Anyone remember the 50's?

I wasn't alive back then but I think it would have been a nice time to grow up then.

wishesuponastar said:

I wasn't alive back then but I think it would have been a nice time to grow up then.

Click to expand...

Why do you think that ?

I was born in the 50s. What is it about the 50s that you think makes that decade special?

It seems like families spent more time together.

Maybe on TV. My father was away from home most of the work week and my mother worked full time. It wasn't all Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best.

Yes it certainly was not a " made for TV " life.

Oh, sorry. I thought there was more time for families.

There was a lot of family time at dinner in the 50's. My family always ate dinner together and conversed about each other's day. That seemed to change in the 60's when someone always seemed to have a tv on in the kitchen during meals.

I was born in the '50s and I didn't care for it. Mom was home, but she was always busy doing drudge work. Us kids had to entertain ourselves outside. It was very quiet. No din of cars on the way to shopping centers (there were none), no Top 40 playing on (non-existent) transistor radios, even the lawn mower was quiet (no motor). The dads all wore brush cuts (unattractive), plain white shirts (boring) and thin dark ties (awful). Peoples' living rooms were painted dark (dismal) green and the curtains had huge ugly patterns that never came back in style. Pink and green bathrooms, white metal kitchens (slightly rusty) with small red accents. Linoleum floors that could only be called "utilitarian." And '50s cars were scary-looking coming down the street -- reminded me of big metal monsters with beady eyes and huge disapproving frowns on their faces. I didn't like the '50s.


When the '60s arrived, and the British (music) Invasion, it was like the scene where poor Dorothy from dreary, unhappy Kansas opened the door to Oz and it was all suddenly in vivid color, action, noise and contentment!

That's all I have to say about that.

I remember family dinners around the dining room table every night after my father got home from work and had a highball with my mother. Then he'd watch TV for the rest of the evening. My mom was a SAHM so she was there when we got home from school each day. Of course, there was only 1 family car, so she couldn't have gone anywhere even if she'd wanted to. I am not sure the 50s were fun for my mom. She was responsible for every aspect of raising us kids (4), keeping the house clean, doing all the cooking, all the dishes after every meal, all the laundry, all the grocery (and other) shopping, made our dresses, did the gardening, and mowed the lawn. Daddy shoveled the front walk (we had a plow guy for the driveway) and took out the trash (after we kids had collected it from each room). Oh yeah, and she wore a dress all the time (but not heels- she was not June Cleaver, LOL!)When my dad died (I was almost 14, and the oldest) I learned that my mom didn't know who held the mortgage, how to write a check or balance a checkbook, if there was life insurance, etc. There was a lot behind the scenes in the 50s that those TV shows never portrayed.

No, I wasn't born until the late 60's. But my 18 y.o. DS must think I grew up in the 50's...he often patronizes me by calling me "June" and saying "You were from a simpler time. " when I either fail to understand or disapprove of some aspect of the current culture.

The fifties was before my time, but my mom graduated from high school in '59. I remember looking at her yearbooks and realizing that the boys got to do chess club and engineering club while the girls did future homemakers club. DD and I went to a college tour recently. The engineering school had pictures of all the grads going back from when it began. Girls didn't even start showing up until the seventies. Oh - and the hairstyles were horrendous.

And you can forget about being gay.

Thank you all for a glimpse of life then.

It is interesting how we idealize life from yesteryear.

I was born in the late 60s, but I know that not all families in the 50s were anywhere near idilic. My mother grew up with an absent father, and a mother who had no means to support her kids. They lived in poverty, wore hand me downs from the community, shoes that were too small for them, and ate cornbread and beans 90% of the time.

There was no soda fountain shop after school, no sock hop with a new poodle skirt, fun shopping trips, or anything of the sort.

I grew up in the 70s and actually had more of a "50's life" than she did. My parents stayed married, dad worked, mom stayed home, etc.....

DawnM said:

I grew up in the 70s and actually had more of a "50's life" than she did. My parents stayed married, dad worked, mom stayed home, etc.....

Click to expand...

Totally agree with this. Life in the 70's was a nice time to grow up.

The 50's was a time of poverty and struggle for my parents.

I was born in 1952. I remember the 50s fondly. It seemed like a quieter, simpler life then. Perhaps, that is just my perspective being a child.

We were a family of six. The summers were amazing. We went outside after breakfast. We came in long enough for lunch and then were back outside until dinner. We explored the nearby farm fields. We climbed trees and made forts out of all sorts of things. We didn't have that many toys, other than our bikes and a sandbox, but we had great imaginations. After dinner, we'd be back out playing until dark. I remember my mom meeting with the other neighborhood moms for coffee about 10am each morning. They'd go to a different house each time.

During school months, we'd walk to school and back (about 12 blocks) or ride our bikes depending on the weather. After school we'd play outside or, if the weather was bad, we'd roller skate in the basement.

Our entire family always ate dinner together. After dinner, my sister and I would do the dishes (no dishwasher). This was followed by homework and then television with the family. We only had one television. It was black and white and we only got three stations. We watched a lot of variety shows. We always watched Saturday Night at the Movies together. I saw some great films with my family in our living room!

Saturdays were fun because there were cartoons on television. About once a month, the one theater in our little town would have a Saturday matinee. It would consist of cartoons, 3 Stooges and a movie. Often they were Tarzan movies. It cost $.35 to get into the show. My mom would give us each $.50. This would cover the cost of the movie plus a soda and popcorn. Disney movies were more expensive. They cost $.50.

We knew everyone in our neighborhood and our families spent a lot of time together. We didn't do a lot of things away from the house. We went to the grocery store once a week. They ran a tab for us. The owner wrote down all of our purchases by hand. At the end of the month, when my dad got paid, he would pay the tab. It was a more trusting time. There were very few stores in town. The biggest stores being Montgomery Wards and Woolworths. There was a Sears catalog store, but it only carried a few appliances. Everything else had to be ordered from the catalog and picked up. I remember one nice restaurant, an A&W Drive thru, a Dairy Queen and a McDonalds. We ate at home the majority of time. My mom was an amazing cook so it was not hardship. Every day, she would bake something for that night's desert. We'd come home from school to fresh cookies, cakes, pies, cinnamon rolls, etc. It was a wonder we weren't all the size of barns!

I'm sure my parents had worries, but they never shared them with us. Our first home only cost $11k, but my parents had to borrow a $1k from a relative for the down payment. It was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath ranch and it seemed like a palace to us! My parents never got involved in our homework unless we got stuck on something. My mom would attend our school programs, but that was about it. We never heard much about our grades other than we should do our best. No pressure.

Things changed quite a lot when I was 12. We moved to Kansas City. We went from a town of 8,000 to a major city. Life definitely was different. Some things were better, but I think we lost a lot of the closeness we'd had growing up during the 50s in a small town.

Sometimes, I wish we could go back to simpler times where people weren't fighting tooth and nail to get ahead so they can have all the cool stuff and it would be nice to not hear so much negative stuff thrown at us constantly by the media. I lost my parents when I was in my early 20s, but I have very fond memories of my childhood in the 50s.

I was born in the 40's and grew up in the 50's. For me, the 50's was a golden time, an innocent time, a time of magic. Maybe I was one of the lucky ones who grew up in a "sitcom family", but my parents were always there for us. We didn't have a lot of money but my mom knew how to squeeze a nickel until the buffalo's nose bled...lol. We had school and church and relatives/friends galore and a lot of freedom to "just be kids" that I think many children don't have today. I was still a cute kid and hadn't hit the ugly-duckling stage yet.

Maybe it's just my cataracts making me look back with rose-colored glasses, but I think the 50's were great.

Lol, my family was Black living in the south. humm let's see Jim Crow, segregation and lynching.

Forgive me for not wanting to go back. to the day he died my father flat out refused to go any farther south than DC

Jaya said:

I was born in the 40's and grew up in the 50's. For me, the 50's was a golden time, an innocent time, a time of magic. Maybe I was one of the lucky ones who grew up in a "sitcom family", but my parents were always there for us. We didn't have a lot of money but my mom knew how to squeeze a nickel until the buffalo's nose bled...lol. We had school and church and relatives/friends galore and a lot of freedom to "just be kids" that I think many children don't have today. I was still a cute kid and hadn't hit the ugly-duckling stage yet.

Maybe it's just my cataracts making me look back with rose-colored glasses, but I think the 50's were great.

Click to expand...

I agree with Jaya. I was born in 1942 and grew-up in a small Indiana town of about 2,000. My dad was in WWII and we were very poor until the middle '50's. My parents started work for General Motors in the '50's and we then had the middle class dream come true. Even though our town was very small our main street reminded me of Main St. in WDW. We had a movie theater and many other businesses in town. We always ate our meals together at our kitchen table, we didn't lock our doors to the house, neighbors looked out for each other and the sock hops after the basketball games were fun.

I live in a city of about 80,000 which is about 15 miles from my hometown. On Thursday morning I still meet with friends from my childhood in my hometown to drink coffee and tell stories. We all agree if we had it to do over, we would grow-up in the '50's and live where we did. We are getting close to the end, but it's been a good ride.

I was born in 1957 so don't know much about the 50's personally, but from what I've seen and heard I think I would have enjoyed being a teenager during that decade.

Loved the 60's and 70's too though. I think those decades were a "quieter and simpler" time than what it's like now.

With the way the world is heading, if DH and I were just starting out now I'm not even sure I would want to have children.