Does it change the myth of Sisyphus for you to learn that Sisyphus is paid? – Errol Morris
‘Make America Great Again’ is an expression which must raise a subsequent question.
Because it is a puzzle. What era would that be?
Putting aside women and African-Americans and Mexican-Americans and Native Americans and gays, as was done, I think we can all agree the best times ever were the 1950s.
Right? Of course, they were.
Here’s the proof in a chain e-mail from an octogenarian buddy. With notes.
Remember when –
It took three to five minutes for the TV to warm up. I don’t remember that.
Nobody owned a purebred dog.
Not true.
Miniature French Poodles were like rats, roaming everywhere. My aunt had one, my grandma had one, Mom had Mimi.
When a quarter was a decent allowance, and made with real silver! I worked my way UP to a quarter a week by my senior year of high school. You’d reach into a muddy gutter for a penny. Made with real copper. Looking to see if it was a 1943 copper penny!
You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time. And you didn’t pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot.
Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box. Not to mention Cracker Jacks!
I distinctly remember owning a piece of the North territory, having received an official-looking deed on official-looking paper from Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.
It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents. My parents both grew up poor during the Depression. We were taught any meal anywhere was a great privilege.
I remember Dad would take us to the Nor-An Drive-In, up towards Poughkeepsie, where a basket of 21 fried shrimp was $1.70. Sounds shockingly inexpensive but that’s $17.70 in today’s dollars. And today you’d get half as many shrimp. Smaller probably, shrimpier shrimp.
They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed and they did it!
I tutored a older kid in a grade ahead of me. The next year, tutored him in the same grade and tutored him again when he was a year behind. Makes me sound like a bad tutor, right. He went on to become an undercover police informant. I know this because his name was in the papers.
When a ’57 Chevy was everyone’s dream car to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady. We had a ’57 Plymouth Belvedere, two-tone, cream & white. Top of the line sedan, $2800. Our first new car.
No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked. To the car or the house. My family was not that stupid. We were forced to take our nocturnal joyrides in other families’ cars.
Lying on your back in the grass with your friends and saying things like, ‘That cloud looks like a…’.
Playing baseball with no adults to help with the rules of the game. My first glove was an orange plastic first-baseman’s mitt somebody had thrown away.
Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger. Our hamlet was too small for a grocery store.
When being sent to the principal’s office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at home.
My problem was, I wasn’t a student per se, I was more an attendee.
Basically we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn’t because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!? But we survived because their love was greater than the threat. But I was never completely confident about that.
As well as summers filled with bike rides, hula hoops, and visits to the pool, and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar. Early summers were in Punxsutawney, PA, and there was no pool.
And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and too young to care.
Remember Howdy Doody and The Peanut Gallery, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow Knows, Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk. Not to forget Clarabelle The Clown, Crusader Rabbit, the Merry Mailman, Sky King and Modern Farmer, if you got up before cartoons.
Saturday morning cartoons weren’t thirty-minute commercials for action figures.
Candy cigarettes. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles.
Coffee shops with table-side jukeboxes. Nickel cherry cokes and chocolate egg creams at the drug store.
Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum. Once.
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.
Newsreels before the movie.
Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Yukon 2601). Or, some of us remember when there were just four numbers with no word prefix at all. And, nearly everyone had a party line.
Peashooters.
Hi-fi’s & 45 & 78 RPM records. And 33s, too.
S&H Green Stamps. Sitting around the kitchen table, everybody but Dad, licking and sticking. Mimeograph paper. The Fort Apache Play Set.
Do you remember a time when decisions were made by going ‘eeny-meeny-miney-moe’? A technique which spans the decades, I’m sure.
‘Oly-oly-oxen-free’ made perfect sense. We should do this more often.
Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, ‘Do Over!’
‘Race issue’ meant arguing about who ran the fastest.
Catching fireflies could happily occupy an entire evening.
Because we were forced to go to bed too early.
It wasn’t odd to have two or three ‘Best Friends.’
I could only ever handle one Best Friend at a time. Hard enough to find one. Got a handful now.
Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot.
Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles.
The worst embarrassment was being picked last for a team.
Would’ve loved to have been picked last. Better than not getting picked at all.
War was a card game.
Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a “motorcycle.”
Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin. Smoked corn silk once.
Water balloons were the ultimate weapon. Crab apples also good.
If you can remember most or all of these, THEN YOU HAVE LIVED!!!
Yeah, sure. In a seemingly placid time. Like a Twilight Zone episode. Every freakin’ day.
That television series debuted in the last year of the 1950s. First episode was “Where Is Everybody?“
An amnesiac in an empty town feels he is being watched.
Exactly my childhood experience.
It takes a village.
If you can remember anything of your youth, then you are STILL alive.
But old. Real real old.
I remember when the first stoplight went up. I remember sitting in the movie theater watching “The Blob” – Steve McQueen’s debut – and my cousins jumped into my lap when the goo first squirted up some poor soul’s forearm.
Remember a local Spanish-American War vet leading the sunny Memorial Day parade down the middle of Main. And Lake Gleneida before they raised Sybil’s alarming statue. Donkey basketball and the Fish & Game Show in the little high school gym.
Now that I look at this again, the 1950s really sucked.
Maybe perfect if you were six years old or even an immature twelve.
But a great era? No. Meh at best.
Why do you think we had the 1960s?