An icon from the past, more specifically, the 50’s, has died. Barbara Billingsley, better known as June Cleaver, mother of the Beaver, died at age 94. Often people long for the good old days, the days before families had a car for every person, a TV in every room, ipods and ipads. But were the good old days all that good and were they good for everyone?
Were the good old days good for blacks, gays, women who wanted careers, girls who wanted to study math and science, and people who wanted to use birth control to limit the size of their families? Were the good old days good for European Jews who had lost their entire families in the previous decade or those who were shut in behind the Iron Courtain? Were things good for the kids who dived under their desks during air raid drills, and who lived in fear of being vaporized in a dust cloud if the wrong person pushed the button?
Hind sight is always better than foresight. Compared to the 40’s I guess the 50’s looked pretty good.
When the pps opens, go to tabs: VIEW/slideshow/start slideshow/from beginning
Sorry, this is the first time I have tried embedding a powerpoint presentation and it was most uncooperative.
Hopefully my calls in to Alanna to fix it will be heard.
Jerry Mathers (The Beaver) speaks about Barbara Billingsly on the Today Show.
Doggone, if Alanna is so good she can fix that sort of thing, perhaps she can tell me why, every time I try to link or Google onto a Washington Post on-line article, my computer comes up “Not responding.” Never happens with the NYT, the LA Times, the Chicago Trib, the WSJ, or other newspapers. Is it the WaPo website or something my computer/Fios connection is doing?
It is some sort of setting. Alanna is good.
Did you see the powerpoint? Blast from the past for sure.
Wolverine, I expect that you are running an anti virus or malware check on your computer and it is removing cookies from Washington Post. I can’t set it to send me email alerts. Soon as I set them, something signals it to stop.
That diving under a desk during a 1950’s air raid drill must have been a Washington Metro thing, maybe NYC and a few other places. I don’t recall ever doing that in a industrial town about 120 miles or so from Chicago and, at that time, the site of numerous plants which made tank and aircraft engines and other critical parts for the military.
You could be right on that, Moon. I have multiple protective devices on this thing. One of them is like living in a machine gun nest. I tap into the “Official White Pages”, for instance, and it starts popping off shots like I was in the trenches in Flanders and under attack by the Kaiser’s army.
That PP was daunting. To think I was actually born during that time. My father had a car like one of those, 1940 model I think. He kept it for over 13 years. I remember that the doors opened in the reverse fashion of the way they do now, and it had a starter button you had to push. The one thing I found missing in that PP was how we traveled back then and into the 1950’s. Moon, do you remember the tourist cabins? No suites or king beds at the Ramada or Drury’s or the Holiday Inn Express. No TV. Just an old guy in a sleeveless undershirt who handed you the key and a set of towels and pointed the way down the dirt parking lot. Cheap mattresses and bouncy springs, a hand pump with well water that tasted like minerals or metal, an oil burner for heat, sometimes a leaky roof. Uncle Joe’s Deluxe Tourist Cabins on U.S. 31.
As for those women without birth control in the 1950’s. My own genealogical studies actually show that our family sizes decreased in the late 1940’s and 1950’s compared to previous generations, even taking the so-called “Baby Boomers” into account. My parents came from families of 7 and 9 kids respectively. They and their siblings had 4 kids at the most, usually two or three. Mrs W’s parents came from families of 12 and 12. They and their siblings, as Catholic as the Pope, never had more than 4-5 max, all but one. The genealogical charts show me that they were not exceptions in that era. Not birth control. Self-discipline I guess. I’ve never asked.
Wolverine, the not asking was part of it…you just didnt. re birth control. That was a northern thing. I thought it was just Conn. but my mother told me right before she died that she had to come back to Virginia for such things. That wasn’t something my mother spoke of freely so I should have taken that as a sign….
My family had one of those ugly old black cars. So did my aunt. Unbelievable.. How did people find their own cars in a lot?
I don’t remember staying in a tourist cabin. But then I don’t remember staying in any motel until I was about 10.
I should have thanked Bear for sending that powerpoint. I hope it opens for everyone. That thing sure kicked my butt.
I didn’t encounter desk diving in VA, but in NJ. I only did it a few times but other people did it a bunch. Not sure where. The where never came up in later years. I only lived in NJ for about a year and a half, then I moved to Atlanta for 3 years. It did not happen there.
I love this post Moon. The “good ole days” are only good if you were in the majority and had not real obstacles in front of you but your own determination. I vote for the 90’s under Cllinton as the best almost decade. Things were so good that people actually focused their energy and political will on silly things like stains on dresses and cigars. Today, given the seriousness of our economy and the world stage, you would, I hope, be villified for wasting taxpayer money and energy on impeaching a president over an affair.
That continual hounding and impeachment did sort of detract but I agree with you.
I expect many people would chose the 80’s. I would not. I would probably chose the 70’s as second best. Of course you have some detractors there for sure. Yup, 90s were the best near decade.
The 50’s have been so romanticized and sort of offered up as the way things should be. that is rather horrifying to think about actually.
Looking back, we can’t choose the 40’s because of WWII. The 30’s are out because of the depression., I guess the 20’s were pretty good. Lots of prosperity and partying. My mother was a little kid then, just to put it in perspective for myself.
Best way to put it in perspective — back in the 80s we were at Universal Studios in Burbank and saw the Cleaver home where the exteriors were shot…and as the tour bus turns the corner, there’s nothing there but lumber propping it up.
As Bon Jovi would say, “It’s all the same…only the names have changed.”
I’m still trying to get my wife to explain to me when, exactly, was “back in the day”.
The 50’s were HORRIBLE.
The world didn’t have ME in it yet……
🙂
the 50’s are considered the paragon of american greatness because the country had just vanquished or subdued mortal threats to its vitality: vanquished threats from abroad, and subdued the insidious assault on capitalism and free markets from within. in the 50’s, america was self-sufficient, could actually manufacture its own stuff and did not have to import everything. government was not seen as the panacea to all of life’s woes. in summary, the american dream was alive and well, yeah the cold war sucked, but it spurred america to reach for the moon and explore space; contrast that to today where obama wants to use nasa for outreach to the muslim world?! how the mighty have fallen
And that’s one perspective, e. How does that explain the 60’s?
I think the 50’s were probably great for people who were like me. Not so hot for people who were not like me. They would have been better for me if I hd been a boy though.
in the 60’s a “perte de la volonté”, a weakening of the will, began to exert sway over the western world, evinced in the u.s. via lbj a la great society, vietnam, the beginning of abdication over our borders and national sovereignty, and the citizens increasingly expecting government support to overcome life’s travails. americans have continued to perform incredible accomplishments, but in many ways we are but lilliputians perched on the shoulders of our grandparents, the greatest generation, enjoying the fruits of their labor
Much has been said about ‘the greatest generation’ and about the word ‘greatest’ being used to describe them. Why were they great? Was it because they grew up in the Depression only to be called into action for WWII. Some of them were so great they got called back up to go to Korea.
Those that didn’t often took advantage of the GI bill. Millions of vets got a college education for the first time in the history of their family.
Were they the greatest or the most unlucky? The Depression and WWII in one lifetime. Damn.
Look at the social justice of the 60’s, especially as it pertains to race. Race, Space, and sex. Damn.
I don’t know. It was my parents were belonged to the greatest generation.
And I think e is right on some levels. I am a boomer and I believe there was a belief that our parents had vanquished the foe so we cold all have a cushy life. I never felt that way but I think many did and many parents felt that way too. I know a lot of other youngsters had a lot of things I didn’t get to have.
I think it is true that the 1950’s were good for the majority in this country and not so good for others. It just seems to me that, apart from the major possibility of nuclear war (which most of us seemed to try to put out of our minds as much as we could as unthinkable), we had far fewer personal worries. I can recall, for example, being able as a small boy to wander all over the neighborhood and beyond without an adult tagging after me because they were fraught withy security fears. My kids, by contrast, watch their own children like hawks, even when they are just in the front yard. As a teenager we had no fear of being out after dark almost anywhere in our medium-sized industrial city. If you ever needed help for any reason, you could go to the nearest home of a stranger and get it readily. Kids who misbehaved in school usually got the triple whammy from teachers, administrators, and parents. Only once did I ever see a cop at my high school — a response to reports of a “rumble” which proved to be only a spring-fever prank. Although your parents did not like it, you could still hitchhike and get home safely. All of which might explain why Hitchcock’s movie “Psycho” made everyone sit up in a startled state. We were not concerned with the likes of Lindsay Lohan’s repeated trips to jail. The big deal was how Elvis twisted his hips and the fact that the Ed Sullivan Show would only show his act from the waist up. It was a simpler and more comfortable time for most of us. The economy was pretty steady. Once Korea was over, we did not have the burden of a hot war until Vietnam came along.
As for those minorities which were not so comfortable, this was an era of vast contrast. The American Indians were out there on the reservations in an almost forgotten state of poverty and neglect. Yet we romanticized the “noble Red Man” in our entertainment, lionizing the likes of the real Cochise and the fictional “Straight Arrow.” Almost every kid I knew wanted a bow and arrow for Christmas. At the Boy Scouts we were taught how to make an Indian arrow from scratch. We were in the “Order of the Arrow.” We were often taught how to do the things the Indians did to survive in the wilderness. At the public library they had a program in which, if a kid took out a book and got a signed statement from his parents that he had actually read it, his prize was a feather to put in his Indian headdress. Being a voracious reader, I had nearly a full war bonnet to go with my bow and arrow. But we seldom heard about actual conditions on the reservations, except occasionally from church missionaries asking for financial help.
American Blacks were another story. They were still openly persecuted in the South. In the North, it was far more subtle and most often in housing — something my own father was instrumental in ending in our town. But I went to school with Blacks since my earliest memories, and this was the era when many of us sat up and took notice of the prowess of many Blacks in sports. It was a real contrast: the same Black who couldn’t buy a home in your neighborhood was venerated because he was a high school basketball star good enough for a shot at the pros and eventually a spot with the Harlem Globetrotters. And then there was the Black boxer and local boy who was so good that he made the Olympic team and was featured by everyone as our guy. But his sister, speaking figuratively, would not have had a prayer of winning the local beauty pageant. We also watched with roaring laughter the TV version of “Amos and Andy” featuring Black actors and actresses. I don’t recall ever thinking that this was a demeaning of Blacks in general. Those thespians in that show, in my opinion, were absolute masters of the craft of comedic timing. In fact, what I do recall is thinking that the likes of Red Skelton and Milton Berle couldn’t hold a candle to those other actors with regard to their comedy skills. But demeaning they eventually became in the public eye of later decades.
But, when you consider Blacks in the 1950’s, many suffering the same discrimination and sometimes violence of previous decades, you also have to take into account that this was the time of the “gathering” for that portion of our population. They got their first major victories then in the courts and at Little Rock. But more important, they were building their muscle and creating the first real framework of their liberation movements. Those who did that are, in my view, some of the major heroes in our American saga. Those were the tough liberation warriors who fought on a battlefield where most of the odds were still against them. Were I Black myself, I would be very tempted to point to the 1950’s as the era when my liberation first began to be seriously forged — an age of real heroes.
I would say September 10, 2001, was the last of the “good old days,” when our biggest media obsession that summer was shark attacks.
Remember flying in planes before 9/11/01? Keeping your shoes on, carrying your souvenir snow globe on board, actually getting a meal even on relatively short flights; not being wanded, patted down and x-rayed down to the details of your naked body, and feeling just a little special because you were flying somewhere?
Remember when there was nothing ominous about duct tape?
Remember feeling, rightly or wrongly, that now that the Soviets had crashed and burned, we were now safe?
And remember believing that acts of war only happened in OTHER countries?
Remember when our budget was in surplus, and no one dreamed that China would be lending us trillions of dollars to conduct two unimaginable wars? For that matter, remember not being able to imagine a “trillion” in American debt?
Wolverine has touched upon a few things most people don’t know about. Amos and Andy were revered. They were masters. It never occurred to me either that they were being demeaned. I am not sure they were. They were hilarious and certainly no more assinine than George Jefferson. I loved them. I knew they were black but I wasn’t conscious of it when I watched them…it almost seemed like an aside. That is a kid perspective.
Blacks probably were fairly invisible on TV other than A & A. IN movies, they were more like Gone with the Wind Characters. I remember when Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner first came out. That go everyone’s attention for sure….of the parent generation.
Wolverine is also correct about kids running free. Even my own kids ran much freer than kids do now. If there is one single reason for childhood obesity, it has to be that kids aren’t turned loose. More’s the shame.
Indians….I don’t totally agree here. Tonto was subservient. Indians weren’t quite as nobel on TV. Not sure about the movies. I remember being jealous of all the kids who got to be INdians at the thanksgiving play and I had to be a stupid old Pilgrim.
Wolverine and I will probably not see some things through the same eyes. I lived in the south. Things were different. Not necessarily bad. Just different. The one thing I will say and I will stand by it….the down side of so few blacks working as domestics now is all the little white children who will never really get to know black people personally and who won’t come to love them as family members.
On another note, want a good book? The Help is great.
@Emma, until that last paragraph, I remember quite well. I knew on 9-11 that nothing would ever be the same.
I don’t remember not having a deficit. I thought we had had a deficit since like 1790. It was huge during and after WWII. I think like now. I can’t even imagine us speaking to China, much less owning them money. Their human rights track record sucks. Blame Nixon. He is the one who opened up relations and got pandas for his efforts.