Example?
Just seemed a simpler more innocent life.
Yes, simpler and more innocent than today. But it was when a lot of this stuff originated.
I grew up & graduated from HS in the 50s. Looking back, it seemed like about the best of times to be growing up.
I grew up & graduated from HS in the 50s. Looking back, it seemed like about the best of times to be growing up.
I was born 25 years too late or 100 years to early. Gen-x
I was just a kid in the 50’s but I remember them well. Women for the most part didn’t work outside the home, they raised their kids. People didn’t lock doors, I remember once when my parents sold their home and bought another they went to closing and they were asked for keys to the house, they didn’t have any. They had to get a lock smith to put locks on the house with keys to complete the sale.
Kids played outside until supper time. You could hear parents on their front porch hollering their kid’s name to come home for supper. Seems like everybody did that. It was a time of feeling safe and secure. You knew who your neighbors were and which ones would tell on you if you did something you weren’t supposed to do.
It was a time when if a girl got in trouble, that’s what we used to call it, that she would go away to visit some aunt or cousin somewhere, have the baby and give it up for adoption, and nobody was supposed to be the wiser, it would likely never be mentioned in mixed company.
I remember when we got our first TV, it was a little 8” job. There was only one TV station at the time, I think it was 1953, we were supposed to be one of the first 1000 people in Louisville, Kentucky to have purchased a TV.
It wasn’t all good. There were truly poor people who didn’t have running water in their homes, people that used an outhouse. I remember visiting someone once who had an outhouse and I needed to go, ulgh! What a stinky dirty experience. From then on I never needed to go when I visited there again. I remember someone visiting us that didn’t have running water in their house, the kids flushed the toilet over and over again.
There weren’t any plastic containers, everything was glass or paper. Supermarket bags were paper.
I remember when the first McDonalds opened in our town, I think the burgers were fifteen cents. The white Castle was in existence before the McDonalds and their hamburgers were only six cents.
Seems like bowling was a thing back then and little league baseball. Soft drinks like Upper Ten, Seven UP, Teem and many others were really a big thing then. Seems like everybody smoked. I remember that everybody I knew smoked, I started when I was 11. My parents weren’t happy about it and told me it would stunt my growth, I’m 6’4”, but I did quit over 50 years ago. Beer and cigarette commercials dominated TV advertising.
There was no such thing as seat belts or interstate highways and if you had 65000 miles on a car it was time to get rid of it. I remember a Mercedes ad that the guy in the ad was bragging about he had gotten 150000 miles on his Mercedes.
Nobody talked back to their elders back then and a father’s word was the law. You might go to your mom and try to get her to make your dad see it your way but you didn’t bank on it.
I remember my first job after school was for seventy five cents an hour then the minimum wage came in and they gave me a dollar and a quarter an hour when the minimum wage was a dollar, I thought I was rich. The store I worked for would pay everybody in cash each week. There was a long table. You would get your pay, then pay the federal tax, then the state tax then the city tax, then the Social Security and last but not least the unemployment tax. I loved it and wish it were that way today. We knew how much money we made and how much we paid in taxes.
I can’t say that I particularly miss those days, certainly parts of it I miss but today we all seem to be so rich. Everybody I know has more than one car, hardly anybody did back then. Everybody today has a cell phone, back then there was one phone in the house, if you were lucky. Maybe some well off guy had a window air-conditioner but people didn’t have A/C back then but now everybody does, even in their cars.
We live more comfortably now and there really aren’t any destitute poor around, today you know somebody is poor because they weigh 400 pounds.
I have no desire to go back to those days but there were some good things about them.