Har!
None of that stuff here, you two. This is Great Debates! If you can’t be debatably disagreeable, you can just hie yourself back to MPSIMS…
From MAD Magazine in the early 1970s:
"Dressing poor when you’re really rich is a status symbol.
Dressing poor when you really are poor isn’t."
Frankd6 (is that Frank six-sided dice?) wrote:
And Senator McCarthy! Don’t forget ol’ Joltin’ Joe McCarthy! And those lovely suburban bomb shelters. Don’t forget to duck and cover, kiddies!
Ahem, excuse me, Ahem. I survived the fifties as a teen ager. In 1954, when I was fourteen years old, I got my drivers license and my first car, along with my first job. I put groceries in bags at an A&P grocery store for $0.50 per hour. Yes, folks, $0.50 per hour. Plus tips which usually ranged from a nickel to fifteen cents, when you got one. I was required to wear a white shirt, “nice” pants and a tie. It was unthinkable that anyone would report to work wearing tennis shoes. A $20.00 grocery order required four to five paper bags. A $50.00 grocery order meant the people who bought it shopped only once a month.
Girls expected to be dated by guys wearing ties and sport coats. And guys expected the girls to be dressed comparably and that was usually what happened. College in West Texas in 1958. Classes in ties and sport coats. Girls DID NOT wear slacks on campus. Girls DID NOT smoke in public. Girls WERE NOT ALLOWED to hold hands with a guy on campus.
Campus conversations were about goals, future prospects, who would be the first to earn $10K per year. First full time job in 1960: $250.00 gross per month SALARY—no hourly job for the upwardly mobile. First offer for the job in question was $200.00 per month.
But, gasoline was $0.18 per gallon, cigarettes were like $0.22 per pack, movie tickets were like $0.75, beer was usually around $0.20 per can. Was it any better? Hell, no. I will be sixty damn years old this Sunday and I wouldn’t go through the fifties again for pay. Well, that is harsh, make me an offer.
Crystalguy
There are some things about a book that you can judge by the cover.
Most notably, the price.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
This morning I donned a nice, clean sweatshirt and pair of jeans for work. My tennis shoes are VERY white and clean. This is my professional attire, and I like it that way.
Years ago, I had to wear nylons, high heels and “fancy” business suits to work.
Having been on both sides of the court, I have to say that “jeans and a T” is better… more comfortable (don’t we all work better when we’re comfortable?); less expensive to purchase; less expensive and easier to maintain (no more drycleaning! no more ironing); and no more “class” distinctions amongst co-workers (even the “suits” don’t wear suits around here).
That’s not to say that getting all decked out once in awhile isn’t pretty cool, too.
Hoo boy! A topic I can stand on both sides of!
“Dress down” has been following me around my whole life. I had to wear a tie and either a sweater or a jacket in high school and for the first year or so of college, then they dropped that rule. When I worked retail, I was required to wear a tie at all times (even when unloading a truck full of bagged-in-ball shrubs or hot sticky bags of peat or manure). I had to relegate a kid to working in the stock room when I worked in retail because he simply refused to wear a tie on the sales floor and I had no desire to fire him. (He was a decent worker.) A year or so after I escaped retail, I noticed that each of my former employers had dropped their “tie” regs. In the world of offices, the “dress down” came more slowly, beginning with “tie-less” Fridays in summer and eventually taking over the whole work week.
How has this affected me? Not much. I still wear shirts and slacks that would go with a tie. I would never wear a polo shirt or a flannel shirt to work. (My shoes are significantly more comfortable, however.) I still “dress up” if I am going to a play or the symphony (despite the fact that I am one of the few guys that seems to) or if I am acting as lector at church.
I was always smart enough to buy shirt collars large enough that a snugged tie would not choke me. I simply do not see the great pleasure in “dressing down.” Since I have chosen not to work at banks, I have never needed more than one or two jackets at a time, but I have no problem with “dressing up” for a sales call or a major presentation to the brass. If that is what is called for, that is what I will wear. :::shrug:::
Of course, it doesn’t matter a lot in my case anyway, since a custom tailored suit will look rumpled on me within seconds of putting it on. I don’t have a very GQ physical appearance.
And, while I can tolerate “dress up” situations, I am generally suspicious of “dress up” people. In my techno-geek world, it is almost a truism that the better a guy dresses, the less likely he is able to code or manage. I have known exactly three exceptions to that rule in 19 1/2 years of programming. The contemptuous phrase, “He’s a suit.” has its roots in real-life experiences. Aside from the three specific exceptions I noted, I can easily rattle off the names of more than a dozen “suits” who dressed their way to success and power while contributing only mayhem and bad feelings to their work environment, and have not been able to add to my list of exceptions while I (laboriously) typed this out.
I’m not sure why that is. As noted, I will readily dress up when required (although I don’t look very good) so I certainly do not believe that putting on ties, suits, etc. affect one’s mental capabilities. Maybe, if I had spent more time at banks and publishing houses and Big 6 corporate offices I would have a different view of “suits.” (On the other hand, the people who the Big 6 put into data centers as workers are the very archetypes of stuffed shirst and “suits”–incompetent mannequins, the lot of them.) I would guess that Eve is simply presenting the appropriate appearance for her work environment and carries her self-image over into her run-to-the-store persona. That hardly counts as being stuffy or stuck-up. It certainly does not imply anything about her professional abilities.
Up until the end of the twentieth century, clothing was a badge of class. Poor people dressed up to show that they were not on the lowest rung. Now that the wealthiest are dressing casually, that sort of badge is no longer useful, and society is moving away from it. I’m fairly sure that we still have class badges, but they are more likely to be displayed in other possessions rather than in clothing–and, of course, those who are not “upper class” still attempt to imitate the “upper class” in the possessions they acquire and display.
(BTW, on a different point: there was no less trash on our streets in the 1950’s. Most of those “$100 fine for littering” signs have been up since the 1940’s or 1950’s. When watching Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Pixie and Dixe, Fury, and Sky King, etc. on Saturday mornings, we saw as many “Don’t be a literbug” ads as Smokey the Bear ads.
Movies looked cleaner in the 1950’s because far more of them were shot on sets than on location and the sets were simply cleaned up each evening.
Tom~
My coupla pennies;
I also survived the 50’s. Yuck. If you were a WASP who followed the rules, life was ok. Otherwise you were an outcast, to a degree determined by how far you erred from the norm.
Cleaner? Hah. Not on your life. I remember trash strewn all over, along the highways and anywhere there wasn’t a building of some kind. Hence the anti-litter laws.
Believe me, egkelly, these are the good old days. Enjoy them.
Peace,
mangeorge
I only know two things;
I know what I need to know
And
I know what I want to know
Mangeorge, 2000
a) You’re right.
b) That makes me want to cry.
Anyway, I agree with egkelly. W
hat I REALLY love about the 50’s is that we didn’t have to do those damn daily duck and cover drills. Y’know, the ones dumbasses thought might protect us if someone dropped a nuke.
And how there was no McCarthyism.
Oh, and the possibility of being exposed to new viewpoints and outlooks from a round the world with the click of a button, instead of being taught that nonAmericans were a) grubby or b)Communist.
Wait, wait, no, that’s today.
Never mind.
–John
'Twis brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gymble in the wabe.
Mimsy were the borogroves,
And the momeraths outgrabe.
tomndebb wrote:
Come, starless Sneeches! For only $3, you can be accepted among the upper crust with my Star-On Machine!
The fifties I remember (born 1953) was that of neighborhoods with unlocked doors, unleashed dogs, burning the leaves in the backyard, and swimming in the Mississippi River.
Now, most people barely know their neighbors, hardly ever speak to them, and double lock their doors. A dog not on a leash disappears forever. The smoke from the leaves would draw every fire truck for miles, and nobody swims in the river for fear of PCB’s and mercury.
At least the air is cleaner now.
I agree with crystalguy andmangeorge. I was 14 in 1959. The road ditehes were strewn with beer cans. The City dump of a town I know in Northern Iowa was a sandbar in the Mississippi.
Dad had a Job. My entire wardrobe consisted of 2 pair of bluejeans,three shirts and 3pair of underwear.And of course a good shirt,tie and slacks.And we were some of the lucky kids.
There were some good times back then though.
I can’t remember where I read this paper, but it proposed that air conditioning has been the death of the American neighbor relationship. Before we had nice cool houses to retreat into, people sat out on their porches in the evening, which, of course, led to conversations with passersby, and offering the neighbors a glass of lemonade. Interesting theory.
Said Eve.
No, you would be morally superior if you did not look down on people who do not dress to impress you. Pride is one thing, smugness another.
You really can only tell certain things about a person by how they dress. If that kind of information is important to you, feel free to use it, but don’t imagine you’re seeing all there is to see. People are wonderfully complex, and you will never understand most of them. At this moment, i, a young female, am wearing a Dudley Do-Right t-shirt, blue jeans, white socks and black running shoes, all in good condition. I am wearing no makeup, but am clean and kempt. What kind of person am i?
Phantomwise
…never seen by waking eyes…
<— has Absolutly no memory of the fifties, unless of course I lived it in a pass life, but I don’t believe in that crap anyway =)
As for clothes–Get over it. Clothing fashions change. Everyone gravitates toward the status quo and the hip-hop look is what is in, at least somewhat. There are many different types of styles.
The Nuke duck and cover: HAHAHAHAHHAHA I so love that. It’s so damn halarious. see a flash? Duck and cover!!… then kiss your butt goodbye your ass is desintegrated.
I’m suprised that no one has mentioned how stupid americans were in the fifties. The only reason are schools are so horridly bad now is because School is so much harder then in the past. Thank sputnik for that. Because of the dismal american math and science scores our scientific output well… sucked. In order to boost it up everyone’s knowledge in these subjects the governemnt beefed up public school standards meteorically. That also accounts for why kids don’t play outside anymore, we have to do 100x more homework.
~Bored2001 the disgruntled student.
As a student then and a parent now, I can reasonably assert that you do not have 100 times (or even twice as much) homework. There are differences from school to school and district to district, but in general you are not getting more. (If you are lucky, you are getting some of it earlier.)
Other Then/Now comparisons.
My parents always locked their doors.
I almost never lock mine.
My childhood neighborhood did not have many social gatherings.
My neighborhood has no social gatherings, but my brother’s has many throughout the Spring, Summer, and Fall.
We had sandlot/pick-up baseball and football, swamp-rink hockey, (all of which required sufficient friends to be “picked”) and find-a-hill sledding.
My kids have organized/moderated/professional-equipment baseball, football, soccer, hockey, and volleyball (where all the kids get some chance to play. There are decent parks where my kids can sled.
(I am seriously conflicted as to whether my kids or I had it better–and I often did not have enough friends to be picked for a team.)
We were the heroic defenders of liberty and freedom who had defeated the monstrous hoards of fascists and militarists who threatened the world from overseas.
We are the oppressors in numerous petty squabbles in which many people die, and even when we are doing the right thing, evil is never defeated.
I lived in abject, physical, fear of nuclear war. (I’m young enough to have never done the KYAG duck and cover. By the time I was in school, everyone realized that there would be no escape.)
My kids are growing up without that fear.
We grew up with an understanding that some people just weren’t quite as good as the rest of us. (Not in my house, where my parents would have been aghast to hear such silliness, but most of my neighbors believed it.)
My kids are growing up surrounded by people who generally accept the basic equality of all people–they go to school with handicapped kids, kids of different races, people of different religions. People who have superiority complexes are at least sufficiently intimidated by “societal norms” to keep their opinions away from my kids.
By getting a job at GM, my Dad was able to take long vacations in which we saw nearly all the states by the time I was twelve.
My wife and I can never adjust our separate vacation schedules to get the kids more than three states distant from Ohio.
I think every era has its good and bad qualities. I was certainly not “scarred” by growing up in the fifties. My kids do not seem too badly damaged by their environment.
(I do miss burning leaves.)
Tom~
When you were in grade school how many arithmetic problems did you have a day?
I had aprx 100 per day. From what I hear from my parents they had like 10. ( yea yea, only a factor of 10, but hey, it’s a generally good number to exaggerate =) )
What was the highest Math course offered in your High school?
I have Calculus Ab at the moment, but we offer algebra, algebra 2, Geometry, Trig, Statistics and calc ab and bc.
Honors classes?
AP classes?
Oh, not to mention that since our science has advanced so much we have to learn more.
Todays students DO have more work then the students in the fifties.
Anyway, back to the OP. I personally like the present. We have far more creature comforts =)
~Bored2001
All that doesn’t mean much to us, Bored2001, unless we know what grade level you’re in. If it’s the third grade, that’s pretty impressive. But if you’re in your third year at Harvard, well…
Peace,
mangeorge
hehe, 11th grade. I was just pointing out that in the 50’s standards were MUCH lower. Then I seemed to be refuted by experience. I have to defend my argument don’t I?
Oh yea, and Harvard sucks anyway. I would never go there.