you lived at all. I hated dogs from the first time a dog bigger than me came barking menacingly into my face. (I still hate them, so much I carry a legal hand weapon on walks. Woe be unto the dog who charges me with menace in his stance or tone, until the end of my days.)
--The idea of just defying the school was alien. Simply was not done. The idea of punching a teacher or cursing her were beyond the pale. It was bad enough to talk in class out of turn. Teachers could give you a hug and no one thought it was perv. I remember my kindergarten teacher as one of kindest, wisest ladies I ever knew, and thanks to her, I had a good feeling about school going forward even though most of it was boring and some kids, somehow, could barely even read. In school, some kids were retarded and had to be in special ed. It was not okay to make fun of them, but you really didn't get the chance as they were segregated. (Looking around at some of my classmates' reading skills, I might have wondered if they'd escaped from special ed. But I didn't.)
--The police were your friends and you should like and trust them. They will never hurt you or put you in jail if you obey the law. You owe them your cooperation and have to do anything they say, but they can't give you orders against the Constitution. The Constitution is the reason you have freedom, unlike people in Russia, who don't have a Constitution and that's obviously why they don't have freedom.
--The Beatles were popular but associated with hippies. Petula Clark is the singer I remember best from the radio. We watched a lot of the sitcoms you see on Nick at Nite today, like Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction. I didn't really get most of the jokes or innuendoes in them. Music came from records or the radio (which was just playing records anyway).
--Women wore basketball hair. I didn't know why. They just did. They looked like That Girl (Marlo Thomas). My early beauty images of femininity were fixed by Barbara Eden, Marlo Thomas, Nichelle Nichols, Donna Douglas. I did not know why exactly I was supposed to think this, but I knew they were very beautiful. (This is why I would later completely believe gay guys when they told me they knew they were gay before they knew about sex. I knew I was straight before I knew about sex, so if they were really gay, it stood to reason their experience would be the same substituting male for female.) Also, some actresses were not nice, though I didn't know why and my parents were very vague about what was wrong with them. I didn't understand how Charo and Raquel Welch could be so beautiful, yet not nice, and other actresses just as beautiful were nice.
--TV came on about 5:30 or 6:00 AM and went off around 1 AM. When it came on, you got a sequence of patriotic images (mostly of the military) and the national anthem. The TV said 'please stand by' beforehand, so at first I thought it was my patriotic duty to stand by the TV, and did so. Later I realized that wasn't what they meant. There were three channels, sometimes a fourth. To change channels your parents made you get up and change them. The phone was hardwired to the wall. Long distance cost a fortune. To make calls, you dialed the last 5 numbers if it was in town. The phone book had all sorts of information about collect calls, yielding party lines in emergencies, harassment and WATS lines. I didn't understand WATS lines but thanks to the front of the phone book I understood that a telephone would be very useful for harassment. There were no pocket calculators of any kind, no computers, no video games and no portable telephones. Seatbelts were optional. Smoking and chew commercials were not uncommon but didn't influence me. My mother was already proving to be weak, semi-sane and a liar, and she smoked, so I could see where that led.
--We had a VW bug. A dollar was a lot of money. We did not have a VW bug for social reasons, but because it was cheap. Even though my father was an engineer and made good money, we were always scrimping on anything and everything. We were middle-class people with lower-class spending habits. If my father were alive today he would shop at Wal-Mart for sure. A letter cost six cents to mail, more for airmail. When the rate went up to 8c I was in second grade (a little after the 60s), and they showed the class how some naive kid had put a 6c stamp on a letter and taped two pennies to it. The postal service said they delivered it anyway, but don't do it in the future. From this I came to believe that if you did something in good and honest faith, but made a mistake that didn't hurt anyone, it would be okay. (It took life less than five years to disprove this and it would stay disproven for life.)
--Above all, I was indoctrinated to trust authority and the system. Everything would be okay provided I obeyed the law and cooperated. (This was the single largest lie of my youth, the one later proven most comprehensively full of crap.)
Anyway, that's the world as viewed from the mind of a boy of six, in 1969 and thereabouts. Some of the memories probably go back farther, though not more than 2-3 years obviously. It's kind of funny today how a lot of people judge me very negatively for my social views, but never learn the vast chasm of difference between the piles of propaganda poured down my throat and the realities that I came to see. It is also very funny to see how one enemy has substituted for another, one threat has substituted for another over the years. Funniest to me is the polar switch in nationalism, with failure to make outward gestures of patriotism today just as stigmatizing as those same gestures were in 1969.
As in the Wizard of Oz, it was the time when the world turned from black and white to color. A time when we started no longer accepting the fact that white males in gray flannel suits should make the rules.
I was graduated from college in June 1960, and moved to NYC. And the Sixties did seem exactly that way to me too......from B&W to Technicolor.
As for those blankety-blank suits, I spent the Sixties trying to find a decent job that didn't require a suit and tie. Boy, did I hate those uncomfortable outfits!
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