For me it was a great time to be a kid. My father had a welding business and he made good money. We weren’t wealthy, but quite comfortable. I was born in 1950 and by 1957 was riding my bicycle all around town with my friends. We would stop at my dad’s shop and grab some bottles of coke from his cooler, then be gone until dinner. Never had any fear of harm from wackos like there are today. We lived in a house that was the last one on a dead end street, and next to a 40 acre field, then about 60 acres of woods with a creek and some ponds. I spent many hours in those woods, saw lots of wildlife. Today interstate 287 runs right through those same woods that are gone, along with the ponds we used to skate on in the winter. There were only 3 tv channels ABC, NBC, & CBS. Commercials were fast and not so frequent. Saturday mornings were cartoons until noon. Sunday was Roy Rogers and Disney. Movies at a theater was 50 cents, candy in machines 5 cents, popcorn 10 cents. School was fun with trips to dairies, zoos, & museums. I don’t remember any protests or riots, it was for me a peaceful decade, and a great time to be an American.
Tx for good description.
“I don’t remember any protests or riots,”
Same here. Things changed in the early 60s. I remember the first “race riots” being shown on the nightly news starting in 1964 when I was 13. Those black and white images were of something so far away and so alien to us they might have been on Mars.
Coincidentally, I got sucker punched by a black kid that same year at a movie theatre. I was leaving the theatre on a Saturday afternoon when he grabbed my shoulder, wheeled me around, and POW, landed a hard right on my face. I dropped like a sack of potatoes.