I was born in 1952, so I remember the 1950's quite well, and my dad graduated from dental school in 1957 so we were doing pretty well. We had a washing machine with a wringer attachment - once the wash was done you had to wring out each item of clothing by putting it between two cylinders that squeezed out the water. No drier, you had to hang the clothes on a clothes line. No one had central air or central heat - if you wanted to get cool in the summer you took a shower. Nobody had more than one car. The houses were small - around 1000 to 1500 sq. ft. TVs were small, and nobody had color. Even in New Orleans we didn't have all three channels, we had NBC and CBS but not ABC.
Smallpox was still around so we all got smallpox vaccinations - the scar on my arm is about the size of a quarter, and it also made a scar on my forehead that is too small to notice unless you look for it. Kids were getting polio and were being put in iron lungs - that happened to a kid in our neighborhood. But luckily they did come out with polio vaccines then, and the entire country lined up to take it, in school cafeterias mostly.
The interstate highway system hadn't been built yet, although it was in the process of being built. That started under Eisenhower.
Women couldn't work - it wasn't just that they wanted to stay home with their kids, they literally were not allowed to have jobs that men wanted to do. They could teach school, be a secretary, a librarian, a waitress, a cashier, a bank teller, a seamstress, stuff like that. Not doctor, lawyer, banker, executive, except for a very few who didn't give a damn and were willing to fight like hell.
Black people still rode in the back of the bus. If you were black and were shopping in a downtown department store and needed to go to the bathroom, you had to leave the store and go find a black-owned business, because the restrooms were for white only. If you were lucky they would have two water fountains, one for white and one for "colored."
People who had rheumatoid arthritis, as I do, became completely disabled within 10 years.
In the early 1960's, the Cold War was in full swing. During the Cuban Missile crisis, kids were given dog tags to wear, the kind they give to soldiers, so in the event of war you could be united with your family or your body could be identified. They would blow the air raid siren for drill and we would practice hiding under our desks.
No, it wasn't the good old days as far as I am concerned. |
