My Explanation for the 1950s and 60s (At least part of both.)

I’m sure you were waiting on one foot to know why the 50s were the way they were. And you may be wondering why this is important. Well, it just is, maybe because I want to set this down so my children can read it and shake their heads.

I really did grow up in a “Leave It to Beaver” world, except my mother never wore pearls to do housework. The costume for housework was such a thing as a “housedress” which was, in fact, labeled as such off to the side of the Lingerie Department of the department store. In said department one could also find “peignoir sets” which were chiffon-y sets of a nightgown and a “robe”, often trimmed with feathers. Brides often received such things (in white) with much laughing at bridal showers, the assumption being that (a) the bride was a virgin, and (b) this yardage would make the groom ready to change her status.

But I digress. The 50s, as I recall them, was a period where everybody acted like they were on mind-altering drugs that kept you calm and in control. Manners were very formal. One wore white gloves to go “downtown” to shop at the big stores. The form of address was “Mrs.” or “Mr.” or “Miss” – unless permission was granted to use the first name. There was a great deal of concern about what “everybody else” would think about something. That was one of the big reasons why you would behave. Little girls wore starched (often painfully so) dresses to school, never pants. Little boys wore ironed jeans and usually plaid shirts.

There was much attention paid to hair – men and women, boys and girls. Men usually used Vitalis (hair oil) if they had enough hair, or had crew cuts. Women’s hair was usually tightly permed. Little girls had junior editions of their mother’s hair, and little boys looked normal during the week, had their hair “slicked down” for special occasions, then had their heads essentially shaved in the late spring for their summer hair cut.

As I look back, everything was about control. Everything was tidy and squared away.

But why? I think I know. I think the entire population of the U.S., coming out of the Depression and WWII, made a group-think decision to act as though nothing bad had happened. Eisenhower was elected – now as an avuncular father, but still the general who had won the war. He would keep all of us safe. The universal decision was made to turn eyes away from what had just happened, and return to “normal” – whatever that was – just as quickly as possible.

Most of my friends’ fathers had been in the war in some way. My daddy didn’t serve, and was embarrassed about it. He blamed a hernia and flat feet, but frankly he was too old (which he would never have confessed to).

The two veterans I knew best prove my theory about the 50s. My precious uncle was desperately wounded, evacuated to North Africa where they put maggots in his wounds, sent back to the U.S. on a hospital ship, had many surgeries, and ended up with one leg about eight inches shorter than the other. The doctors told him he would die in the next 10 years because of the dozens of pieces of shrapnel still in his body (he lived 40 more, probably just for spite). He came home addicted to morphine, stopped that, and became “just” an alcoholic, for “just” 35 years or so.  His first wife told him not to get injured because she “didn’t want a cripple for a husband” – and sure enough, she divorced him immediately. He remarried a wonderful woman and they loved each other dearly.

But, he never talked about the war, at least until my last visit with him. He told me what had happened in that last battle, and a little about his friend he had saved. (Truth is, he was injured saving his friend. He could have stayed safe, but he saved his friend instead.) Then he told me that now he spent a lot of time with the Vietnam Vets at the VFW center. (This was in 1981.) I didn’t notice the tears in his eyes, at first, when he said, “Aw, those boys just need somebody to talk to”.

The other veteran had been a Marine in the South Pacific. Not to be confused with the musical…this was a group of men who were trained for hand-to-hand combat, going from one island to the next, doing the dirty business of war that no one wants to acknowledge.

When the Korean War started in the early ‘50s, he was called back up to do the same thing again, this time on the front lines of that nasty “police action”. I never, ever heard him talk about either war, but his nerves were shot. He had a bad temper, drank endless cups of coffee, smoked too many cigarettes. And he was jumpy. Really jumpy.

But, as I mentioned, everybody’s fathers or uncles or kin (kissing or otherwise) had been in the war. I must have been told about someone’s service, but I don’t remember any specific conversations and it was not discussed.

For all of this universal forgetting, though, the war was still much on people’s minds. It showed up on TV. This was long before cable television and the endless Nazi documentaries. Instead, we had the Hollywood version: Nazis smoked cigarettes in holders, were prone to wearing leather overcoats, and had squinty eyes. All Japanese wore the same black glasses and were maybe meaner than Nazis.

On Saturday nights, one of the local channels ran “Million Dollar Movie” – TV airings of mostly B war movies. There were a lot of them that involved kamikaze bombings with close-ups of stereotyped Japanese soldiers screaming, “You Die Yankee!”

Anything we knew about the war was sanitized. I really didn’t know anything until I bought a book at the school book fair (I was 12) that laid out the graphic details of Dr. Mengele’s hideous research at Auschwitz. (A pause here. Really? How did that make it to a school book fair? This was a terrifying book that broke my heart.)

But back to the 50s. Everybody bought cars. After the war years, when nobody could, and the Depression, when nobody could afford them, finally the roads were filled with shiny cars. And chrome.

It was all about appearance and control. Tight, tight, tight. And clean. House cleaning was going on at my house all the time, with special top-to bottom cleans for Spring (general), Easter (specific), any time we hosted summer picnics, Back to School, and Christmas. It was a liturgical year of Pine Sol and Pledge.

Most people we knew went to church on Sundays, and those didn’t either lied about it or  professed to feel guilty.

Milk and dairy products, bread, and dry cleaning were all delivered on a regular schedule through the week. We lived in the suburbs, but in the city, where my grandparents lived, there were still “hucksters” who came through the neighborhood selling produce.

But technology was changing everything. We got our first TV in 1949 (which was before me and really early, but my daddy was fascinated)…most houses had TVs by 1953 or so. (By the way, some of our neighbors had not bothered to get telephones until the mid 50s…and party lines were common. It needs to be noted that my grandmother famously said, on a party line, that someone’s new baby looked like “a cross between a flying pissant and a window shutter” – everybody knew about that by suppertime.

The rate of change got faster and faster, it seems now. Ed Sullivan introduced Elvis. (I fell in love for the first time. And my mother and her best friend took us to see Elvis’s earliest movies - looking back, probably inappropriate for a 6 year old but they were in love with him, too.) I remember Sputnik and interstate highways and the introduction of tubeless tires.

And then, all at once, it was the 60s and the world changed again. What happened? I think everyone was finally tired of being so tight, so controlled. What had been critical then was not important now. They didn’t need it any more.

I think they let go of the rope that had kept them bound together in their universal understanding that what had to happen was to give everybody a chance to recover, to find their feet, to take a deep breath. They’d all been through a terrible time, but it was better now.

 It must have been exhausting, anyway, to keep your knuckles white in a do-it-or-die grip. But they had to hold tight through those years of depression and war. If they had let go then, they would have fallen into the abyss.