In 1957, even in a large metropolitan area, we had only 2 FM stations. One was classical only, the other was a simultaneous broadcast of an AM station, so there was really only one FM station. In the country, there were none.
Long distance phone calls were expensive and required an operator to set up. There were those newfangled “dials” on some phones, but no touch-tones yet. Extension phones were too expensive, so most homes had only one phone. And the handsets were heavy. You could pound nails with them.
Most TVs were black & white. Only rich folks and owners of TV repair shops had color, and those were deeply curved at the sides. All 17" of them.
1957–Thalidomide was approved for morning sickness without being tested on pregnant animals. It would take four years for it to get banned. The women in the US of A who took it for morning sickness either had to get an illegal abortion, go to another country to get a legal abortion, or give birth to a deformed baby.
<giggles behind hand like a girl in 1957 would have done> I wasn’t even thought of in 1957, but my eldest sister was born that year.
1957 had strange cookery habits and garlic was considered exotic.
And LD calls on Sunday were cheaper. Jeez, I remember growing up in the 80s and Og forbid if you made a long distance call…and we only talked to out of town/state/country relatives on Sunday.
Early 90s, wasn’t it? Oh, there were problems before then with certain retailers, but I seem to recall that as late as the early 90s, the only things open in Toronto’s Fairview Mall on Sundays were Shopper’s Drug Mart, the movie theatres, and the sit-down-table-service restaurants. This would have been up until about 1992 or so, if memory serves. Then, for a couple of years, wide open Sunday shopping (well, excepting liquor and beer stores) was only allowed on the four Sundays before Christmas. I don’t recall Sunday shopping all year long being allowed until about 1995 or so.
Thanks for all the input. I am going to try to distill these ideas into something manageable, but I doubt I’ll be able to include all the stuff about whether or not some colleges are considered “ivy league”
The cancer I survived in 2003 would have been a death sentence for sure in 1957.
I’m about the same age as Fear Itself and the same was true in Colorado. Most misbehaving junior-high kids got sent to the vice-principal to be paddled, but we had at least two teachers with paddles on the wall behind the desk. I never got hit with one, but I saw them used. One of them was a canoe paddle with the words “BOARD OF EDUCATION” routed in it.
They still are, sometimes. My wife and my 21-year-old daughter both talk about “going out with the girls,” and women of all ages talk about “girls’ night out” or “just us girls” going to do something. The difference is that MEN aren’t allowed to call you girls anymore.
Thalidomide was never approved for market in the U.S. A number of samples were given to doctors for clinical trials, but there are only 17 known thalidomide victims in the U.S., a result of the work of FDA researcher Frances Oldham Kelsey who refused to approve it. Of course, more than 10,000 children were affected by thalidomide worldwide, but the U.S. number is comparatively tiny because the drug was never approved.
Some of you seem like you have a serious mad-on for the past. Not everything was worse in 1957. Bill Bryson’s latest book gives a pretty well-balanced account of the good and the bad of that time period.
And add me to the list of people who went to schools that were still paddling kids in the '90s.
Well, the point of my OP was to point out how things weren’t so rosy in 1957. Sooo… hmm… maybe that’s what we’d be focusing on in this thread?.. ya think? I already got the 1957 was better list in an email…
Less plastic, mom’s didn’t generally have to work, fewer artificial food ingredients, Main Street USA, pre-Watergate confidence in government, doctors made house calls, people were capable of fixing their own cars, rivers and lakes were cleaner, Disney movies were better, . . . some people value a simpler time when cell phones, jumbo jets, and the internet weren’t creating chaos in our lives . . . “better” is subjective.