To those of you who remember this era, what was the present you most remember? A bicycle because it provided personal mobility?
We had coal heat. A coal truck would drive up and send chunks of coal down a chute, through a trapdoor, into a small room in the basement called a coal bin. We had to hand shovel coal into the furnace, which had an electric motor-driven blower to force air into the ducts. I’m pretty sure there was no thermostat, but at the top of the stairs was a lever, connected to a chain that opened and closed something on the furnace to regulate the heat. At night, the fire went almost out.
Next to the furnace was a water tank. If you wanted hot water, you lit a burner at the bottom until it got hot enough to come through the “hot” pipes to the bath or kitchen.
We later converted the coal furnace to natural gas from a city line and replaced the water tank with a gas water heater. In high school, I converted the coal bin into a photographic darkroom.
Our neighbors on both sides kept chickens and we had fresh eggs all the time, although I was afraid of getting pecked when I was told to gather eggs. This was in a suburban environment, with row houses, where no one would dream of keeping chickens now. The chicken coops became garden sheds and kids’ playhouses.
Almost forgot – I kept several hives of bees just for a hobby, and sold honey around the neighborhood. When I went away to college, my high school chemistry teacher came over to maintain the hives.
Yes, yes! I got my first bike in 7th grade, which made me the laughingstock of my peers, who had had bikes for years. But it enabled me to get around pretty darn well, as there were no bus lines or shopping centers close by. I rode my bike to school every day that I could which made me quite independent of my parents. It was the start of something big.
Pizza was considered an ethnic food, but so was pasta. And my family ate a lot more pasta than we did pizza. We went out to eat pizza, and it was a special treat. We never made it at home.
It was hard to get mozzarella and/or ricotta cheese in the 60s in Fort Worth, according to my parents, and when the store DID have it in, my mother would buy it and make lasagna.
With all due respect, this is *still *the way of life in, geographically, most of the US. I just spent a month in this town - well, several of them, but this *mythic *town - in western New York and in southern Indiana. Out away from the cities, and it’s really like stepping back in time, corner stores and treehouses and all.
My husband, who spent 1980-2005 in one of these towns, had no idea all that time where the keys to his house were, because he never used them. The keys to his car stayed in the car, doors unlocked. Kids still wander and amuse themselves and raise hell and get whippings when caught, and high school football and church are the major social opportunities for adults. The town justices still rule with impunity and if your roots aren’t at least five generations back, you will forever be That New Guy From The City. The Jewish pharmacist was frozen out and ignored until he gave up and moved his family out of town. (I cannot tell you how the Black families are treated, because there aren’t any.)
A lot of the differences articulated here aren’t 1950 v 2013, they’re rural v (sub)urban.
Until one of this board’s periodic multi-page battles about the values of rural vs. suburban vs. urban living, I never realized that there were places where people actually didn’t lock their doors at home. I’d heard people say that, but as a lifelong suburbanite, I thought it was just an over-the-top expression, like having a floor so clean you could eat off of it.
I remember it as being a safe and secure time of my life. Where I grew up it was just as described by the OP. People didn’t lock their houses or cars.
Now that you mention it, there must have been a recession because it seemed like all we ate for a year or two was wild game and fish.
I never heard a raised voice on the street. People had good manners, except for a few of the town characters. And nobody expected more of them.
I could take off on a Saturday and make the rounds of the farms with kids my age, go three miles out of town and play by the river, even go down to the dump and play if I wanted to! Nearly everyone in that town watched out for each others’ kids.
The only time I can remember seeing family dysfunction while I was growing up, although I’m sure it must have been there, was when the owner of the local bar went into DT’s and an ambulance was called to take him away raving with his wife hollering a few choice words after him.
We didn’t even have a town policeman, just a road superintendent who would pass the word about loose dogs or whatever needed to be done in the get-along-with-your-neighbor department.
It was a pretty idyllic childhood from that perspective.
I guess you could wonder about social services but that was taken care of by the people who lived there. It’s amazing how intertwined and interdependent our lives were when I think back on it. No one had to tell us to get along or take care of each other because in order for the little town to work we had to co-operate.
Born in 1946, so my memories start a bit before 1950. My folks had one car. If mom needed to go somewhere, she would drive my dad to work and pick him up at the end of the day. We had deliveries of milk, eggs, chicken, bread. Once a week we were all packed up in the car to do the week’s grocery shopping at the one supermarket. Mom planned an entire menu for the week so that she would have enough for each meal, but no excess.
Dessert was as likely to be fruit as anything. Ice cream or soda was a special treat; I was flabbergasted when I was visiting a friend in my teens and they had a whole case of soda in the garage.
My dad worked in the same factory for most of my life. Mom worked for a while to try to put aside extra money for college for my sister and me.
I remember the day when the first black child enrolled in my elementary school. Later, in high school, there may have been as many as 5 or 10. If there were Jewish kids, I didn’t know it. We knew who the Catholics were because they were allowed to leave school early one day a week to go to chatechism, and I had no idea at the time what that was.
There was the supposed ever-present fear of nuclear war. I remember us kids being scared silly during the Cuban missile crisis.
If you pick and choose, sure. But here are some items you didn’t pick, and I defy you to call these typical of rural 2013:
[ul][li]coal furnaces[/li][li]no air conditioning in houses or cars[/li][li]no seat belts[/li][li]no indoor plumbing[/li][li]no TV or few channels[/li][li]no FM radio or few stations[/li][li]no refrigerators[/li][li]no shopping centers (even a small Wal-Mart is a shopping center compared to 1950’s)[/li][li]diseases like polio, smallpox, diptheria, measles, chicken pox[/li][li]significant racial segregation[/li][/ul]
FWIW, my parents are STILL very proud of the fact that they got one of the first baby car seats for me when I was a baby in 1972. Apparently it was some metal affair they had to get from the dealership and bolt into place.
The United States took first position in per capita GNP from the United Kingdom in 1910, and had surpassed the UK as the world’s largest economy sometime back in the late 1800s.
China is on the way to surpass the US as the world’s largest economy any year now and although it is a long way from overtaking the US in per capita GNP I think that will happen. The US has already been overtaken by many European countries in per capita GNP since losing first place in the 80s.
TV licensing is still required in the UK. It helps to fund the BBC.
Yeah, we need to start making coffee pots, ipads and everything in between again. 
Right…I didn’t pick those because those are the things that belong in this thread. (Except the shopping centers thing…it’s an hour or more drive to Walmart in some places, and an old fashioned corner store or tiny grocery is still what you’re going to get.)
I was born in 1956 in the Santa Clara Valley, now “Silicon” Valley. A few years ago my father, now in his 80’s, started recording his biography on tape. Which is how I learned the story of how we ended up here. My father, who grew up impoverished even for Depression-era NYC, got his MA in Journalism from U of Wisconsin (Madison) on the GI bill. Then he couldn’t find solid work anywhere on the east coast. He looked for a couple years before giving up. In 1952, after begging a loan from a friend, he and my mom and my oldest sister, then a toddler, drove out West with all they owned in an old Studebaker to try to start a newspaper business.
The Ford plant in Oakland had been retooled during WWII for war planes, and rather than re-retool, the company decided to rebuild, in Milpitas, 50 miles south. My Dad heard about this, and intrepidly decided to create a Milpitas newspaper for the Ford plant workers. The Ford Co. had a strong interest in encouraging their trained workers to relocate with the plant. There was a cheapo subdivision being built for them there. At that point Milpitas was a miniscule crossroads with a bar, cafe, drugstore, gas station, and not much else. I remember each of these businesses vividly. It was farm and ranch and orchard as far as the eye could see. I remember that vividly too.
My parents printed up the paper in a shed behind their old rented house, collated it by hand, and drove up to Oakland every day to stand at the entrances of the factory and pass it out to the workers as they left work in the evening. The Ford Company saw their efforts as a positive force for convincing workers to relocate by showcasing the delights of Milpitas.
I used to think that my parents, like many others, sort of effortlessly rode the post-war boom to prosperity. And their story would not have been possible without that boom, so marked in California. But they started with nothing but a dream and they worked like dogs for decades. My dad became one of the city fathers of Milpitas, a founding business leader who knew everyone in that town (not always a blessing for the kids). My mother, highly unusually for that era, was the editor of the newspapers until her retirement.
We eventually had more money than the families of the factory workers, but not by a vast amount. We lived in the cheap subdivision, slept two kids to a room, spent Saturday mornings doing chores, and sat down to a homecooked dinner every night just like everyone else I knew. We all walked to school, and played outside after school in all-age packs, in which the big kids made sure that everyone played by the rules and the little kids each got a turn. Black kids from Oakland, Asian kids whose farmer/immigrant parents had been interned in the camps, kids from the Portuguese families who owned most of the ranch lands being turned into housing, all played together, there was no sense of class or division there in that brand-new place where virtually everyone was from somewhere else.
It was a childhood particular to that place and time. I don’t think of it as idyllic, although the landscape was. It was certainly simpler, in that there were very few choices as to what you ate, your entertainment, what was expected of you according to your gender. There were poorer people but no slums, there were richer people but no mansions. Everyone’s kids went to the same schools. Girls wore dresses to school that came to exactly the middle of the knee, and if they didn’t you were sent home. Expressing one’s individuality was not a value.
It was different.
A few more memories -
The English war brides.
The first box of frozen peas Mom brought home ca. 1950. Birds Eye, with the picture of the bird’s head in the corner. Must have been an extravagance.
So in this scenario, we’re equating “girls” to “men”? Curious.
I was born in 1982. Infant car seats were common by then, of course, but seats for somewhat older kids were not. My mom had these humiliating contraptions that consisted a brown vinyl booster seat and a thing we called an “orange strap” that was bolted behind the seat and was an H-shape except the bottom had loops that the lap belt was threaded through. We used those things until we were, I don’t know, 7 or so? Constant source of humiliation. No one else had them.
Of course, my daughter who was born in 2000 used a sporty-looking booster seat in the backseat until she was like 8 or 9, and it wasn’t an issue. Sometimes I feel like because I was such a young mother, things weren’t THAT different…but in some ways they really were.
My uncle was an insurance adjuster, and he said accident statistics and tests supported the claim that seat belts were a good idea. None of the car dealers offered them. We had to special order the belts and get a mechanic to drill holes in the floor and install them in our 1954 Chrysler. Lap belts only, of course. At least the car didn’t nag you to put them on.
I was gonna say it was the doll my dad sent from Japan when I was 7 or 8, but yeah, it was the bike. The first bike was secondhand and we lived in the country so there weren’t many places to ride that one. But I got a new one when we moved to town, when I was about ten. It was a beautiful shade of light turquoise and white, single speed (of course) with big fat tires. Rode it everywhere, even to the lake seven miles outside of town.
Next favorite was the transistor radio I bought with earnings from clearing beans in the summer. That would have been in 1958 or 59, I think. I thought the sound quality was amazing.
PSXer writes:
> Girls were girls and men were men
and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
7 transistor Sony, right? Or did you have the fancy, big model with 9?
I was born in 1946 but my childhood wasn’t like many of you have described. I grew up on a farm. My dad wanted to farm and my mom had a job so he could afford to buy a farm and equipment, and they didn’t think they were going to have any kids after being married for 8 years, so they borrowed some money. When I came along I put a crimp in things for a bit; we were pretty poor. But being poor on a farm is far less unpleasant than being poor in town. We had a garden. We had neighbors who would swap eggs for chores. We had a milk cow.
As soon as I was in school my mom went back to work, not only for the money but because she liked it. That wasn’t standard for the era but since we lived on a farm and everyone we knew worked hard all the time, no one thought we were odd. And as for the “girls were girls and men were men” someone mentioned earlier, on a farm there pretty much isn’t women’s work and men’s work; there’s just work. My dad cooked and my mom and I both drove a tractor. Doing laundry involved lifting heavy wet clothes from the washer and hand-cranking them through the ringer, and my dad helped me with that as well as hanging things on the clothesline.
We also locked things. It seemed to be the case that if you lived out in the country things went missing (no one to see the criminal) so we locked our door. Someone was stealing gas out of our gas tank so we put a padlock on it. The car got locked in the driveway after the neighbors’ truck got stolen. My dad never did lock his pick-up though as he said no one would steal it.
I had a good childhood but I am glad those days are gone. It’s true there were some good things but all in all I think the bad outweighed the good. Maybe if my dad had had one of those jobs for life that paid well I would feel differently but farming is not a job for those who want stability and security. The way women and minorities were treated was horrible, mostly. And those bomb shelters and drills were quite frightening to me as a child. No, not the good old days for me.
I was quite surprised to read that there weren’t phones in homes in England. We all had phones, but of course it was a crank-operated party-line phone. Better than nothing. My mom had bad asthma and at least my dad could call the doctor at home and tell him to meet us at the hospital. Which he always did, even at two in the morning, and for $10. So, maybe some parts were “good old days”.