You can definitely buy Ghoulardi shirts, all the way from Amrap. You just need to do it the old fashioned way with the printout form and a check. http://www.theghoulardifest.com/store.html
Or patent leather shoes. And girls got sent home if their skirts didn’t reach the floor when they knelt. Nobody was allowed to wear jeans, shorts, t-shirts or sneakers. And boys’ hair could not be over the ears or collar.
You’d call her on the phone or ask her out face-to-face.
You’d pick her up and go to a movie or a meal or a dance. Sometimes you’d meet at the dance.
People were hired more on who they knew rather than what they knew. A relative would hear of an opening and recommend you. It doesn’t work quite that way any more.
As much as any time.
To some degree. The Beats were not that underground.
Depends on the location. Not where I grew up, where it was rural, so no, and it probably didn’t exist in east coast cities. If might have been a thing in southern California, though.
No one really expected it. Science fiction was not seen as being particularly predictive (and it still isn’t).
No. Computers were mainframes, and the idea of a PC never came up,nor did anything more complicated.
The Pill was hard to get, especially for a teen girl. Until it became common, pregnancy was a worry. Note that teen girls at that time did know about abortion and were willing to risk arrest or death if they became pregnant.
Just a few. It was rare.
My mother had no opinion on Elvis at all; she was too busy raising three boys.
My folks preferred Broadway showtunes.
Much like the stereotype.
Obviously, 1964, when the Beatles hit the US. Actually, their hair wasn’t any longer than many of the musicians of the 50s (remember, the Beatle haircut occurred when George decided not to bother putting in hair cream). It was just that they didn’t comb them up like everyone else.
It was definitely fading in favor of folk (as was Doo Wop, though Motown was establishing itself), which was what the cool kids listened to. The Beatles changed that.
It’s indisputable that the death of JFK ushered in the Beatles. CBS was about to do a feature on them the day he was shot; they shelved it. A couple of months later, Walter Cronkite decided that it was now appropriate and that people needed something fun after a time of national mourning. The report aired. Ed Sullivan saw it. The rest is history.
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? — You phoned on a land line.
How did you see each other? – I would arrange a date for a certain time, then go by her house and knock on the door.
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? – Pretty much all jobs, you learn on the job with no formal training. You put on a tie and comb your hair and go and find the person responsible for hiring, and present yourself as a person he can trust as an employee who seems to be able to learn the skill needed.
The challenges to authority and drug use that are most often associated with “the 60s” - were those present yet? – Drug use was just beginning to appear, it wasn’t even thought of in the 50s. Beatniks were the thin edge of challenging authority.
What about any sort of counterculture - outside of the Beats, which seem to me to have been underground, was there any sort of counterculture? – Not really. If there was, it was still kept hidden from view.
Car culture - was it a big thing to go cruising for chicks as shown in American Graffiti? – I never saw any.
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? – I don’t think anybody ever thought about it. I didn’t. I think there was a presumption that the future would take care of itself, and things would turn out OK. One or two mistakes, and there was still a boys-will-be-boys attitude about it, and lives weren’t ruined by one foolish misstep.
Did your average person have any idea about the potential of computers or know much about them? – Technology came on very gradually, and nobody had any problem learning to cope with things like dial telephones and miniaturized transistor radios and automatic transmission and pop up toasters.
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? – Very few girls stood out. When I went to college in 1956, there were about a thousand guys at my school studying engineering, and only one was a girl. She was a celebrity, and very respected by both men and women. You could always tell an engineering student, they had a slide rule hanging from their belt.
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? – Pretty much, but mostly just for a show of geriatric soidarity, “The kids!” kind of thing. Parents assumed the kids would grow out of it. There was still intergenerational trust and cohesion.
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)? – A lot of the big hits of the late 50s were still by people like Perry Como andn Pat Boone, and kids liked those, too. The whole family could still enjoy listening to the car radio.
When did you first start to see “long” hair? I mean longer than say JFK’s length? On men. – The change came with ungroomed hair. Boys used greasy kids stuff and girls went to bed with rollers in their hair, and I don’t think there was really a sharp transition away from that Getting a job still meant acceptance by grown-ups, an they were still guided by grooming propriety…
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? – I think there was a watershed around 1963, with the emergence of female vocalists singing ballads. Barbara Lewis leaps to mind as a game changer: Barbara Lewis -- Hello Stranger - YouTube. The time was ripe for Dionne Warwick.
Also, as a DJ, what genre fads do you remember that pop cultural history of the 60s has forgotten? – Nothing comes to mind, there were alsays mini-fads going on, then as now.
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? – Well, my own age went from 19 to 24 in that time, so any change was more likely maturity within myself and my peers, than in the culture of the times. I don’t think JFK’s death had anything to do with anything, culturally.
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.
Here’s what dating was like when I went to college, in 1956 (LSU, Baton Rouge, probably tyipcal).
If you saw a girl you liked, you just introduced yourself. Easier if you were in a class together, still better if you were in a lab together, you could freely chat during lab, a go to the coke room together. If the introduction turned out, you could ask her out when you see her in class, or ask her dorm extension nunber or look it up in the student directory. All undergraduate girls lived in an on-campus dorm except those from town who commuted from home.
A girl didn’t get in or out of the dorm without going past the housemother. If a girl goes out in the evening, the housemother logs her out. The guy presents himself to the housemother, who phones the girl’s room and announces that her escort (wearing a tie) has arrived. She has to be logged back in by 10:00, a little later on weekends, maybe 11:00. At curfew time, the doors are locked, and the consequences of being late were too dire to contemplate. At 9:50, the anteroom fills up with girls and guys trying to sneak a last kiss (or first). I never saw a girl past the front door of a men’s dorm. Nor in a frat house except at a supervised event.
There was a city bus route to sleepy downtown, with not much to do there except a movie. Or maybe one on-campus event a week. There were also a few restaurants adjacent to the campus. Anything louder than that was inaccessibly suburban. But generally, a date was a movie, wilh precious little time afterwards for any hanky panky. Virtually all the girls were virgins, either in fact or demeanor. Even second base was a challenge.
Very few students had cars on campus, which were restricted without some plausible need. So dates were walk/bus affairs. There was a campus dress code for girls, relaxed but not abolished weekends and nights. Slacks or skirts below the knees (the fashion of the day), tops with sleeves. All boys in first two years, ROTC was mandatory, which had its own grooming restrictions – tidy haircut, no facial hair.
I never heard of any drugs, never even heard their names mentioned. Never saw anybody drunk in the men’s dorm, where residents and male visitors could come and go unrestricted at any hour.
What was the Beatnik culture like around this period? And was it more of a philosophy or a political ideology? What would you share it shared in common with the Hippies, and how would you say Beatniks differed from Hippies?
I’m guessing it was mainly marijuana at that point? Stuff like Heroin and such wouldn’t become a big deal until later?
Because it was so scant, or more out of fear do you think?
What year around would you say you first saw dial phones and automatic transmission and pop up toasters?
Do you think the the generation gap was inevitable, and that Vietnam and The Beatles merely hastened its arrival? Also…Why do you think it’s been portrayed by members of your generation in pop culture that the entirety of the 60s was basically like the end of the decade? I mean, if you look at movies made by Boomers or shows, the entire 60s was about long hair, Acid, and disobeying your parents…I ask these questions about the earlier part of the decade because it’s almost been erased from history outside of JFK’s Presidency.
I was pretty oblivious to “The Big Picture” (hmmm, maybe that was a classic Beatnik attitude – like Maynard G. Krebs).
So I hope others here can enlighten you.
I’ve done some reading since then, and had others explain my own generation to me. One friend detailed the transition of the Beats to the Hippies, which involved Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey’s bus…
Many good articles online, like “The Beats & Sixties Counterculture”
Keep in mind “beatniks” were a media label. Again, like Maynard G. Krebs… (and keep in mind, the G. stood for Walter).
Jack Kerouac used the term “Beats”. For a number of reasons.
It should be pointed out that the terms “beatnik” and “hippie” were other people’s terms for these people. I never heard anyone describe themselves in these terms. And for the more authentic ones they were both philosophies and political ideologies, as well as art and music movements. For others, they were just a different form of conformity. Many of them were guilty of exactly the same level of conformity and non-thinking as the society they were fond of criticizing.
I was born in 1945, and as far back as I remember, we had these things. The only difference is that we had a party line on our phone.
The word Beatnik was a creation of San Francisco columnist Herb Coen, but it comes from Jack Kerouac’s characterization of themselves as the Beat Generation, i.e. beat down. The Beats called themselves the Beats long before the public ever referred to them as beatniks.
Hippie has a far more convoluted history. The Beats were also called hipsters, a term that came out of black jazz slang in the 40s. A hipster was hip, i.e. into jazz and poetry and stuff that the squares weren’t. The hip people started being called hippies around 1960. It didn’t take off as a cultural term until around 1967 when San Francisco columnists began using it to designate how the beat movement had morphed into its successor. The hippies called themselves hippies far more than than the beats called themselves beatniks.
One big difference between the two was attitude. The beaten down Beats were negative and pessimistic, isolated and individualistic. They used marijuana but also were heavily into heroin, the drug of choice for jazz musicians. The hippies were upbeat and optimistic, communal and proselytizing. The Summer of Love was all about a better world fueled by pot. Then heroin moved in and San Francisco went to pot, so quickly and horribly that the “Death of Hippiedom” was declared in 1967. The 70s were the era of plastic hippies, metal music, hard drugs, and the end of optimism. That’s why people like to pretend that the Summer of Love epitomized the 60s. Everything else about the era was awful, far worse than anything we’re seeing today. We had Nixon.
I was also born in late 60. Never heard of your Ghoulardi, but we had Svengooli. And I’m NOT talking about Rich Koz’s Son of…
Since I was too young, I won’t respond to the OP other than to observe that occasionally when using my cellphone, I’ll think it is like Dick Tracy and his 2-way wrist radio!
From my own memory, your milage may vary widely
You got your ass off the couch, you went and walked over to see here.
If she lived 3 miles away, you walked 3 miles.
We also had things called bicycles, it wasn’t uncool back then to walk or ride a bicycle
See above, was no magic voodoo etc to doing it.
At first i want to laugh at the person who asks this, but then i think, and feel kind of sad for them.
Have we really gotten so far away that the young do not know how to walk over and go see someone?
Yea i guess kind of, seemed to be lots of things back then a kid could do to earn money.
And there were a lot of jobs back then that no longer exist.
You went shopping, a boy bagged your groceries for you, and might even take them to the car if you needed.
Lots of people delivered, butcher, groceries, drug store, hardware store, dairies etc.
Lots of people with no degree did well, there were lots of jobs in factories manufacturing etc.
Machines did not do all of it yet, nor was it farmed out to china.
Back then people did not want to buy stuff made in china etc.
And alot of the things we made and bought were designed to last and be repaired, so there was a whole service and repair industry.
TV’s, kitchen appliances, radios, you name it there was someone who repaired them.
I will just say that TV puts every event of that sort for the entire decade into one condensed hour that makes it appear like non stop protest and LSD parties for everyone under 40 for the entire decade.
I don’t remember any such thing
Best answer to that is it depends on where you live
Some places were very much like american graffiti with cruising etc, other places, not even remotely so.
I think most people had a practical view of it, sure we will invent stuff, and we did.
Most of it will probably not be that practical and wont see it in a home.
There is stuff we giggle about that they said was the thing of the future, but i think we knew then that it wasnt practical for the near future
It varies, people that used computing devices, be it a slide rule or adding machine etc could understand the potential, the rest? i suppose thats what facebook was invented for lol
Someone else should answer that, part of it is conjecture, and im not a girl so not qualified to comment on the pther part.
I dont remember anyone having an “aversion” to anything per say.
No older people i knew said elvis was the devil or what not, maybe didn’t prefer his music but Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller etc were kind of rockers in their time so…
When i looked in the mirror. I never though of JFK as having long hair, i think my dad’s was longer than that.
I had, and have a terrible aversion to scissors coming near my hair, other kids had their heroes, i had guys like Tecumseh and Crazy Horse etc, and they didn’t cut their hair, nor Merlin or Arthur and others.
Probably not, then again if a butterfly in japan flaps its wings…
Nobody had cell phones, but nearly everybody had landlines. Parents constantly rolled their eyes at the amount of time their teenage children spent on the phone. Also, people wrote snail-mail letters far more often than now.
Social life was a lot more structured than today. People joined churches, clubs, and fraternities far more often than they do today. The culture made an active effort to persuade unmarried people to get married. Churches, schools, and clubs would often organize dances and “socials” to give singles an opportunity to find a spouse.
This is another thing that must be regional or specific. I don’t remember a single delivery service, and no kid of my acquaintance ever got a job delivering stuff. But on the flip side, most stores were close. We lived on a side street but the major street had a dairy, a small grocer, a meat market, and a bakery within a block. Small drug stores were a few blocks off in three directions, along with supermarkets (much smaller than any today of course: think the size of a pharmacy). The flight to the suburbs had just started and the city’s population peaked in 1960. When I got old enough to drive, we went to places in the suburbs to shop, but as a kid the daily needs were within easy walking distance.
Under 30. “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”