I mean before The Beatles arrived? Doo Wop, Hot Rods, Milkshakes…When people thought we’d be living like the Jetsons right now. Anyone here old enough to remember that time period?
Do you have a specific question?
I was a disc jockey from '58 to '63, so I remember it vividly.
I was born in 1955, and it was the best time of my life.
Was born in '61 but I find the 56-64 American pop cultural referents quite interesting and fun.
Born in late 1960, so I was just a couple years too young to catch Cleveland’s Ghoulardi (aired Jan 1963-Dec 1966). I revere him like a god and would proudly wear a Ghoulardi tee shirt around Brooklyn if the license-owners ever got their shit together and sold them.
Great book on the subject: Populuxe
Used to watch Ghoulardi every Friday night. Another potential t-shirt buyer.
I used to watch Ghoulardi with my cousin. I was a little too young to get it, but I knew it was cool.
“Par-ma?”
What was it like? What was the “zeitgeist” of the period? Like…I’m trying to get a picture of the time period in my mind. How did it compare to today? For example, if you wanted to see a girl, you met a girl you liked, how did you go about it in the pre-Internet, pre-Cell phone age? How did you see each other? Was getting a job relatively easier as has been claimed? Was a guy without a college degree in that time still seen as a respectable person? The challenges to authority and drug use that are most often associated with “the 60s” - were those present yet? What about any sort of counterculture - outside of the Beats, which seem to me to have been underground, was there any sort of counterculture?
Car culture - was it a big thing to go cruising for chicks as shown in American Graffiti?
Did people REALLY believe we’d have jetpacks, robot assistants, and flying cars by now, or has that been played up in retrospect? Like, your average guy or gal of 1958-1963 - what did they imagine the 21st century would be like?
Did your average person have any idea about the potential of computers or know much about them?
Also, was it as conservative a time as has been portrayed? To be blunt, how “easy” were women in this time versus the “free love” era in the latter part of the decade? Were women - I mean young girls, say the late teen to early 20s in 58-63 - beginning to question their gender role in society or did that come later?
What were your experiences with members of my grandparents generation - the people in their 30s and 40s during your time as a DJ - were they truly as averse to Elvis and anything new as has been stated? What did they listen to in terms of music in the 50s and early 60s? What were roles like between older men and women of the period (older being above 30 for the sake of the question)?
When did you first start to see “long” hair? I mean longer than say JFK’s length? On men.
In the latter half of your tenure as a DJ - 1960-1963 - was rock “dead”? I ask because I’ve read news articles from that time period discussing how rock seemed to be a dying fad and was being slowly phased out of rotation on the radio in favor of Doo Wop and the Spector type stuff. Were those articles true to your experience(s) - that in the period before Beatlemania, and after Elvis went in the Army, and the Big Three died, rock was kind of dying as a viable genre?
Also, as a DJ, what genre fads do you remember that pop cultural history of the 60s has forgotten?
Lastly, do you subscribe to theory that JFK’s death was a big part of what helped usher in Beatlemania, and do you feel there’s a big difference in your memories between the overall “feel” of 1964 versus 1958 to 1963?
Sorry for all the questions…It’s a period of intense interest to me. It’s also a period of very low to nil photographic coverage in my family, too.
Yeah, I thought up what I wanted to know, in the last post. Sorry for the vagueness of my OP.
I graduated high school in 1963, so my perspective of that period was as a teenager. I was part of a semi-counterculture group in high school. A few of my friends had smoked pot, but it was generally hard to get. The Beats weren’t totally underground; there were coffee houses where people read poetry and performed folk music with acoustic guitars. And we were active in civil rights.
Yeah, people actually believed those projections. “By the year 2000” was the phrase that everything started with. We thought our generation would achieve peace on earth and racial harmony. And an end to organized religion. This was years before “Imagine” was composed.
Computers? Hell, we didn’t even have simple calculators. Those were still years in the future. Ever use a slide rule?
“Free love” was starting to catch on in my social group, but not in general. There were some teen pregnancies, but not talked about. A friend of mine got pregnant, left school for a while, then miraculously she had a baby sister. In general, gender roles were still very rigid.
My mother listened to old standards (Sinatra, Bing Crosby, etc.) and my father listened to Classical.
In a coffee house in 1962 or 63, one of the waiters had a pony tail. But in general, it didn’t start until late 64 or 65. But of course it wasn’t universally accepted by the other kids.
I was a college freshman when Kennedy was assassinated and the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. To many of us, it seemed that everything was different afterwards. I mean EVERYTHING. 1964 was the beginning of the 60s.
I was born in 1946 and graduated from high school in 1964, small town Ohio.
“Was getting a job relatively easier as has been claimed? Was a guy without a college degree in that time still seen as a respectable person?”
Very easy. I can’t remember anyone having a hard time getting summer jobs or permanent work after graduation. These jobs were perfectly respectable.
“What about any sort of counterculture - outside of the Beats, which seem to me to have been underground, was there any sort of counterculture?”
No Beatniks in Amherst Ohio, only in the movies. The Beatles, however, almost defined our life for a while.
“Car culture - was it a big thing to go cruising for chicks as shown in American Graffiti?”
Hell yes. Hanging out at the popular drive-ins was big time.
*“Did people REALLY believe we’d have jetpacks, robot assistants, and flying cars by now, or has that been played up in retrospect? Like, your average guy or gal of 1958-1963 - what did they imagine the 21st century would be like?”
*
Nope. No one thought much about the future until the 1990s when the dreaded Y2K raised its head.
“Did your average person have any idea about the potential of computers or know much about them?”
Not until the 80s.
“When did you first start to see “long” hair? I mean longer than say JFK’s length? On men.”
- Beatles. Overnight. I remember the very first mention of the Beatles when I heard “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on my crystal radio (true) and had never heard anything like that before. The announcer said some women were getting Beatles haircuts and I could not figure out why a woman would get a man’s haircut. A few weeks later I knew why.
By the end of the year our high school forbid Beatles style haircuts even for after hours things like sports events.
*
“Lastly, do you subscribe to theory that JFK’s death was a big part of what helped usher in Beatlemania?”*
Nothing to do with it at all. I have never even heard this theory. The Beatles music was all it took, plus their cool look.
Dennis
Born in '47. I fully endorse the answers above.
As far as meeting girls. You had to actually have personal interaction, make eye contact and ask them out face to face (or perhaps on the phone if you were really shy).
I like soul/R&B music from this era like Sam Cooke and Ray Charles, and Marvel Comics in the early '60s when all those classic superheroes were created is of interest to me as well. This isn’t really my favorite period of pop culture otherwise, though.
Late 50’s/early 60’s sorta-beatnik-wannabe – AMA.
Before there were “coffee shops” there were “coffeehouses” – cheap/free food, impromptu poetry and folk music (read the history of the hungry i in SF).
Yeah, some of the laughably-self-absorbed “guitar noodling” was mine.
Yes, they really, really did. That is, they believed in a technological Future, though the specifics varied over time (giant fruits and vegetables were a big thing for decades, flying cars were reinvented about a hundred times, and jetpacks are a retro joke). I study the stuff, and I know they did. (Check out my site, Flying Cars and Food Pills for a taste of how much Future stuff was visible since about the time of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition.)
Space was a huge thing after Sputnik. Space enthusiasts had been trying for years to get people interested and everybody including the military couldn’t care less until the Russians beat us. Then everybody was obsessed with space until we landed on the Moon and we collectively said, well, now we won and we don’t have to care anymore.
Computers were huge. Literally so. Nobody thought we’d each have one in our pockets but giant electronic brains were simply assumed to be the next big thing but have nothing to do with our lives.
Did everything change after the Beatles? Yeah. Sorta. more in attitudes than in accuality. Most of us didn’t see any real life changes outside of Life magazine until the very late 60s, though.
In the words of Robert Heinlein, “Every generation thinks that it invented sex. Every generation is mistaken.”
In the words of Mel Brooks, “Sex was more fun back when it was dirty.”
In the words of a friend of mine, “It was a lot easier to get laid before the Sexual Revolution. When everybody started keeping score, they got a lot pickier.”
In the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, the US had multiple failures of the Vanguard rocket. When grading tests, my English teacher called the kids with good grades Sputniks; those with bad grades were Vanguards. This was, of course, an anti-American attitude, and the rumor spread that she was a Communist.
Unless you were a student in a large university. For us, everything changed in 1964, seemingly overnight. Especially the music, which went hand-in-hand with all the other changes, more than in any other decade.
I was in the 9th grade when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. Robbie Thomas got in trouble for combing his hair into a Beatles mop top. They made him leave class and change it.
The best music was between 1955 and 1963. I had to start listening to the oldies stations by 1967. 
Girls were not allowed to wear jeans or slacks to school.
Yes, we did spend our weekends “cruising.” In Pomona, it was up and down Garey Avenue. For hours. But then gas was about 30 cents a gallon.
Lots of people didn’t have car insurance unless your vehicle was worth insuring. I guess your free health insurance you got with any old full time job covered your accident injuries and I don’t know how the body work was paid for.
I paid 250 dollars for my first used car. (A 61 Chevy Corvair. Wish I still had it.)