2. Fifties – Page 2

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 was alone with his boys, and — we knew — not when he was alone with his friends. If there is such a thing as “locker room talk,” which became a thing in 2016, there wasn’t in our house. Nobody commented on physical attributes of women, so the most you’d ever hear was that some movie star was “sexy.” We were taught to open doors and pull out chairs for women, although not to hold them to the forced gender roles. Ladies first was taken for granted.

When I started noticing girls as girls, they were magic, worthy of awe. Touching, or holding hands, connected me to their glow. They were soft to the touch and smelled like spring and flowers. They were different from us boys in all the best possible ways, alluring. And they were better. Higher beings.

Love for us elementary school kids was a platonic “going steady” that started in the third grade for me, with Nancy Pershing. The other kids knew about it and respected it. It meant nothing more than an extra smile at odd times and partnering up during the square dance sessions in PE. Jane Trowbridge and Penny Tie in fourth, fifth, and sixth.

And it also meant relating to the love songs they played on KYA, the rock station of the Bay Area. Earth Angel, Dream Lover, You Send Me, in my radio at night, with me dreaming of holding hands when we weren’t doing square dancing in PE.

A lot of the oddities of gender from the fifties seem horribly out of place as I write this in 2020.

Girls didn’t do sports. Not the cool girls. They could maybe do field hockey, but that was about it. Only boys rode their bikes to school, plus the occasional oddball girl who was not cool.

Women were generally expected to be nurses, teachers, secretaries, waitresses, or retail salesclerks and cashiers.

Mom, although she lived the stereotype, objected to the tight gender roles whenever she got a chance. Later in life, after we grew up, she resented her role as housewife and wished she’d had a career. She never wanted Martha to be pigeonholed.

Mom and Dad taught us to believe in equality, ending segregation, civil rights laws, integrated schools. But the blacks were in the Fillmore and Hunter’s Point in San Francisco and East Palo Alto, and we never went there. We also avoided the so-called “Mexican” neighborhoods in Mountain View. The fear of the other was unspoken, in the background. Prejudice and bigotry weren’t allowed in our house, but then our house was in a lily-white suburb.

For more about gender, then and now, there’s a password protected piece on some related issues, in my section on reflections.

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 “We will bury you” speech. Parents worried, teachers worried, and we kids worried too. I was nine and in fourth grade at Loyola School.

The cold war wasn’t just adult talk. It was kids’ talk too, and nightmares. Nuclear war. A mushroom cloud erupting over San Francisco, just 30 miles north of us. We had regular duck and cover drills at school. They told us about Hiroshima. We knew the detail of a human form burned into a surviving wall, people sizzled into dust in an instant. The threat was always there.

I remember being out on the back lawn in sleeping bags, two 10-year-old kids on a sleepover. We looked at the stars and talked. And we talked about whether one of those stars was a Russian missile about to destroy us all. And we scared the hell out of ourselves and couldn’t sleep for hours. That was just one night, one memory; it wasn’t unusual.

Our neighbors just above us up the hill installed a shelter in their back yard. We could see every detail of the installation. It was like a big tank, maybe half the space of a railroad tank car. They hired contractors to dig a huge whole. We saw the fallout shelters advertised often enough. Most of them had some kind of filter for air, and a bicycle for power, and months of stowable food. Mom and Dad silently disapproved. I wasn’t sure why.

There was a missile installation in the East Bay, just across the Dumbarton Bridge. The missiles were poised in launch position, pointing upwards. The threat was always there.

Fear of the Russians prompted a big push for education that changed the United States and blessed my generation. We had to beat the Russians. I was too young to have What started that day in 1957 means accelerated classes for me, as I benefited from dedicated and concerted tracking, from early on.

Throughout my years at Loyola School, third to sixth grade, we had the smart class, the sort-of-smart class, the middle class, the sort-of dumb class, and the dumb class. Every kid knew that and knew where they placed; and I’m pretty sure the parents knew it too. Our hierarchy was firmly established.

That continued for me through middle school and high school. That was the way of the world back in the fifties and sixties.

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. The flight took less than an hour. Our parents dropped Chip and I off at the gate and our Grandad picked us up in Santa Barbara and drove us to their home in Ojai.

In those days, we dressed up for the planes. Women wore high heels. Kids wore the church pants.

Grandad and Grandma lived in an idyllic small house under a huge oak tree at the foot of the TopaTopa mountains. Theirs was literally the last house before the undeveloped wild leading up to the mountains, but it was still only a comfortable walk for two boys from there to the movie theater in the old center of town, what we called “Spanish” arches. Ojai was nothing special back then, just a small rural town in the mountains above Santa Barbara.

Grandad and his next-door neighbor took us fishing on the Pacific Ocean. The neighbor had a small boat on a trailer, with an outboard motor. We woke up well before dawn and drove to the ocean. One day we caught like 17 bonita, a fighting fish related to tuna. Grandma turned up her nose and complained, but Grandad set up his homemade smoker and smoked them all over three days. We went in a small boat with an outboard motor so far out to sea that we couldn’t see land. That was scary, inherently. But I was there with my Grandad, a big man with strong arms who seemed to be always smiling, and always safe.

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 sister Martha in 1957. Almost everybody in her generation smoked. Dad was a rare exception to the rule, and in his case, it was because he loved his sports, touch football, basketball, or whatever. Smoking wasn’t good for sports, and everybody knew it by the fifties.

Mom said her brother, Fred (Uncle Buddy to us) was a distance runner in high school, and one of the best around. They called him fleetfoot Freddy. But he smoked, so he lost it.

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 drove the big American cars, two-wheel drive, no chains. Dad was the all-time champion of snowy mountain driving without chains.

Our first trip, we went to Deer Park Lodge near Lake Tahoe for skiing when I was in kindergarten. I hated it the first day (I was five) and then loved it from the second day on. We skied on wood skis, with cable bindings. The lift at was a rope tow. After that first trip I went several times skiing with a friend’s family. I’m still surprised that I was up to that, at just five and six years old; and that my parents were okay with it too. But it was fine. I loved it.

Dad never liked skiing, but he was good to me. Two or three times a year he’d let me coax him into skiing weekends. We’d leave Los Altos at 4 am Saturday morning, drive to Dodge Ridge or Badger Pass, ski all day, then sleep in a hotel or motel, then ski all day Sunday and then drive home. Dad had a steady work routine as a doctor, no time to spare. But I’d plead and beg, and he indulged me, over and over.

I particularly liked Badger Pass because we’d stay at the Yosemite Lodge in Yosemite Valley. Those trips were my first taste of Yosemite, which I’ve loved ever since.

To get to Yosemite we’d drive south to Pacheco Pass, then east through Merced and Mariposa. The highway drops down steeply to the Merced River after Mariposa, and then follows the river up into Yosemite Valley. We’d see El Capitan first, with Bridal Veil Falls across the valley to the south. Then we’d drive through the snow-covered forest to Yosemite Lodge, with good views of Yosemite Falls. The waterfalls would accumulate towers of ice near the bottom. The forest covered in snow, Half Dome in snow, all so peaceful, and beautiful.

After skiing at Badger Pass, we’d drive back down to the valley via the highway that would view the valley from Vista Point. Dad would sometimes stop to see the view, El Capitan, Bridal Veil Falls, and Half Dome at the far end of the valley.

Badger Pass was mediocre skiing and still had just t-bar lifts and rope tows, no chair lifts, when we skied there in the fifties.

For Dodge Ridge, we’d cross the Dumbarton Bridge and go through the winding two-land road through Niles Canyon, which was a winding road by a creek surrounded by steep brown hills dotted with oaks. We’d go through mostly rural farm country through Livermore and Tracy and on across the central valley, through Sonora, to Dodge Ridge. Dodge Ridge had chair lifts.

One memorable Friday morning Dad had taken the day off and was letting me skip school for a three-day in Dodge Ridge. We got up at four and took off over the Dumbarton and through the Niles Canyon as the daylight emerged from the dark in a driving rainstorm. Dad stopped at a diner in Tracy and called Dodge Ridge about the weather. I waited in the car. He came back and told me no, it’s raining in Dodge Ridge, so no skiing. Back home we went. That morning I ended up in school on time, despite having driven the 200 miles to Tracy and back.

We didn’t own skis or boots. We rented them. It took just a few minutes. Ski boots were leather boots that were laced up and tied like boot laces. Skis were wooden planks carved into skis, with cable bindings called safety bindings. They were supposed to pop up and out during a fall.

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 of the family drove down US 101 to pick us up and continue on south to either Newport Beach or Balboa Island, where we’d have a rented house for a week or two. We’d meet up with the family than had lived next door on Benvenue in Los Altos.

The beach trips were a mix of body surfing, sunburn, parents playing bridge, and beach trip highlights. Balboa island had a waterfront boardwalk, games and rides at the Balboa Pavilion, and a pier from which we’d fish small fish with a drop line. There was another big pier close by on Newport Beach

And with kids pressuring, and parents resisting, we’d dedicate one day to Disneyland in Anaheim. It was always the highlight for me. Disneyland opened in 1955 and promoted itself every week with the very popular Disneyland television show. We grew up with the Disney moves and the animated characters. Disneyland, when we’d go there, was a dream come true. The parents hated it. There was already smog back then in Los Angeles, so there was that. But lines were manageable and the opening rides — the jungle cruise, the autopia, and the railroad were our favorites — had only short lines. Park admission was $1.00 and the rides involved tickets, which varied from $0.35 for the most expensive to $0.10 for the least.

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 — parents and kids old enough, Chip and Me — to watch Gunsmoke, Disneyland, Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, Bonanza. We built Friday and Saturday nights around the shows. For Perry Mason we played a game guessing the culprit every week. We had to write our guesses down and drop them in a copper pot near the TV before Perry Mason revealed the guilty, always in the last five minutes. And we watched College Bowl and guessed the answers and learned about Oberlin and Pomona College. Quiz shows were big too, once a week extravaganza in prime time. And we still had to be there on time and sit through the commercials to watch the shows. There were no replays or second chances. So, we were there, as the TV demanded, at the appointed times. Or we didn’t see the show.

Television brought us football. That was a Dad thing. The San Francisco forty-niners, pro football, televised the away games. I learned football from Dad, and watched with Chip and by the time he was 6, Jay too. We dove into the TV, ate it up, analyzed every play, read the sports page every day, debated everything, and enjoyed the hell out of it.

We had three main choices for TV. NBC on channel 4, CBS on 5, or ABC on 7. Plus a local independent on channel 2 and KQED, PBS, on 9. They broadcast from 5 or 6 in the morning until 11 or 12 at night. They signed off with a patriotic message and ran a test pattern through the night. All TV came through an antenna on the roof.

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 house on Eastbrook. In my memory those games were always sunny, and the stadium almost always mostly empty, and Stanford almost always losing. We watched John Brodie the star quarterback. Dad left late for the game, parked innovatively in the unmarked parking in the sparse eucalyptus trees around the stadium, and usually left the game early, with Stanford losing, to beat the traffic.

I do remember what Dad says, that when I was little at those games, like in first, second, and third grade, my attention focused almost entirely on the vendors walking around with hot dogs, cokes, candy, and popcorn.

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, a bike ride from our house. Billy and I hung out a lot. It never occurred to me that the broken home stigma was anything more than incidental, a fact of life important to Billy but not to anybody else.

I mention it here because life has changed so much since then. Being from “a broken home” made Billy different, and vaguely, I hate to say it, but vaguely less than normal.

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 Chip, two years older, was in charge of the bike trip. We wore uniforms, brown pants and white shirts for the boys. The girls all wore the same light blue jumpers and white shirts. I remember a very scary Sister Clarissa and a kindly, young, Sister Judith. Sister Clarissa disappeared after Christmas vacation in my first year, having been taken away for mental treatment (I learned later).

In Loyola School in Los Altos, K-6 public school I attended, we also dressed in uniforms, but not what you might think. Not formal, official uniforms, but we as kinds enforced uniforms on each other. All the boys wore Levi’s jeans (Levi’s not Wranglers or any other brand) every day. In six grade all but a very few boys worse shawl collar sweaters every day. Those who didn’t suffered on the social scale.

The social scale was well established. Everything on the playground was sifted and sorted according to groups and hierarchies. The social structure was based loosely on athletic ability for the boys and appearance for the girls, but it wasn’t a single-factor system. Being in the “smart class” was a plus, unless you were in the smart class but also awkward, uncoordinated, or, for the girls, not pretty. Being in the “dumb class” We were all grouped in classes from smart to dumb, five classes for each grade at Loyola and four at Blach Junior High School. Schoolkids on the top of the kid social structure knew it and reveled in it. I was in the top class, and I was athletic, the captain of the fifth grade football team, so I was on top. Just placement in the smart class wasn’t enough if a kid was out of touch with social skills, likely to get outcast as the 1950s equivalent of what they later called a dork.

Kids were cruel. Bullying was rampant. But we didn’t have a word for it, we didn’t call it out, and nobody did anything about it. We had no vocabulary about bullying, or diversity, or ADHD, or on the spectrum, or any of that. It was in or out.