Were the good ol' days really that good?

stretcher74

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Frankly, in the 1950's, I enjoyed the fact that Mom did her household duties while wearing a Balenciaga gown, pearls and high heels, Dad drove the newest DeSoto to a mysterious office job that paid mucho $, my brothers and sisters all got along like Stepfords, we knew the mailman and the milkman by name, school was two blocks away and the bad guys wore black hats.

NO, NO Pecker, you're supposed to hate the 50's. They were abominable and oppressive.

as for the boomers hypocritically banning everything they tried out in the 60's though, isn't that the truth ?

Nothing wrong with a little nostalgia. I was a kid in the 80s so as far as I'm concerned that was the best decade ever.
 

Principessa

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Were the olden days that are romanticized really that great? For some people...I suppose they were. For others not so much. Or are we victims of a media dictated nostalgia and our own selective memory? Both
Do you remember how it was in the 50's, 60's, 70's? What was better back then that we have lost today? Well until March of 1977 when I was 10.5 prejudice did not exist in my world. I had literally never encountered it. I had the only dad on the block that didn't commute to work in NYC. Consequently, we always ate dinner together as a family. It was nice. He was the EEO Officer at the local Navy base. He was always home by 5:15 and dinner was on the table by 6. I attended a lovely private school which gave me not anly a good academic base but a love of plaid. :rolleyes: I had piano lessons on Tuesday afternoons and ballet on Friday nights. My mother's mother lived with us, and my father's parents lived 20 minutes away. I never had a babysitter that wasn't a family member.
The down side was living in the shadow of the cold war. We had a small black and white tv in the kitchen and watched the news during dinner. Heated discussions often followed.

We lived in a small rural town which was equi-distant (about 40 minutes) from Earle NWS, Fort Monmouth Army Base, Lakehurst Naval Air Station, Mc Guire Air Force Base, and Fort Dix Army Base. One day I asked my dad if a bomb hit Fort Monmouth would we be okay? He paused, thought about it, and told me not to worry about it. If the Commies (they were the enemy back then) wanted to really hurt us they would bomb Earle Naval Weapons Station. It's a munitions depot he explained.
If a bomb the size of the one we dropped on Hiroshima were dropped there, half the county would be vaporized. We'd die, he said, but we wouldn't feel a thing. I think I was about 7 then, I never forgot that. Daddy has never been one to sugarcoat things. :tongue: That's also why I knew when 9/11/01 happend that rescue and recovery was pretty much futile. I felt so sorry for the doctors, nurses, and social workers that rushed to area hospitals to treat the wounded that never came. FYI- 4 years later they were still finding body parts on rooftops in Harlem. :frown1: Morgues from around the nation sent body bags. They went unused because there were so few whole bodies.
The only thing I can think of that might have been better back then was nude swimming at the YMCA and I never got to experience it. Disco- mnyah, Drive-ins, Golden Age of Sex.....hmmmm?
I took swim lessons at the Lakewood YMCA summer 1970. I was 4, it was co-ed and we were never nude. I guess that was just for adult men. :tongue:
Being a total slut having bareback sex nutting off in countless birth control pilled babes was pretty fun. I had about 6 months of that before AIDS came into prevalence. I guess you could say I dodged a bullet.
Being free to go where ever I wanted and do as I please between sunup and sundown (when I wasn't in school) starting at about age 8 with little or no fear of human predators was nice too.
The racism was bad though. For me it was from about age 7 on. We were allowed to ride our bikes to the 7-Eleven on the highway to buy slurpees and candy. It was a mile away. Our mothers soon discovered that by reinforcing the brackets on the flowered baskets on the front of our bikes we could also pick up essentials such as milk, eggs, bread, cold cuts, and cigarettes.

Well, maybe if we could find some better method to resolve disputes than having contests to see which country can kill the most of the other countries' people, we might have a chance to have a couple generations of human beings who aren't so disassociative they can't deal with reality at all. We need religion and drugs to heal our wounds because we just fucking can't stop inflicting them on each other. Shameful, truly.
I agree, that's a lovely thought, but we haven't come up with a better way to dissolve disputes in over 3000 years. I've kinda given up hope on that note. Television was still new in the 50s. It wasn't that serial killers and child molesters didn't exist, we just hadn't heard much about them yet. Besides, there was still a "suck it up" cultural attitude- soldiers home from war found it better to be distant than communicate their feelings, which would have been seen as weak. Women who had been running their households plus the country, but were suddenly demoted back to being housewives were feeling a cognitive dissonance that pretty much would require either drugs or therapy- and therapy is for "crazy" people. Valium took off. WELL SAID!! The 90s were better for minorites of all sorts though. This is the first decade since I've been alive that we've actually regressed. I am angry as a human being, but I'm embarassed as an American. Yup, :redface: agreed.

Frankly, in the 1950's, I enjoyed the fact that Mom did her household duties while wearing a Balenciaga gown, pearls and high heels, Dad drove the newest DeSoto to a mysterious office job that paid mucho $, my brothers and sisters all got along like Stepfords, we knew the mailman and the milkman by name, school was two blocks away and the bad guys wore black hats.
Ooooo, Balenciaga gowns were 'The Bomb'! I used to sit on the milk box on the front stoop, to wait for the school bus everyday. :smile: Ahhhh sweet memories.

Cheap balsa wood gliders, too. Those were neat. We still have them but they aren't cheap. I remember those, they were pretty nifty. For one thing, when you called a business or government office back then, a bona fide human might actually pick up the phone. Now we spend much of the day hearing, "listen carefully, as the menu options have changed ...", I hate voice mail, more than God hates sin.

Punk is just a mix of folk with hard rock (take a Woody Guthrie song, add distortion). I'd rather not. :tongue:
Even Elvis was largely drawn from gospel music. The only Grammy's Elvis ever received were for his gospel music.
 

Pecker

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NO, NO Pecker, you're supposed to hate the 50's. They were abominable and oppressive.

Actually, stretcher, the closest my mom got to a Balenciaga gown was passing the department as she took the escalator to the Neiman-Marcus basement to find the cheap stuff. She usually wore little better than flour sack dresses. Seeing Donna Reed and Barbara Billingsley idealized as the Typical American Mom bothered me as a child.
 

madame_zora

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Actually, stretcher, the closest my mom got to a Balenciaga gown was passing the department as she took the escalator to the Neiman-Marcus basement to find the cheap stuff. She usually wore little better than flour sack dresses. Seeing Donna Reed and Barbara Billingsley idealized as the Typical American Mom bothered me as a child.


My step-dad worked for an auto maker and my mother was an accountant. I was an only child until I was 16, and we still didn't have that kind of expendible cash. When mom threw a formal dinner party and wanted to look fabulous, she'd make her own dress. She'd spend about $10 to look like a million, and the sound of the machine humming after she'd already put in a long day at work put me to sleep many a night.
I'm sure it's why I sew for a living now, and why I really don't care to do anything else.

If she had time, I'd rather have one of her homemade gowns for school dances than store bought, even if it meant KFC for dinner a few nights instead of her cooking. When I think about how much she was able to accomplish in a day I get tired in advance.

She died at 46 from a heart attack brought on by stress. Seems all those expectations to "do it all and look fabulous while doing it" weren't such a great idea after all. Seems she could have learned a little from Roseanne about not being so perfect all the time, Donna Reed only had to be perfect for a half hour a week.
 

B_big dirigible

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Dad drove the newest DeSoto to a mysterious office job that paid mucho $,
'50s DeSotos, about the closest we ever got to the flying cars we were all supposed to have, at least according to prewar Popular Science. Of course they didn't fly, so having what looked like a rocket ship parked in the driveway would have to do.
 

earllogjam

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I suspect that it wasn't all that rosy back then. We get a distorted picture of the times looking at TV reruns of Leave it to Beaver and the Brady Bunch. Affluent upper middle class families living in well to do suburbs. Mr. Brady worked as an architect supporting 6 kids, a full time housekeeper, his beautiful stay at home wife, and owned 2 cars, and lived in Pacific Pallisades. Yeah right. Maybe it was that ideal of prosperity, "the good life" that made the show so popular however unreal it was.

The reality was I think a lot of parents both worked and lived in modest houses- a lot smaller that the ones now, and were frugal, maybe had their own gardens, and did side jobs - at least that was how it was where I grew up.

I do think however that our American standard of living has most certainly declined from our hey days of the 50's when the norm was that a one income household was able to support a family of 4, own a home, have a new car every 3 years, take a family vacation every year, and have mom stay at home - cook, clean, raise kids. The phenomenon of middle class women taking jobs started out as a liberalization of a women's right to work in the 60's and 70's but has ended up being a necessity just to get by and survive today.

Not to knock women's rights but there was a time, I think up until the early 70's where women were only "accepted" in two main professions - teaching and nursing. Consequently since it was the only field they could advance within, only the best and the brightest women taught American kids and it had a great impact on the quality of grade school education - we lost that valuable resource when professional women sought other more lucrative or interesting jobs after women's lib and I don't think public education ever recovered. I think it was the start of the slow decline of the educational system in this country.

I wonder if we are really better off now, if we are going to have it better than our parents or grandparents. Socially no, standard of living-wise....? I guess it's hard to compare apples to oranges, then to now. Does it matter? Is being nostalgic on the past going to make the present or future any better?

And when did we start looking back for our inspiration instead of looking forward for it?
 

viking1

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The "good old days" had their highs and lows, as do modern times. I do think things were simpler and the pace slower back then. We have so much more technology available to the average person now.

That said, I would go back in a second, if I was given the chance to. Getting older has done nothing good for me that I know of.

A guy I went to school with came into the shop at work last week at lunch time. We had a little "life as we age" discussion. Some said that they were more content now as they have gotten older. I am not. I feel the same way mentally that I did years ago. I told him time has done nothing except make me old, fat, and ugly. Well, I don't know about the ugly part...I never was handsome. When I was 18 my back didn't hurt from arthritis and degenerative disk disease, I could see better, hear better, and I had more energy and stamina. Most of all I didn't fear for the future like I do now. I think I was more content back then. I really would go back if I could. Yes, there were bad points back then as compared to now. I still say the "good old days" really were just that for me.
 

SpeedoGuy

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IAnd when did we start looking back for our inspiration instead of looking forward for it?

Marketing again, I'm afraid.

Its much more enjoyable to look back wistfully at the days of finned cars, defined benefit retirement plans, and bouffant hairstyles than to look forward to:

* bin Laden wannabes plotting and scheming around the globe.

* Ecomomic competition with China driving the price of fuel ever higher.

* Rush hour traffic jams becoming the norm at just about all hours.

* Pakistan only one assassination away from becoming a nuclear-capable fundamentalist Islamic theocracy.

* More brown skinned people in your neighborhood. They're already everywhere and their numbers are growing.

* Assembly line medical care, er, I mean, the HMO your retirement plan contracts with.

* etc
 

earllogjam

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Marketing again, I'm afraid.

Its much more enjoyable to look back wistfully at the days of finned cars, defined benefit retirement plans, and bouffant hairstyles than to look forward to:

* etc

Lol.

Yeah time to quote Bob Dylan- "the times they are a changin"

What pathetic visionaries we have today. Don't even think of mentioning (insert your presidential candidate), Oprah or Dr. Phil here. L Ronn Hubbard and Carl Sagan are dead. Can you think of a foward thinking visionary today?
 

B_big dirigible

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Marketing again, I'm afraid.

Its much more enjoyable to look back wistfully at the days of finned cars, defined benefit retirement plans, and bouffant hairstyles than to look forward to:

* bin Laden wannabes plotting and scheming around the globe.

* Ecomomic competition with China driving the price of fuel ever higher.

* Rush hour traffic jams becoming the norm at just about all hours.

* Pakistan only one assassination away from becoming a nuclear-capable fundamentalist Islamic theocracy.

* More brown skinned people in your neighborhood. They're already everywhere and their numbers are growing.

* Assembly line medical care, er, I mean, the HMO your retirement plan contracts with.

* etc
Our era is hardly the first which has had to face challenges. It's not even the first to try to duck out of it all by fetishizing weltschmerz and angst. Fortunately, efforts to convert the entire planet into an effete, helpless, touchy-feely, testosterone-free zone have not been completely successful.
 

50%more

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I fished a lot more in the good old days.

Barbara Eden and Elizabeth Montgomery were in my fantasies.
 

ClaireTalon

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Nostalgia is basically the ability to forget things that sucked ;-)

I was born in 63, so I'm more a (conscious) kid of the 70s, and I still didn't get past favoring the music from those days, also the music of the 60s and 80s. Aside from that, I don't miss too many things. However, sometimes I personally miss my earliest days as ROTC cadet, early 1980s. Life wasn't easy being a cherry, but in some way it was made easy. Also, laugh at me or don't, I sometimes miss BT (Basic Training, aka Boot Camp). The rough physical drill was a good contrary to the intellectual challenges of college, but that made it relaxing for me. Also miss firing an assault rifle ... I always imagined my brothers were the silhouettes at the other end of the ranges, and watching them go down one after the other, bloody, I know. Or Flight Training... you name it, early 80s had been a BLAST for me.

I liked that computers hadn't been around every house and desk then. I try to savor that kind of ambiente by storing my laptop away when I'm finished working with it.
 

Love-it

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Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Moving on:

I had a happy childhood and I won't let it go!

I realize that I was luckier than some. I thought that we were an average family but at some point I realized that we were different, a lot of that had to do with our New England upbringing that stood out in California. My conclusion: when the west was being won, criminals, malcontents, psycotics and lawyers were the first to arrive, and they reproduced!

No hard feelings, I like the remote parts of California and I wouldn't want to live in any city in any state.
 

Full_Phil

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Nostalgia is basically the ability to forget things that sucked ;-)

It is just that--- the "ability" (as well as the desire) to forget the bad times that carry most people through. Sorry to bore folks with my history again, but I have carried my childhood pains around with me by choice for many years and have no real fond memories of The Good Old Days. If you opt to improve your life and shed old bad habits, however, you can create a better life regardless of where you are in time or place.
 

ClaireTalon

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It is just that--- the "ability" (as well as the desire) to forget the bad times that carry most people through. Sorry to bore folks with my history again, but I have carried my childhood pains around with me by choice for many years and have no real fond memories of The Good Old Days. If you opt to improve your life and shed old bad habits, however, you can create a better life regardless of where you are in time or place.

That is why my "Good ol' days" are either very selective, or start rather late, around my 18th year. I don't want to glorify the bad times, and I really can't do that; however, I do remember the better moments. But the question must be asked whether the good ol' days have been more than music and TV shows. I mean, what about things you did, experiences, events?
 

SteveHd

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Since De Soto cars have been mentioned, I've uploaded pics of a 1959 De Soto. This one sold at a Barrett-Jackson auction for $230,000! The triple-port fins ran from 57 thr. 59.
 

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dong20

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For one thing, when you called a business or government office back then, a bona fide human might actually pick up the phone. Now we spend much of the day hearing, "listen carefully, as the menu options have changed ...", apparently recorded by a card-carrying member of the Slow Talkers of America.

They talk slowly because it's usually a premium rate line. And, when you do get through, it's the wrong dept, either because you pressed a wrong key at option level 719, or they put you on hold, or they put you on hold then cut you off.:mad:
 

ClaireTalon

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We lived in a small rural town which was equi-distant (about 40 minutes) from Earle NWS, Fort Monmouth Army Base, Lakehurst Naval Air Station, Mc Guire Air Force Base, and Fort Dix Army Base. <.>


Well, what do you say: More Good ol' days. MacGuire was where I had been stationed for some time. Those were the days...

He paused, thought about it, and told me not to worry about it. If the Commies (they were the enemy back then)
[/quote]

And another point. I just can't get past those Commie guys, they were the big bogeyman then. Well, it looks like the Russians are acting up again, and there will be a comeback? Stay tuned. I still think their leaders made the better concept of an enemy, other than UBL.