50s: Authentic Post-war Boom Times
Boom times. We’d won the war and destroyed the industrial base of our main would-be competitors. There were jobs everywhere. Good jobs in manufacturing, on …
50s: Howdy Doody, B/W etc.
I was three years old. I sat in a basement family room straining to see a small black and white television set. The big kids, …
50s: Nomads
We moved around in the early fifties. I was born in Milford MA where my Dad’s family had lived for generations. He was a doctor …
50s: Suburbia
There were a lot of other kids in that neighborhood. On weekends and during the summer, we’d leave home after breakfast and play with five …
50s: TV takes over
Throughout the fifties, as I grew up, television was mostly a family activity. Sure, we had endless cartoons on Saturday mornings if we wanted them, …
50s on 50 cents per week
As a kid, I got 50 cents allowance every week. I had to choose between buying a Matchbox brand car or truck (about an inch …
50s: Oddly Rural
In 1956, when I was eight, we moved from the flats up into the hills. To Eastbrook Ave. We moved from classic fifties suburb to …
50s: Mom Held Court in the Kitchen
On most afternoons, middle to late fifties through middle sixties when I left home for college, Mom held court in her kitchen. She’d talk with …
50s: Dad Taught by Example; Mom by Talk
We were a typical family of the fifties. Dad was the breadwinner and Mom kept house. We had a family meal at six o’clock every …
50s: Gender in the Fifties
We were taught to respect women. Even back in those gender-restrained days, as we grew up, Dad was never disrespectful to women. Not when he …
50s: We Learned Duck and Cover
Monday, Oct. 7, 1957. Sputnik. The Russians put a man into space before we did. Less than a year after Russian head of state Nikita Khrushchev’s …
50s: Ojai Grandparents
I took my first plane trip in 1958. It was a small propeller plane from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. A commercial airplane, but tiny. …
50s: Smoking was Common
Sometime in the 50s Mom gave up smoking. Chip and I hated her smoking and I think she gave it up while pregnant with our …
50s: Dodge Ridge, Badger Pass, Tahoe
Skiing was a four-to-five-hour drive from Los Altos. We’d leave before dawn, drive, ski, stay in a hotel, ski Sunday, and then drive back. We …
50s: Southern California Beaches
For several years in a row, Chip and I flew to Santa Barbara for a week in Ojai with Grandad and Granma. Then the rest …
50s: Living by the TV
The television grew steadily more important. By the late fifties we had a bigger black and white set in the family room. We gathered — …
50s: Stanford Games etc.
Dad took the two of us and later on the three of us to watch football live at Stanford Stadium, nine miles away from the …
50s: The “Broken Home”
I had a friend who came from “a broken home.” Billy’s parents had divorced, and he lived with his single mother, close to Loyola School, …
50s: K-12 Social
For my first and second grade I rode my bike about a mile through suburban streets to get to St. Nicholas Catholic School. My brother …