Create what happened 1950s
Created | Updated Jul 11, 2023
Create what happened 1950s
Once the War was over, and the country was on its feet again, my father thought about either goig back to college or making the family a bit bigger. My mother reminded him that he had wanted seven girls, and only one had arrived yet. She voted for the latter option, so I was conceived some time in late 1947. I don't think my dad minded that I was not a girl when I arrived in April 1948. Of course, when a family gets larger, the living space has to expand as well. My older sister and I were growing, the economy was expanding, and my father could afford to think about putting us in a house of our own. neither parent wanted to raise kids in the "city" they were living in. The G.I. bill was there to help, and my parents had a friend with some land to sell in the town next door. The deal went through some time in 1950.
But I must have liked the status quo. My two earliest memories were: 1. the chocolate ice cream I got after my tonsilectomy, and 2. the cupcakes that were served at my sister's grammar school just before we moved. Oh, well. (I was not yet two when these things happened. It was scary to be walked down the hall of the hospital for the surgery. But the ice cream made up for it.)
It was going to take a while to build the house, so the four of us lived in a "camp" on the side of a hill about a mile from our new dwelling. I remember the mica on the slope below the camp. I remember pumping water. I remember moving into the basement of our house once it was finished, and stories the carpenter told me about bees while he was building the upper story. I remember my sister dairng me to eat a caterpillar (it tasted like cherry leaves). I remember the smell of the kerosene heater that kept the basement warm in the Winter.
There weren't many neighbors, which meant I didn't have kids to play with. I dreaded having to go to school when I turned six. We had a dragon for a teacher. She was accused of harming the psyches of dozens of kids. To her credit, you can bet they learned how to read so they wouldn't have to have her again. She was always making me stand behind the piano. This was a punishment for twitching and talking (I later found I had chorea; this drove two of my teachers to distraction). In third grade, I was present when history was made: Eisenhower's second inauguration. I remembered this Eisenhower person; the host of a local TV kiddy show toasted him with milk at noon every day while the band played "Hail to the chief."
The town had its charms, especially if, like me, you had two decent parents who made sure you were kept safe and well. Some of my classmates were not so lucky. Some had come to the town from places like Poland or Italy or Greece. We had a family from Hungary in 1956. Some of the kids learned songs from their older brothers who served in Korea. They also learned some cuss words that I took to parroting, not knowing what they were. That was how I got in trouble. I had never heard my parents use those words.
By the time the 1950s ended I was eleven. The country was about to change. As I look back on the 1950s, I realize that the air of innocence that enveloped me obscured some really dark stuff. I never heard of Joseph P McCarthy, though I remember Walt Kelly's depiction of him in the :"Pogo" comic strip. Nikita Hhrushchev? He was a lovable bear who thought America's first president was Georgy Vasha Ington; his wife was Masha. The Nixon "Checkers speech" was also unknown to me. I was happily loving Lucy and the Mickey Mouse Club and Howdy Doody. Then there were Rocky and Bullwinkle, who blithely fought Boris Badinof and Natasha. They wree not Russians, of course; they were from Spotsylvania.
What scared me the most was nuclear fallout. I would read about it in the National Enquirer and
become quite alarmed. Even if you lived in a bucolic small town, you could not be safe from it. Our school had regular drills to make sure we could get to the "safety" of the auditorium on the bottom floor in reasonable time. (Looking back, I don't know why this would have been a safe place. The whole building could fall on top of us...)
I'm sure that the adults in the town would have had a very different idea of how "safe" the 1950s were.
We didn't have people of color, or people of non-Christian religious persuasion. By the time I got to college, I would have met (and liked) people from these groups. I remember watching the TV version of "Amos and Andy," and my take away from the show was that people of color were not much different from the people I met.
My only criticism of the town was that it was boring. I was about to enter the 1960s, when things got a lot less boring!
