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I disagree very much with this revisionist sentiment. There were dysfunctional people and families in the 50s-60s, and there are dysfunctional people and families today. What seems to have happened is that people who are/were dysfunctional project their own, personal situations onto the general conditions of the time. "We were nuts in the 50s, Dad was an alcoholic, just like everybody else in the 50s, so we really weren't so bad after all." No! It was just the personal situation of a small portion of the population, then and now. Most people in the 50s were quite happy and very well behaved (perhaps somewhat more so than now). There was no alcoholism or abuse whatsoever in my very large extended 1950s-1960s family, nor is there any today.
I've been guilty of some hyperbole about dysfunction in the 50's and 60's, mainly as a reaction to some people's idealized memories. Agreed, it was probably about the same as today. But the secrecy was much greater. I can't stand all the Maury Povich/Jerry Springer air-your-dirtiest-laundry-and-scream stuff. But when everybody treated their families' weaknesses as unspeakable, those of us who did have alcoholic parents and other "differences" in their families felt unnecessarily isolated. As kids, we were naive enough to think that everyone else's family really was like Father Knows Best and puzzled over how things in our family could have gone so wrong.
Anyway, back on topic. Life did seem simpler and happier in some ways when we didn't feel we needed as much. I still have an aversion to the big houses of recent years. And it's harder for young people to make it today in part because there are so many more things that are considered necessities. When the economy first went bad and the housing market tanked, I thought the silver lining might be people learning to simplify, and distinguish better between needs and wants. I think that may have happened a little bit, but not really enough.
I have enjoyed reading this thread because it brings back so many great memories of my childhood....simple times. I agree with most people who posted about missing the way things were.
Now that I am getting older and nearing my own retirement (I'm half-way there), I am looking forward to getting back to those simple times. I can thank my parents for instilling in me the values and morals I have now and appreciating what I have. If it ends up to be only me, I know I will be able to enjoy life with what God has given me. "Voluntary Simplicity" I think is what NEG calls it. Love that term! I have had a lifetime of living and learning and will be able to apply that knowledge so I can manage the rest of my life, God willing.
How true this comment is and leads into my comment.
My father's dream was to buy a big home (which he did) with acreage. Our driveway was a mile long. Anyway, I longed to be in a real neighborhood but that house was to die for! (I still remember I had PINK carpeting and my own bathroom). They were happy years. Very typical - dad travelled, went to work, my mom was a SAHM, 4 kids, pets, all that. Very social family. By that - I mean neighborly, friendly to others all the time.
When we moved to Florida, we got the real neighborhood. We were out till dark, then we had to come in for dinner. There were 16 homes on our street and 48 kids - all ages, everyone played together and took care of each other. It was a blast. Kids would play baseball on my parents' front lawn - the sprinklers were the bases (in a sense) but my dad was cool b/c he believed "baseball is life" even well the ball hit the glass window. Still cool - were you playing baseball?
No one spoke about their financial problems. The neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. and you had better mind your manners otherwise Mrs. M would call your mom.
Our neighborhood was a true "Sandlot" - this was mid to late 60's, early 70's -my parents moved in 1993 and were one of the first to leave that street.
Good times.
This is a fairly close approximation of my own childhood. Kids had the run of the neighborhood and the one thing no one worried much about were pedophiles or other criminals. Not only was I was allowed the run of the neighborhood, but we had an adjacent area we called "the cowfields". It was an undeveloped tract of land that was about 1 and 1/2 miles wide and 2 to 1/2 miles long. After about age 9, I had a motorized minibike that I could drive all around these cowfields. You'd think parents would worry leaving a kid my age to do all that on his own, but if they did worry I was never aware of it.
There was a much different attitude towards education too.
I also miss the days when parents and children were all related. There were no step-parents. People lived with their own mothers and fathers. The only exceptions in the area around me were two widows who did not have boyfriends.
We'd heard of "broken" families but people mentioned them only briefly and with some embarassment. The families I met were stable.
I also miss the days when parents and children were all related. There were no step-parents. People lived with their own mothers and fathers. The only exceptions in the area around me were two widows who did not have boyfriends.
We'd heard of "broken" families but people mentioned them only briefly and with some embarassment. The families I met were stable.
There were a few step-families where I grew up. Most were widowers who remarried and few broken families. People back then cared what others thought. Everybody was into everyone's business.
Fresh from the horrors of the Great Depression and WW2 couples were thrilled to marry and buy a modest home. TV was in its infancy so many families congregated on their front porch with their neighbors after dinner. The adults had coffee and watched us children play until late. Folks found comfort in each others' company ... not locked away inside staring at the tube all night.
The floodgates of illicit drugs and sexual immorality hadn't opened yet ... kids were protected from such filth. We felt safe and were allowed our innocence to run its natural course, as God intended. The occasional "weirdo" who exposed himself to a kid brought out an army of concerned and angry citizens determined to protect the neighborhood.
If you had no money for extras you did without until things got better. There was a totally different mindset then.
I'm not saying 1950s-60s America was without human problems but it truly was as close to ideal as you can get. The description of innocence is no myth. Anyone who tries to deny it simply wasn't there.
Last edited by Rapturegal; 03-25-2012 at 05:39 PM..
Reason: added thoughts
One conclusion I come to in comparing the 1950's to the present day is that the good life resides not in granite counter-tops and the latest advanced cell phone, but in freedom from fear (kids playing outside in their neighborhoods after dark, etc.) and in freedom from the kind of stress that excessive debt brings. I was six years old in 1950. Looking back (although this was not apparent to me at the time), there were three major ways in which the 1950's were deficient vis à vis today's life and times:
1. Jim Crow was alive and well. This winking at the 13th Amendment was a blot and a stain on the pride Americans have always taken in being "the land of the free".
2. Options for women were severely constricted. Career-wise, a single or childfree woman could realistically hope to be only a secretary, a school teacher, or a nurse. Or at a slightly lower level, a waitress or a cashier in a store.
3. There was excessive pressure to conform.
And no, I am not black, not a woman, and not a rebel (although I am an independent thinker).
One conclusion I come to in comparing the 1950's to the present day is that the good life resides not in granite counter-tops and the latest advanced cell phone, but in freedom from fear (kids playing outside in their neighborhoods after dark, etc.) and in freedom from the kind of stress that excessive debt brings. I was six years old in 1950. Looking back (although this was not apparent to me at the time), there were three major ways in which the 1950's were deficient vis à vis today's life and times:
1. Jim Crow was alive and well. This winking at the 13th Amendment was a blot and a stain on the pride Americans have always taken in being "the land of the free".
2. Options for women were severely constricted. Career-wise, a single or childfree woman could realistically hope to be only a secretary, a school teacher, or a nurse. Or at a slightly lower level, a waitress or a cashier in a store.
3. There was excessive pressure to conform.
And no, I am not black, not a woman, and not a rebel (although I am an independent thinker).
My aunts (born in the first decade of the last century) were a nurse (but a head nurse who pretty much ran the hospital) and a business woman. My mother was a SAHM, but she was a preacher's wife, twice (married to preachers and widowed twice), and that's a job in and of itself - she's the only woman I know who once gave a sit-down dinner for 80 at her house, and was upset with herself for not making the pies, never mind she smoked the ham and the turkey, made everything else, baked the cakes, and made the tablecloths and decorations herself. I can remember my father telling me, when I was 8 or 9 (that would have been about 1956 or 1957), "You can do anything you want to do" when talking about what I would be when I grew up. (I'm still trying to decide that one.) His idea was that I might want to be a research scientist. This was in East Texas, in the 1950's. My mother-in-law, born in 1913, was, indeed, a nurse in the Army during the Korean War, but then worked in accounting for the government, and was a single mother. So while there was this idea of "the little woman", the reality was not always that way. Remember, these were women of the Rosie the Riveter generation, and they weren't entirely content to stay at home.
That being said, my upbringing in the 1950's was pretty idyllic. I grew up on a Methodist church camp in the piney woods, complete with my own 80 acre lake, and when Mama said don't leave the yard, she meant 800 acres of woods that I had the run of and nobody worried. My entire life was spent at camp! My Daddy the preacher made sure that I read the Bible first word to last, for context, including the Apocrypha, as well as Hamilton's Mythology and Darwin, and I can remember dinners at our house where he, the local Baptist preacher, the local Rabbi, the local Catholic priest, and a religious leader of one or another of the sects in India would all be sitting around the table talking shop. The only acceptable reasons for being out of my room after bedtime were to go to the bathroom, if I were sick or bleeding, or to look something up in the encyclopaedia. Evenings were fireflies and lemonade and the smell of the woods.
There are stereotypes of the 1950's that are both good and bad, but stereotypes they are, nonetheless.
Now, the 1960's - well, let's just say that I was 18 in 1968 and I don't remember a lot of them, because I was there.
Yes;I agree anf the firsdt I really saw of violence or anger such as expressed was in the mid 60's. It seems pretty common how days on all sides really. Back then I heard stories of now my ancestors where starved during the patatoe failure by the british but that was to ponit out to me how lucky I was to be born when I was. nfact the stories of my fathers going to work at 13 to help support the family after hsi father died having nine younger siblings for same reason.I think that impressed on me that no one is special and you have to get at it;as they said then.I can alos remmeber neighbor who had immagrated just years before telling horror stories much worse.
My mother was mentally ill and hit me for everything...but not my sister. I never liked having friends come to my house and looked for every excuse to get away from her and play at their houses. My father never said anything.
The woman left diagonally across the street beat her young son (starting at 3 years old) so much that the kid had all of these nervous tics and twitches. You could hear him screaming all of the time. He was her only kid, if I remember correctly. If you said "boo" to him he'd tremble. He rarely went out of the house and never played with other kids. Of all of the kids in the neighborhood, he's the one that haunts me. I wonder what happened to him.
The woman directly on the left was an alcoholic and beat her son all of the time but not her older daughter. Everybody thought he was a lovable rascal (he was, you couldn't help but like him). He used to get in trouble a lot as a young kid (around 4 years old to 6 years old) and defy her all of the time and she just kept beating him. He liked to eat and was especially fond of cookies that the whole neighborhood used to give him. He always seemed to know when someone just baked.
The woman across the street was the tramp on the block and came on to all of the men. She was younger than the other women on the block and was married a few times. The other woman all talked about her behind her back.
The guy next door sifted the dirt on his front lawn for about 5 years so they never really had a lawn and even when they eventually did, despite all of that sifting, it didn't look better than anyone else's lawn. Everybody used to say he was looking for gold. The kids in that family ran wild.
Diagonally from us, and right across the street from the sifter, was the Jewish guy and his mother. She had him on a tight leash even though he was probably in his 30s. I only mention she was Jewish because they were referred to as that but not in a negative way. I always remember her opening her door and yelling his name every time he was outside. I don't know if he ever eventually got married but if he did I feel sorry for his wife.
The family at the end of my block had a disabled son who was picked up in a van and driven to a special school. He was the sweetest kid. I heard he died before he finished high school. He had muscular dystrophy. That mother steered clear of the other women on the block.
The mother worked in the family across the street from the family with the disabled kid. That was very unusual back then. She never hung with the other women on the block so of course, they all talked about her. She was also my scout leader. I played board games on their picnic table with both of her "unsupervised" daughters (that was a big deal) and with the daughter of the alcoholic. Her husband was home infrequently because of his job. Looking back, I seem to think he was a truck driver. They had a big German Shepherd who used to get loose all of the time and I loved that dog. A lot of people were afraid of him.
The kid on the corner died from drugs. He vomited in a drug induced haze and choked on his own vomit. I heard about that after we moved away. I used to borrow books to read from their older daughter. The son was a year younger than me, if I remember correctly.
One of the men on our block was an airline pilot and died when his plane crashed along with the passengers on board. It was in all of the newspapers and whether it was pilot error so of course, more gossip. I don't really remember those people because they lived at the other end of the block and didn't have kids.
One of the ladies on the block had a few kids and used to give the neighborhood kids money to go on the rides that came around in a truck. I liked her and her family. Her older daughter (she was a teen, and an Elvis fan, when I was around 9) used to listen to rock and roll records at the school gym during the summer and I liked to hang with those older kids that summer and listen to music, too. She had a son that was a year older than me.
There were two other families on the block but the women didn't hang with the coffee klatchers and the kids didn't play with us. They were up the other end of the block. One had a daughter that went to Catholic School.
We had a black family move onto the next segment of our block and that had tongues wagging about "block busting." (If you were around during that time - early to mid 1960s - you are probably familiar with the term.) Both the husband and wife were both very educated professionals originally from Haiti, I think. My sister used to play with one of their 2 daughters who was the same age as my sister. That daughter grew up and went to Johns Hopkins and became a physician.
So, that was my block back in the 50s and 60s.
Other memories:
-Nobody wore helmets. If you fell off your bike, you fell off your bike.
-We stayed outside until it got dark.
-My school lunch cost 25 cents.
-We walked to school if the school was less than 3 miles from where we lived. No parent walked with us or drove us (probably because there was one car in the family). We met up with friends along the way.
-Nobody had 2 cars, 2 bathrooms or two TVs, either.
-I don't know any kid who had their own phone.
-Old people drove big vehicles like cadillacs and Lincolns.
-Nuns and large families had station wagons. Unlike now, no teen boy would be caught dead with a big car.
-As a teen (for me that would be mid- late 60s), we danced to records in the basement.
-I read a lot of superman and other comic books in elementary school. We traded them.
-It turned cold Labor Day weekend, the same weekend we went back to school. I don't think my elementary school was air conditioned.
-The Viet Nam War was on TV every night.
-There were 13 channels on the dial and we got up to change the channel. I don't remember thinking there wasn't enough stuff on TV.
-More than half of the Yankee games were on radio, only.
-There really was a lot more snow back then. Everybody had a sled.
-In elementary school, we got under the desk to practice for when we got bombed by Russia. In high school we went into the hall and faced the wall.
-I worked beginning at age 15 and never stopped working until I hit 55. I worked after school and every summer. I worked when I went to college.
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Looking back
