Posted on 07/28/2012 3:55:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
We didn't lock the house EVER.
Then, right around that time, black and white realtors alike started "blockbusting." (The king of the black realtors was Isaac Haggins. Sumbitch's family is still in business.) They would call up every house on the street and say, "You know, the neighborhood it changing fast. You really want to sell your house now while you can still get something for it. In five years, it will be worth nothing."
If worked. "For Sale" signs outnumbered the dandelions.
Anyway, we sold our house to a nice black couple. The realtor asked for the keys and my dad's jaw dropped. Keys? He had to put new locks on the doors because no one knew where the keys were from when they first bought the house.
I was 5 ,walking home . My 10 year old neighbor told me the President was shot and motioned his finger to the back of his head. I shrugged my shoulders and went home to no decent TV for 2 weeks.
The quality of life has improved. In 1962 the average life span was 69 years. Now it is 78 years. People are living longer and they are much more healthy thanks to advances in medical care. We have better products at lower cost.
If you have to ask that question it shows that you know very little of what life was like in the US in '62.
You dodged the question.
My answer to this crucial question: Black people were better off in 1962 than they are today.
Safer neighborhoods.
Better school performance.
Stronger family structures.
Lower unemployment.
Stronger church attendance.
More cohesive communities.
Big Government has made all of that go away and given precious little in return.
“The next year, I stuffed envelopes for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign and there weren’t any television attack ads.”
Hmm... how about “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.....KABOOM!”
Anyway, I was thirteen in 1962 and a kid’s life was as described elsewhere on this thread, near Green Bay WI where there was lots of fishing in the summer & and hockey played on any patch of ice in the winter.
Then the JFK assassination the following year, on my birthday. World turned upside down in an instant.
Today I have one cellphone (my wife’s), one TV for news & info, we share a laptop & I refuse to buy a digital cam. I listen to Rush & Glenn on my 1968 Zenith Trans-Oceanic. My car is not fully broken in until I’ve driven it for at least ten years. The only ancient feature missing from our kitchen is Betty Furness.
I-phone? What’s an I-phone?
I don't think you understand very much about what it means to be a human. Not too surprising, I suppose: Big Government has been sapping away our humanity for about 50 years. More, really.
LOL! What a great story.
Graduated from junior college in June, 1962, and had a wonderful summer, preparing to go off to school for the first time in September.
Life was splendid in my little hometown! As I look back, I seldom had a serious thought....life was fun and the living was easy. I was fortunate to grow up in these delightful years.
And we had the best music too!
Third year electrical engineering student at Ga. Tech and married for one year. Vacuum tubes were the in thing. Still married to that nice lady after 51 years.
There is far more material wealth today, including computers, but there is far, far less liberty and a great deal more immorality and incivility. People today act like animals. Even worse, they take pride in it. Things weren’t perfect back then, but at least most people aspired to be something better. Now it’s a mad rush to the bottom, but at least we have computers...
“Not all of the changes in our country have been bad.”
It’s hard to name what’s gotten better. Sure, blacks were treated like dirt, but they had intact families and safe neighborhoods...and were steadily climbing economically. Gays were in the closet, or locked up.
Yes, it had to be stressful with the Cold War going on...but at least back them we had the will to identify the enemy arming-up and were willing to stay ahead of them. Now we ignore an enemy at least as dangerous while we arm-down.
So what bothered you from back then?
If I wanted to change the TV channel I got off my butt and clicked to one of the other 3 stations.
A cheese pizza cost 1.25, 1.50 if I wanted a topping.
Duck and cover drills were part of my 7th grade experience.
“The next year, I stuffed envelopes for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign and there weren’t any television attack ads.”
You might want to look up Daisy Ad, one of the big factors in his defeat.
That came in 1964 with LBJ having Goldwater nuking a little girl picking a flower.
Think Bill Cosby, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Sid Caesar, Martin & Lewis, Lenny Bruce, Red Skeleton, Lucille Ball, Art Carney, Jackie Gleason, etc. Back then, comedy meant something more than saying poo poo ca ca. The decline in real humor since ‘62 reflects the overall decline in the rest of society.
“In 1962 if I wanted to buy a computer it would cost me millions of dollars.”
I guess one difference was that we did things, QUITE WELL, without computers back then. Look at the development timetable for the SR-71. It takes 5 times as long now. We built Apollo without computers, and pretty much built the Shuttle without computers 10 years later. Now instead of building spacecraft, we build PowerPoint charts of things that never (or barely ever) fly.
Computers are cheap now, and powerful - but we did quite well in the past too, when people drove around town without some voice telling them where to turn.
Learning to drive the family car. It was a 58 Ford 6 cyl stick. No power anything. No AC. It had floor vents you could open to “cool” off. It already had bondo on the rocker panels and on the fenders behind the front wheels where it had rusted through even though it was only 4 years old. The car would probably not make it to 100k miles. Very few did. It had shoe brakes, no seat belts and bias-ply tires. My mother rear-ended another car once because she didn’t have the strength to lock up the wheels. I’m sure she could have stopped in time in a modern car with power disk brakes.
The interstate highways were just being built. The first time I drove on a road was on a 10 mile stretch of I-90 that had just been completed. Only that 10 miles existed on that stretch and there was almost no traffic. A trip to my Aunt and Uncle’s home in Charleston, WV took over 8 hours. That trip became 5 hours or less after the interstates were completed.
I was a bright 7 year old, even smart enough to change my own diaper.
Designed with slide rules and drawn with pencil on vellum.
Bill of materials kept by some ancient clerk with 3-ring binders.
How the heck did we ever do it, LOL?
“The quality of life has improved. In 1962 the average life span was 69 years. Now it is 78 years.”
Life span and quality of life are two ENTIRELY different things. Yes, I’ll concede that there have been significant medical advances - although those days are in the process of ending now. But quality of life encompasses much more. Back then, kids didn’t get indoctrinated into the gay lifestyle in high school, if not before.
My immigrant wife, who has a family in a large city, lost half of her nephews to the gay lifestyle (4 of 8, to be exact). They never had a chance. The parents knew little English, and those kids were just meat for that system. I once asked her if those kids would have turned out the same way in the “old country”, she said NO WAY. Nor would they have turned out like that in the America of 1962.
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