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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1962, I was in school at N.C. State College, School of Civil Engineering. (We led the revolt when the legislature lawyers from Carolina tried to mimic California and rename NC State as the University of North Carolina at Raleigh. We won. it became NC State University ) Memorable spring courses include integral calculus, physics, surveying and world history. I recently resumed fishing having taken a fishing course in the mandatory PE program.
I lived in a house with 21 other mostly engineering students where intense studies were balanced with lots of beer. Most had girls at home or in school elsewhere so somehow they were not included. There were almost no girls at NC State and none in my engineering classes.
I don’t remember much about world events because focus was on classes in the mornings and labs, long labs every afternoon. The focus was tight on classes and studies.
There was no TV
In the fall, we were inflicted by the new computer registration system. The long long lines for class cards were replaced with shorter lines and orange IBM cards. It was quicker and better unless there was a glitch and that screwed things up royally. The primary goal at registration was no 8:00 or Saturday classes.
Today, about ten of us and the girls from home we married meet annually to tell the tales and revel in our past sins. Wives eventually leave and go off by themselves having heard all the stories and knowing them by heart. It was truly great.
During the summer my family moved from Wheaton, Illinois to Farmington, Michigan. I didn't know a soul. I began my senior year as page One editor of the school paper, taking advanced Biology, Advanced English, and Advanced Journalism.
Near Christmas a girl asked me out to a party. I had never been on a date or been with a girl. I seemed to be a natural and learned quickly. I was on the Wrestling team and tried out several moves on her. They worked.
That took me into 1963, graduated with honors and went to college. 1962 was a poignant year for me. I left behind all my childhood and school friends in Wheaton, and never even got to say goodbye. I was so lonely in the fall of 1962 in Farmington that I simply went home every day after school and studied for hours. That seems to be an excellent way of getting straight A's.
For me it was the Beach Boys, Gant shirts, penny loafers, madras shorts, Northville ice cream and girls, Ann Arbor, a HP 289 Mustang in Lotus Green, and the dream of one day owning a Corvette. Now it sits in my garage. A 436 HP red convertible. A little late to cruise for chicks, but it's been a fun ride.
I will always remember 1962 in my heart!
I was 10 years old and going to a private Episcopal day school. My father had a growing manufacturing business and my mother had inherited money. Life was very good. My parents were yuppies long before anyone had ever heard of one. I was a spoiled rotten little rich kid and didn’t know it because all my friends were too. Didn’t everyone get picked up in Granny’s chauffered limo when mom was too busy, or drunk, to drive the two miles to their school?
I was 19 and had a good job with Proctor & Gamble traveling around the country giving out free samples of Salvo soap. It was made in biscuit sized tablets that each did a washer load. We would walk neighborhoods and hang doorknob bags of Salvo and Downey on every doorknob. We got to see much of the country and met some interesting people. Living in motels started getting old by the end of fall. As I recall they sent us home for Christmas. I joined the Navy in January hoping to stop the communism in Cuba. Instead it has made its way to this country.
I was six years old, enjoying a happy childhood. I love to ask people “who’s childhood would you rather have, your’s or your kid’s?” Most say “theirs.”
Listening to Jose Jiminez on the radio as they counted down...
Catching Huntley-Brinkley on the B&W TV.
Working in tobacco fields, catching soft crabs and selling them to a local restaurant, and baling hay in the Summer...and fishing with a cane pole back in the creek.
Life was good, and we didn't know we were 'poor'.
Like BOR and at about the same age, I was on Long Island but much farther out. We had milk, butter, cream, eggs, bread, Danish, and coffee cake delivered to the back door. We walked to the beach or rode bikes to the huge salt-water pool (much more interesting because it had three diving boards) also located on a beach. We ice-skated and played hockey on two different local lakes, bringing our skates & sticks to school in order to play during the week on the walk home. When the ice melted, we played basketball or tennis or pickup football. When we got home by dusk (5 p.m. or so), we had two hours to do homework or put in an hour of piano-practice before dinner (my father commuted and generally got home by 6:30), and another two hours on the books or in daddy-class after dinner. No TV-watching at all until we were in high school (and my father controlled the dials). My mother gardened, sewed, knitted, cooked, washed, ironed, read ravenously, oversaw the homework for her nine children. It wasn’t until the youngest was in sixth grade that she extended golf on the weekends into golf during the week—often with one or more of us kids. And we said the rosary on our knees immediately after dinner, every night—dates or no dates.
Which brings me to another facet of 1962. Catholics had no idea what would hit them as a result of John XXIII’s “throwing open wide the windows of the church.” Mass was in Latin, the priest faced the altar, separated from the community by an altar rail, the music was Gregorian or otherwise solemn, there were no readers, no “kiss of peace,” no female alter “servers.” On the other hand, there WERE prayers at the foot of the altar and superior schools run by nuns and/or brothers who kept the public school system honest. And in the public schools, both the pledge of allegiance and the Our Father were recited at the beginning of every day. The words “right” and “wrong” were part of the daily vocabulary, failed students repeated grades, and discipline was upheld in public and private classrooms. Homework, as mentioned, was voluminous and GRADED. Cheating, even on homework assignments, was punished; and “feeling good about yourself” meant “pride always comes before a fall.” Oddly enough, these “pressures” resulted in far fewer teen suicides than were evident in the later sixties and beyond.
No, we didn’t have cable (or even color) or computers or Iphones/pads (or even multiple phonejacks); and many of us got to drive only the family car. But, I agree with some posters here, I’d wish it back in a New York minute.
Conceptual design was still on the drawing board at that point...
I had just graduated from a Catholic high school staffed by French-Canadian nuns,in a small Massachusetts town. I immediately went to work full-time in a typing pool in a local manufacturing firm. My pay was $1.25/hour ($60/week). My parents started charging me room and board, $15/week. I didn’t complain, because all my friends’ parents were doing the same thing. Unbeknownst to me, my parents were stashing the money away in a savings account that they used to pay for my wedding in 1966.
I was on board Renville APA 227 getting ready to invade Cuba.
Years later, the film “American Graffiti” featured the ad campaign “Where were you in ‘62?”
And not a lot of years either; about 13. Tells you a lot.
I was 15, we had moved to the Ozarks from the Intermountain region of the west. We were not from here and the hillbillies hated us as outsiders.
Two weeks later we were handpicking beans in the hottest weather I ever lived in. The standard of living here was low and the CHICKEN MAN had an economic stranglehold on this area. You worked for agricultural poverty wages or you did not work.
There was no air conditioning and I remember hot, hot nights when I would wake up and the sweat would be rolling off me. Days were worse.
Movies were good but we were not allowed to see them, I slipped away and saw KINGS OF THE SUN that year, then EL CID and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.
1956-1966 was not a good time for us.
I wasn’t a thought yet - my parents were dating.