TV was just starting. I would find a 'Cuban singer with a red haired wife and develope a sitcom for them.
Way too late, “I Love Lucy” was on the air October 15, 1951, to May 6, 1957.
You are going to wait 41 years to retire? How young are you? 
I figure with my families medical history I will be lucky to make it back to 1984. I hope to have enough of a nut to largely be retired by the mid-sixties when I am around 50.
Jim
I play guitar and mandolin and I know tons of old songs, so I’d head to Greenwich Village and try and find work as a beatnik folksinger. It seems like the kind of career where you can romanticize/cover up your history without much trouble, and a great listening post from which to observe the Sixties. I’d be roughly the age of William Burroughs and Pete Seeger. That’s assuming all you JFK savers don’t screw it all up.
Being “born” in 1915, I’d have to concoct a reasonable cover story about where I was during World War II. I could steal my Dad’s war memories to a certain extent. If I needed to I could probably work as a copyeditor or proofreader – I’m old enough to remember the old proofreading marks. But of course I’d have no resume, so I’d have to develop bulshitting skills that I do not currently have.
And I vastly prefer the beatnik folksinger thing. A beatnik folksinger with an amazing, hushed-up knack for the stock market…
Depends – if I’m just as I am now, I’d troop down to the local newspaper and get a job covering city council and the local school board, exactly as I would do thirty years later, only this time it’s probably be a lot more fun. I’d damn sure buy one of those snazzy new Chevy Bel Aires. Since I was thrown back in time, I wouldn’t have met the woman who is now my wife – she’d be only five years old – and at my age, datable wimmin would probably be pretty scarce. I’d be looked askance at as a middle-aged single guy – y’know, a “confirmed bachelor” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
On, and screw that crap about not saving JFK – in six years I’m joinin’ the crowd on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository! T’hell with shootin’ ‘im, we’re gonna’ throw the motherfucker out the window!
Then I’d probably die of colon cancer.
Go to Vegas. Play single deck blackjack. Kinda keep track of the cards that just came by - you know, minus 1 for 10-A, plus 1 for 2-6. Don’t win enough to get beat to pulp in the back room, but enough for a little stash.
Then back a then unknown singer or 2, or just befriend a not-yet famous actor, and make money off the access when they break through.
She never said she was going to develop it for Lucy and Desi. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that. Although Desi was as I understand it rather monstrously protective of the franchise, so another “Cuban married to a redhead” show on the air might have engendered some legal action.
Fuck managing the band. I bet I could learn to play the drums in five years…
That still leaves the shooter on “the grassy knoll”
This intrigues me.
If I was thrown back to 1957, is the same condition as I walk down the street, the contents of my wallet, my computer bag, and my sketchbook would suddenly be very interesting to the authorities. 
44 in 1957. Hmm. My mother and father would be a thirty-something young couple, married about four years, with a toddler underfoot and another on the way (my sisters). They’d be renting a house in Peterborough, which would be somewhat smaller and a lot more self-contained in terms of local industry than it is now. Could I walk up to my grandparents’ house and ask to see the man of the house? Once, maybe.
The Toronto suburb of small apartment buildings where I live now would just have been built.
Assuming I survive the first six months and start to fit in, I think the hardest things for me to get used to would be a) smoking everywhere, and b) the banking system.
Others have mentioned smoking, but how did people cope without money machines and direct deposit? Bankers’ hours sort of assume multi-person households where one person goes to work and another does the banking. How did single people cope? Were most people paid in cash? Were branches open on Saturdays?
What did people do while traveling? There were no credit cards or long-distance withdrawls. I myself can just barely remember the arrival of “multi-branch banking” in the late 1970s: it was a Big Deal to be able to go to a different branch of the same bank and withdraw money at the counter. By the time I got to university in 1981, let alone having my first full-time job, the ATM and direct deposit had arrived, and I’ve been using it all my adult life.
My mother told us of working in a bank in Peterborough, when she was just out of high school. She was one of the first to use a computer, which she said was called “the Marchant machine”. I suspect it was more of a calculator. There were electromechanical adding machines and cash registers, of course.
I think I’d go to California (much easier to get into the States then), and try to get in on the ground floor of the electronics and computer revolution. Or write SF. Or design passive-solar houses (by speaking the language of operating costs, I could sell them, I suspect).
I would, sadly, be too old by the time Woodstock rolled around. The Sixties Counterculture fascinates me, but I suspect I’d hate some of the details in real life (especially the smoking).
Lunch hour.
Plus a lot of factories had payroll offices where employees could cash their paychecks.
You don’t need to go back in time to do that.
Survival would be easy. There were still lots of unskilled/day labor type jobs that didn’t ask too many questions and would provide enough money for a cheap room. For that matter, being a “short order cook” took almost exactly the same skills as working at McDonalds (or you could just get a job at McDonalds – they were around them) and you’d get at least one meal a day.
Since Sputnik had just been launched, you could pick up some quick cash betting that the Russians would launch a living thing into space within a month and that Milwaukee would beat the Yankees to win the 1957 World Series.
Then just lay low until 1960. By that time you’ve won enough bets to afford a trip to Las Vegas where you’ll get colossal odds with a parlay bet that the Pirates will win the World Series AND Kennedy will beat Nixon. Cash in and retire.
Obviously, the hardest thing would be having to get up every time generic you wanted to switch TV channels.
And no easy-to-get contraceptic devices. :eek:
For what, though? I’ve already seen all the shows of any interest from that era. 
Thanks, Walloon. The Zenith Space Command having been introduced in 1956, I guess that makes me so 52 years ago.
I’d write a whole bunch of songs. Probably call them “All You Need is Love”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, or I dunno, “Magical Mystery Tour”.
There’s a little thing called “checks” that people used.
And the equally-nonexistent evil pixies in the flying saucer. Not worried.
Speaking of JFK, I guess (assuming he still got elected in 1960) I could warn him away from the Bay of Pigs, advise him not to get any deeper into Indochina. What to say about the missile crisis in 1962? As it is, we’re lucky we got out of it without a nuclear exchange; maybe I should just leave the whole thing alone and hope it plays out the same way.
I wonder how often it happens, that some nut who believes he can predict the future writes to the White House? They probably have a whole file of letters like that.
I’m not a big sports fan; about the only major bet I can think of is the '69 Mets, and after 12 years I might have changed things enough so that it wouldn’t happen.
…just in time to be replaced by Pete Best. Footnote to a footnote to history. 