For all of you folks who dig historical re-enactments, I have a question. If I decided that I wanted my family to live the way people did (in the hallowed 1950’s)-could I do it? Yeah, I can redecorate my house to look like its 1955-and force my kids to dress oin those styles…but could i actually be a 1950’s dad (like “Jim Anderson” of “Father Knows best”?
Dressing up on Sundays-wearing formal wear at parties-how long before this would wear thin? Hey, I would like to drive a '50’s car…and wear a fedora, etc.-but where does re-enactment end and insanity begin?
How long would it take to wear thin? Let’s see.
Your family has one car. You drive it to and from work. Your wife stays home all day, cleaning and cooking, and sweating in the summer because no one has central air conditioning.
Your kids walk to school, even in the cold, the rain and the dark, because you already left for work in the car. Your neighbor’s kid just got married at 18 and already his wife is “showing.”
You’re constantly working around the house on weekends, because the woods and metals they used then don’t last as long as the plastics of today. You don’t have power tools so even sawing a 2x4 takes three times as long as it does these days. Speaking of which, no one has heard of latex paint yet, and your kids have subtle signs of lead poisoning.
You have one TV, which gets poor reception on three or four stations; two newspapers; three radios; and a record player.
It’s not all bad. More than likely you work a consistent 8-hour shift, which means you’re home at the same time every evening. Because of that, you can reliably plan to fire up the backyard grill or have the neighbors over that evening. Your job is pretty secure, unless something called “automation” is headed for your plant.
And you’re probably not living very long, because…you’d better have a cigarette for this…no one knows what causes “Lung Fever.”
I would say the point you deny life saving medicine to your children because it hasn’t been invented yet.
I suppose it would have many benefits for a racist person. Not suggesting that you fit that bill, but if you did you’d probably dig your own lunch counter.
You must also be ever-vigilant to combat the Red Menace. Religious service attendance is also a must.
Don’t worry about that. Polio will kill you long before you die of cigarettes.
Contrary to what the previous posters have said, people weren’t dying in the streets in the '50’s. The life expectancy for men was 66, for women, 72. You might only have one car, but your wife would take the car on the days she needed it and would drop you off at work, the train station or the bus stop. You might have a maid. You were likely to drink more and weigh less. You would spend more time with your family, without the distractions of 100 channels and the internet. OTOH, if you were unhappily married, you were likely to stay that way. You were likely to have an easier time finding and keeping a job. If you were colored, your life would be a great deal harder than today.
My parents married in the ‘50’s. My mother had her first child at the age of 24, not too different from today’s average ave of 25. My mother taught school and my father worked in his father’s store, then went into my mother’s brothers’ construction company as a supervisor. My mother had 7 children within 6 years, happily. Unhappily, she lost one set of twins born prematurely. This birthrate was exceptional even then. My mother had uterine cancer while pregnant with me, putting an end to her childbearing. She survived many births, a car accident that crushed both legs (much poorer car safety in the '50’s), gangrene and cancer. My father died of lung cancer in his 60’s even though he was a non-smoker. Construction jobs in the '70’s removing asbestos probably had something to do with that.
Life is what you make it - changing your lifestyle probably wouldn’t change your happiness level much. Although your kids might hate you for making them get crewcuts.
StG
I’m calling bull on that one. I follow a lot of Mid-century Modern blogs that have showcases of “time capsule homes”. They look a heck of a lot better than the 80s homes. And you can find metal kitchen cabinets of the time that are still nearly perfect.
Plenty of people dress in Mid-century fashions, drive 50s cars, eat (occasionally and often with improvements) old recipes. Heck, 1950s lifestyle is a fetish (I’ve never looked this up. I don’t want to know details, okay?)
You could get as authentic as any medieval re-enactment if you wanted (trust me, they all still use modern medicine - and you wouldn’t have to give up flush toilets!)
Based on historical trends? It’d finally wear thin in about…1967, more or less.
We’re going to go round and round with examples and counterexamples here.
Windows in general were made of wood and had to be painted.
Those metal kitchen cabinets you speak of were porcelain over (usually) steel and chipped easily.
Aluminum siding was never as good as vinyl.
Screens and storm windows had to be swapped depending on the season.
We can agree to disagree here, but I still insist your average homeowner spent more time maintaining a home built in the 1900s-1950s than today’s homeowner spends on a house built since 1960.
Well, there were school buses back then.
Unless you spent your evenings at the Elks Lodge or your afternoons at the Junior League. Like you said, life is what you make of it, and people will always have had choices about who or what to spend their time with.
Admittedly I’ve never owned a home, so this is all secondhand. The one site has a forum pretty much dedicated to buying and selling the metal cabinets. A lot of people get them stripped and repainted at auto paint places.
Funk a dunk. I walked to and from school in the 60’s and 70’s and my parents each had their own car since they’d married in '53. Guess they had it out for me!
True. But people aren’t dying in the streets of AIDS today either. My point was that people today fear AIDS and people in the fifties feared polio - neither decade was carefree.
But old fears like polio or nuclear war seem less frightening now. And we imagine our current problems like AIDS or terrorism are much worse. So we look back and think how great things must have seemed back then.
While AIDS is certainly a concern, people generally aren’t as worried about it as they were in the 1980s, and rightfully so because for much of that time, we didn’t even know what caused it, let alone how to treat it. I hope no other disease like that ever comes along again. 
There’s an entire genre of really show devoted to this; taking an ordinary modern day family (or group of families) and having them recreate a time period. I don’t know if anyone’s done the 50s specifically, but I’ve seen Victorian, WWII, Edwardian, Colonial New England, and Frontier days. The Supersizers… also did a 50s episode.
[QUOTE=Tom Tildrum]
Unless you spent your evenings at the Elks Lodge or your afternoons at the Junior League. Like you said, life is what you make of it, and people will always have had choices about who or what to spend their time with.
[/QUOTE]
Agreed. My mother’s family never attended church and nobody ever accused them of being Communists. The local schools didn’t even have organized prayer so even that wasn’t universal.
Lots of young people (however that may be defined) have said in recent years that they would have liked to have lived in the 1960s. People who are old enough to remember that era almost invariably say they wouldn’t have.
Is the OP white? Is the OP male? Is the OP Mexican, or someone with a noticeable foreign accent?
Depending on the answers to these questions, your enjoyment of reenacting the 50s may vary wildly. OTOH, you can say the same thing about the 40s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, …
Actually, this sounds like it could be a fun day!
Hold a party and a barbecue in the back yard. Make it a full-day event, and invite a lot of friends and extended family. Give the party a Mad Men theme.
Send out invitations.(by mail, of course. Email hasn’t been invented yet, and long-distance phone calls were expensive, remember? )
Require everybody to dress appropriately.
Put ashtrays on every available spot in the house.
Tell one of the kids manipulate the rabbit ear antenna on the TV set, so you can try to get a clear picture.
Talk to people proudly about your new Fridgedaire, with its E-Z Glide drawer and handy ice cube trays.
Hire a black maid (if you dare!), and have her address everyone as sir and ma’am.