Tell me about the '60s.

In My Humble Opinion
21

I was managing a restaurant abt.'68,when one of my busboys-a likeable black kid from the ghetto-responded to my question about what he’d like to do with an upcoming Xmas bonus said " First thing I’m gonna do is get me a pole lamp,to decorate my batchelor pad" :slight_smile:

I can still see his bright earnest smile as he’s thinking of the upcoming scores he’s going to make in his “with-it” pad.That dream may have included a velvet painting,which I think began in the 60s, as one of those horrendously ugly to look at today fads.

Men’s fashion started out in the 60s buttondown shirts,form fitting,slim silhoutte,type suits-a break from the 40s,50s,wide lapels,and baggier look,to end up with a wide lapeled baggy look by the 70s,reminiscent of the late 20s,early 30s,baggy pants of that generations fashion concious young men.

The joke around forever,I guess was keep it in the closet until it becomes fashionable again.

22

b. 1958 here.

I remember the sixties very well. It started out very Rat Pack and ended very Led Zeppelin.

I remember all of the cultural and political stuff, but I remember other things, too.

I remember open bigotry, people using the word “nigger” unapologetically and with pointed hostility. I remember people expressing gladness that King had been assasinated. I remember crying over his death and over the fact that some people seemed happy about it. I remember people calling my mother a nigger lover. And all of this was not the South, it was Los Angeles.

I remember seeing war on TV every single night. I remember seeing American soldiers covered in filth and blood, explosions and guns cracking. I remember body counts. I remember my sisters boyfriends being afraid and trying to find some way to avoid the draft. I remember that some of them didn’t or couldn’t and never came home…at least, not alive.

I remember that everybody drank, on TV and in real life, seemingly any time of day or night, without any consideration of whether they were driving. Lots and lots of alcoholics, none of them in meetings.

I remember that the entire decade was wrapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke. There was literally nowhere, * including hospitals * where it was prohibited to smoke. As a result, I remember the world being littered with cigarette butts, particularly in the grocery store.

I remember Schwab’s drugstore.

I remember alot. It’s a grainy black & white movie that gradually gets more and more colorful as it progresses. I’m really glad I saw it.

23

I was born in 1960. For me it was a wonderous time of unlimited possibilities. The space program was the real deal. There was nothing that technology couldn’t cure. We were looking forward to personal jet packs, cars that flew.
In the summertime we could leave the house at 9:00 am, go out to play in the vast world, on our bikes with no helmets, come home for lunch, go out again, come home for dinner, and come back when the street lights came on, without fear. Skateboards had metal wheels. The best toys were made by Whammo. A seat belt was an oddity that had no use in the real world.
Jonny Quest was the greatest cartoon of all times! We played with BIG plastic authentic replica guns that would make parents of today’s hair stand on end.
The words “Go to the Principal’s office” would send waves of terror throughout your body. We had stingray bicycles (the coolest being the Schwinn Lemon-Peelers and the Raleigh Choppers).
Summer camp was real cool. Boy Scouts was fun.
There was no question in your mind that you would one day go to college. It was expected. I said the “Pledge of Allegiance” every morning in school, and then read about Dick, Jane and Spot. You were rewarded greatly for achievement, and chastized for failure.
From my suburb prospective, it was a privalege to grow up then.
Later when the parents divorced, Watergate came in the news, the Apollo program was cut back, drugs became readily available, the gas shortage came into effect, college never happened, did I really appreciate the the times that I had. It was a helluva ride.

24

<<Pole Lamps!>>

I remember pole lamps, now. There were always three lamps on the pole pointing three different directions. Most of the time the shades on the bulbs were kind of bullet shaped, either plastic and three different pastels, or painted metal and the same color as the pole. Usually white, grey, beige, or black. The pole extended from the floor to the ceiling.

If it didn’t touch the ceiling, it was a just a floor lamp, like Grandma had. The three-way bulbs were still considered to be pretty nifty, even if they were only in a floor lamp, especially by small children, who could entertain themselves for whole minutes by cycling through the three ways over and over.

Stereo sound was still new. When did tapes go from reel to reel to cassette?

And Lawrence Welk was big in the sixties. Grandma always had it on. Hard to think of him as ‘sixties’ but I think his show went straight through them.

Fewer franchises. More small shops and restaurants owned by individuals or families. Dime stores were still around, even if the prices were higher than that. One of the things you could get at the Dime store was a book of paper dolls.

Drive In theaters were popular and the speakers were attached to the pole by a cord. When we were small, we’d get into our pajamas before we got into the car, in case we fell asleep half way through. We mostly went to Disney movies at the drive-ins.

Drive In restaurants were fading out, although A&W hung in longer than most. There wasn’t a McDonald’s in town until the end of the sixties and they started out with no drive-through. Drive-throughs were Jack-in-the-Box’s big thing. In the sixties, you spoke your order into Jack’s mouth.

Taco bell tacos were a quarter. Candy bars were a nickle. It was possible to buy penny candy. I made $1.25/hr on my first job.

Teachers ran through spiffy pre-planned lessons with felt cutouts on felt boards. Colorforms stickers were a hot new toy technology. New math confused parents and bored children. There was pressure to learn to tie your shoes before kindergarten and definitely before first grade. No velcro. Straws were made of paper and tended to collapse before you got through your carton of milk. Milk cartons were coated with wax, and you could get loose wax bits floating in the bottom. Those always made me gag if they got in my mouth. Don’t know why, it was just wax.

Playground equipment was set into asphalt. Every play ground had a teeter totter and a metal merry-go-round.

The frisbee was big in the sixties. Bobby socks were scorned with a deep and abiding scorn. Athletics were unfeminine. In girl’s basketball, the court was cut in half and only the rovers could cross the center line (six man team). My mother remembered further back, when the court was divided into three, and no one could leave their designated section. We were too delicate to run back then.

25

>>It seems to me that everything back then was “modern”. You know; “Modern”. I’m not sure how to explain it. <<

Yeah, the Seattle Worlds Fair and Disneyland both had Houses of the Future. I don’t remember them all that well. The one in Seattle had a programmable TV. The one in Disneyland had a dishwasher. But you put the dishes into a slot in the diningroom table and they were washed and sorted into the kitchen cupboards. That would still be totally cool.
>>I remember the '60s as being very Mod and New and Kooky <<

Hiphugger bell bottoms worn by girls now called Teeny Boppers. Flower power stickers on VW beetles and later on bathtub bottoms. Oddly shaped sunglasses.

Huge family fights about how long a guy’s hair could be or how short a girl’s skirt could be before the family was shamed, the manhood of the father was impugned, and civilization was imperiled.

Transition from obedient children (and wife) as a sign of family success to coolness as a sign of success.

Air raid drills. Drop and cover. No one ever said the idea was silly. I was too young to know that these were atomic bombs that we were supposed to be saving ourselves from by getting under our desks and covering the backs of our necks with our interlaced fingers, while our elbows covered the sides of our faces.

Do you have anything that your kids have been trained to do immediately, on command?

>>If you srewed around in school, you were kicked out.<<

But you were really only expected to graduate high school if you were going to have a white collar job. It was perfectly reasonable to quit school to enter apprenticeship programs after the eighth grade. You could make a good living. High school diplomas were prized. You couldn’t get one by just showing up.

>>Birth control pills and sexual freedom of women<<

Another thing that split womenandchildren from one word into three was antibiotics, immunizations, and improved water delivery and waste removal systems. When my Grandmother got married, her mother told her that on HER wedding night her mother had told her that she would have eight children and four of them would die. At the time she was saying it, they both knew that this was exactly what had happened.

Grandma, on the other hand, had four children and all of them lived. Mom had three, who all lived. But both knew children who had gotten polio or dyphtheria or whooping cough and who had died or whose health had been wrecked. I grew up expecting that children just naturally grew up. We got shots and we hated them, but we grew up.

>>The joke around forever,I guess was keep it in the closet until it becomes fashionable again.<<

My Dad had two ties. One narrow and one wide. Said one of the other was always in style. He had shoes older than I was. He still had them when my kids graduated hight school. They were dark navy velvet dress shoes. I used to pet them when I was really little. I don’t think I ever saw him wear them. I guess they never came back into style.

<<I remember open bigotry>>

Oh, yeah. I remember very nice people instructing children to be sure to use the words ‘colored people’ as it was more polite. I remember a teacher in second grade explaining that they didn’t really all look alike, it just took awhile to learn to see the differences, and that saying they all looked alike was rude and could hurt someone’s feelings.

<<The space program was the real deal.>>

Yeah. Dad got us up at six, five, however early in the morning, California time, each liftoff or landing was scheduled. There was a great sense of participating in history. For the moon landing we visited Aunt Pete. She had a big color television.

I’m enjoying this thread.

26

For me it began with Audrey Hepburn and Henry Mancini and ended with Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, and Santana.

I was born in 1943 and graduated high school in 1961. I had never had pizza, shrimp, a ribeye steak, sour cream or blue cheese dressing.

Cigarettes and a gallon of gas cost the same – 25 cents.

Sandra Dee was a top box office draw and Warren Beaty could pass as a teenager. Sleeveless dresses and pillbox hats were “in” because that’s what Jackie wore. And on campus we wore kilts and knee socks. Women were not allowed to wear pants at college. And the women’s dorm curfew was eight o’clock unless we were signed out to the library.

Women usually entered one of two professions – teaching or nursing. I had never met a female attorney or doctor.

Frats and sororities were big. The Beatles looked funny with their “long” hair down to their ears. And no one that I knew smoked grass or meditated when the Beatles first album came out. I signed a petition in support of the war in Vietnam. (After all, LBJ was a Democrat so the war was surely justified.)

James Bond appeared on the scene with Sean Connery. And when Goldfinger came out, I couldn’t believe my ears at the name “Pussy Galore.” We tittered and giggled about it.

In about 1966, I heard the word “hippie” for the first time. All I knew was that they were mostly in California, smoked grass, wore really cool colorful clothes and had long hair.

I began to hear more and more about the Civil Rights movement. I liked the idea but I was a little afraid of black militants. It was cool to be liberal. Then Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and the city shut down at night. Even adults had a curfew. I saw tanks roll down the middle of our main thoroughfare.

I didn’t hear much about “The Summer of Love” in 1967. But the girl who had begun college as a religious education major lost her virginity.

In 1968, I met and talked briefly with Bobby Kennedy. In June he was gone. That summer the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago got everyone’s attention! The police brutality was astounding. And the chaos within the convention was like no other.

I realized that hippies weren’t just for fun; they had an agenda and I agreed with it. The peace movement, the counter-culture, and the women’s movement became intertwined.

Within a month’s time (between July 18th and August 15th, I smoked my first grass, Mary Jo Kopecne drowned at Chappaquiddick, man landed on the moon, the Manson murders took place and Woodstock began. WHOA!

27

I was born in 1940. I remember the end of WWII and the beginning and ending of the Korean conflict. I remember the 1950s and the first three years of the 1960s for the repression I felt while living in reactionary Dallas, Texas. I moved to Santa Cruz, CA in 1963 and the first thing that hit me was the sense of absolute personal freedom that prevailed. I remember most of the 1960s as being a time of personal liberation. I made friends in San Francisco and I remember free concerts in Golden Gate Park, lots of long hair, and the ritual sharing of herbs. I remember long conversations in dimly lit apartments, red wine, and the ever-present music of the day.

28

Another 1958 baby here.

We had a black-and-white TV and when the horizontal hold went out, a common thing back then, we’d yell, “Dad, the TV is flubby!” I don’t know if that’s a word we made up or not. One of our favorite shows in the early '60’s was “Beany and Cecil”. Does anyone else remember it? It was one of the first cartoon shows ever broadcast and was aimed more at an adult audience (as most cartoons were back then) than children with a lot of jokes that we didn’t understand. We liked it nevertheless.

Of course, we watched Walter Cronkite, et al, back then and the news was full of terrible things. One of the most disturbing, and one of my earliest memories had to do with the race riots in Detroit. I used to have nightmares that the blacks were very angry and they were closing in on me. Though I don’t remember actual faces, I do remember vividly trying to tell them that I wasn’t prejudiced. At the tender age of 5 or 6, I already knew it was wrong to hate people because of their race. It wasn’t anything my parents told me, though they led an excellent example by treating everyone well. I simply knew it was morally wrong to be prejudiced even then.

Happier memories include saddle shoes, Easy-Bake ovens, my mother’s parents visiting us from Michigan and getting to ride in their Kennedyesque convertable (my mother insisted that we girls had to wear scarves), and sledding down our hill in winter. My Dad had refloored the kitchen in our house and we got to use the scraps of Congoleum for sleds and I will forever believe that they were the best ones ever. :slight_smile:

29

We are stardust. We are golden. We are going to look really stupid to future generations.

:slight_smile:

30

Everyone was on edge. The furure was so uncertain. The guys were all afraid of being drafted, the girls were afraid of losing their boyfriends, the blacks were rioting in the cities every summer, the whites were rioting on the campuses, the government lost our trust and was at war against the people and passed strict gun control, the leaders were being assassinated. Some protested and many just “dropped out”, what else could we do? We went to extremes, mini-skirts, beards, long hair, etc.

Companies ganged up on every college graduate to try to get him to accept a job.

There were very few immigrants from asia, arabia, and latin america. There was no unemployment, and no traffic jams. Gas and cigarette prices were less than a quarter.

We had lots of fun, but it was both the best of times, and the worst of times.

31

" . . . watching Walter Cronkite on the 6 o’clock news reporting from Viet Nam and hoping to catch sight of my Dad, eating popcorn and chewing on ice cubes with my granma . . ."

—Wow! Vietnam really was different than I’d thought!

32

But I remember the 60;s well.
I was a hippie, albeit a very young one who never took drugs.
But there was an excitement in the air.
I could feel it; things were changing, people were having fun.
It was great.

33

Stoid, Schwab’s is still open on Beale Street in Memphis. Y’all come see us sometime.

34

Jefferson Airplane–White Rabbit always takes me back to the sixties.

35

These were probably blue suede shoes,a 50s type,immortalized by Carl Perkins and covered by Elvis.Suede shoes were pretty big in the 50s=along with Pat Boone’s white bucks.Don’t think they’ve been heard from since.At least as an oxford style.

36

OOps hit send to soon.One other thing that may be apropo re 60s

I was eating all those foods in the 50s.I grew up in NYC,and supposed everyone ate them.Remember the cheapo Flame Steak joints of that era? They were rib steaks.

The 60s must have been the last stand of regionalism,as far as pop culture goes.In the early 60s most people outside of a major urban center never heard of a bagel,unless they were jewish.Now there are national chains and local shops like John Brown’s Bagels :slight_smile:

I couldn’t have imagined a McDs or Burger King could be in Times Square.C’mon we had Grant’s on the corner at 42nd&7th with pizza,beer,and anything you could dream of.The spaghetti houses or Child’s up the street,even an automat nearby.

The 1st time I realized that all these sights weren’t urban local anymore was in '75 driving thru some town in Iowa,and seeing a hooker in hot pants standing on a streetcorner,waiting for business.This on a Sunday night around midnight.

The age of innocence was lost,somewhere in the 60s.

37

John Brown’s Bagels sit a-moulding on the shelf
John Brown’s Bagels sit a-moulding on the shelf
John Brown’s Bagels sit a-moulding on the shelf
And the lox is smelling bad!

[sub]Hey, it’s not even 0500. It’s the best I can do.[/sub]

38

American Bandstand with Fabian on the front end of the sixties and the “original” Woodstock with Hendrix on the back end. Yikes!!

39

b. 1953

The Fabian - Hendrix comparison, or the Audrey Hepburn - Janis Joplin one, sums it all up. Things changed fast. Do you realize the Beatles were around for just 6,7 years? During which time theyroduced a dozen classic albums & changed the world? Shoot, bands today go that long between tours.

Everything was important: socially, politically, scientifically, militarily. It was impossible to be detached, ironic or apathetic. It sure made the evening news interesting…

40

Beg to differ…I distinctly recall lava lamps in the late '60s. They became popular at the same time as recreational drug use, not coincidentally.