The Romance of the '50s

Holy Moly, Holy Moly!!  Did you grow up in the D.C. area, Greg???  Pick Temple!!!???  OMG, what a story I have about that guy!!!  No, I was never on his show (WTOP, at the top of the hill), and I never got the chance to sit in the saddle and rattle off 'Hi's!' to all the family/friend's names I could in the alloted amount of time...before the cow mooed.  But I attended Janney Elementary school just a couple of blocks away from WTOP studios.  Across the street from Janney, at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Albemarle St., was a Sears Roebuck store...very Art Deco in styling, and a neighborhood icon. 

Well, during lunch hour, kids could either eat their lunch in the school lunch room, walk home if it was close by, OR go across the street and eat in the Sears cafeteria in the lower level...no permission slips required.  THAT was special, sometimes financed by the parents, sometimes out of our allowance.  (Believe me, NONE of this lunchtime behavior or leaving school on your own would EVER be condoned nowadays!!  Anyone want to argue that 'Times have changed'????)

But, back to Pick Temple...   I had a girlfriend, Susan, in my class.  Sometimes when all of the events of life were aligned, we'd both go across the street to eat at the Sears cafeteria.  Well, on this memorable day we had just finished lunch and were rounding the corner to ride the escalator up to the ground floor.  We hadn't seen this guy a few steps on the escalator ahead of us.  Susan, seeing this guy with a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, fancy duds standing before her with his back to her blurted something like "Hi ya, cowboy!!".  With that, he turns around and we both recognized that it was THE MAN, himself...Pick Temple!  OMG! 

Susan fainted.  I mean she just dropped like a rock.  I was dumbstruck and could neither say anything or do anything but stand there, the escalator continuing on, folks behind rushing to help Susan...and Pick Temple, himself, stepping DOWN the escalator to grab her.  He picked her up, still in a dead faint, and carried her like some hero would for the rest of the ride to the next level.  There he enlisted a store clerk to help, get a damp rag.  Susan came to about then, started to cry, and half-screamed in disbelief again as she looked into his face, still in his arms.

Needless to say, she's not the one I married.  I flunked the first test of chivalry with my first girlfriend...even though it was within the first decade of my existence. 

And Winky Dink!!!  Watched it regularly on our old Dumont TV.  I can still hear the jingle..."Winky Dink and you, Winky Dink and me...!"  Yeah, I remember the plastic sheet...that they'd have you send away for in order to connect the random lines on the screen to divulge the message for the next adventure.  Not me!  Dad saw what that was all about, went to the kitchen, and came back with a sheet of Saran Wrap, the clear clingy film for covering food dishes.  He put it on the face of the Dumont tube, gave me a crayon, and said something like 'Here, save yourself a buck!'  Dad's are so smart...at least they were back then!!!

I hope this thread never ends.  It's downright therapeutic!! 

KD

  Well, this has been a reunion of ages gone by.  I was in the ninth grade, still taking a daily newspaper, now, having sometime ago paid $50. ($5.00 a week from my newspaper collections directly to the Bikeshop owner (my first official loan)) for my new 1954 26" American English Shwinn 3speed bike that I still ride today.  Each day I crossed  the ACL mainline NY to Miami line twice a day.  My father had become President of the school PTA and after school as I got on my bike to go head for the newspaper printing room which was three blocks back accross the ACL Mainline I had to endure taunting remarks from some students who were very upset at my father and the PTA.  It was then that students would be required to stay on the school campus - no off campus lunch privileges.  The town merchants said they did not want students waundering around downtown any more, said they were 'losing merchandise'.  I guess that was the beginning of mandatory on-campus lunches here in NOrth Carolina.

"Holy Moly, Holy Moly!!  Did you grow up in the D.C. area, Greg???  Pick Temple!!!???"

Well, yeah, KD.....if you count Cambridge in the DC area. If you ever went to Ocean City via RT50 all the way to the shore, you passed over the Choptank Bridge and went thru Cambridge.

Today, most of the people there opt for high class cable or satellite for TV, but back in the '50-'60's, everything came in the house via twin lead wire from a roof antenna. Back then, we got (only VHF that I remember) channels 2,4,5,7,9,11 and 13. WBAL, WJZTV, WMAR, WTTG, WWW I CANTREMEMBERTHERESTOFTHEM!!!

You must have been thrilled to have seen the man, Old Pick himself. Don't know if you ever looked, but you can find out much more here http://kidshow.dcmemories.com/pick6.html

Since you are from the DC area, you will find much of what is there interesting.

And you will especially like this, it is just for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg-S2Qm7N-k

Funny story about the escalator. I don't think I saw or knew what one was until I was probably 18 or so. We did have an elevator in Cambridge, went all the way up to the second floor in a bank. As kids, we used to get a kick out of riding it up and down after school...until someone would come and kick us out of the building.

And as poor as we were, 6 of us living in a 5 room house with no toilet or bathroom, I am sure I remember having the Winky Dink screen and sticking it to the tv when the show came on to do "the secret drawing." Go figure that one.

As for the guys and their Tonka trucks, I never had any of those...but we did have our Structo trucks, that lasted forever. I still have a couple of my tractor trailer rigs!

I would say, that those of us born from 1946 to say, 1950, had that Fanner 50 that someone mentioned in another post. Now....for the kicker, how many still have theirs and the original holster? I still have mine, and I BET that probably 6 out of 10 on this forum still have theirs... if they had one. They took the more expensive "perforated caps" so we did not bust rolls of those with hammers.

But we did bust plenty of the others!! And I bet many on here had a little, pearl handled derringer that took one bullet....that came apart and took a round cap inside when you put it back together and then in the gun, a Palladin, "Have Gun-Will Travel" gun from the show back then.

Raise your hands, who had one? And still has it? I do. I don't think my mother ever threw anything away.

Gee, I still have my baseball cards and marbles! Lucky me. My 8 year old grandson would not know what to do with a marble if I gave him a bag of them! Funny how times change, isn't it?

We had yo-yo contests sponsored by Duncan on Saturday at the movie theater, the typical hula hoops and pogo sticks, soapbox races yearly (I never did get to go to the Nationals in Indiana (?)...anyone on here that did go? 

Anyone ever do something my grandmother called "tic-tacking" to a house? We usually reserved it for Halloween. You could do this way back when, when the houses had clapboard siding.

It took a 16d nail, a piece of twine, and a wet rag. You tied one end of the twine around the nail up by the head. The twine was about 24" long.

Prepared for battle against those who dared to not give treats on that hallowed night, you initiated your vile attack! After leaving the porch empty handed, you made your way to the side or back of the clapboard house.

There was almost always a gap between the boards horizontally. If there was, you had it made. You pushed the nail point up vertically in between the loose boards until it "bottomed" at the head. Remember, the head is now down since the point went up, and the string is hanging from the head.

You then took the wet rag in your hand, and held the twine, up by the nail head, between your thumb and first joint on your forefinger between the rag and squeezed. As you squeezed, you also pulled on the string that was attached to the nail.

As you pulled, you changed your tension so that the string would slowly slip between the rag and slide. The vibration of the string being pulled and released and slipping, caused the nail to vibrate, which in turn, caused the boards to vibrate.

Given the right boards, and the right guy "working" the string, it made it sound like you had a crowbar and were pulling the whole side off of the house! A drum could not have made a louder noise to echo throughout the neighborhood.

Guaranteed to cause the hapless homeowner to bust out the front door running to find out what was happening to his prized home!

And it was perfectly harmless. You pulled down on the nail and moved on to another unsuspecting house.

I am one of the few I know who ever heard of that trick. Don't try it with aluminum or vinyl siding!! You really will pull the side off of the house.

Oh well, gotta run. I have some wax bottles in the kitchen that I have to bite the tops off of and suck out the sweet nectar that comes in them! Remember those?

Greg

Born in 1949, I am blessed to have enjoyed my childhood in the 1950s. I got to see The Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore) and Lassie live at the Akron Rubber Bowl, and Moore handed me a silver bullet! My simple little Lionel train was one of my prized possessions, and I grew up in a house that sat alongside the Erie RR mainline with countless passenger and freight trains racing past my window every day!

You couldn't walk through our house without stepping on a toy gun as we were always playing army and cowboys, but we learned the difference between right and wrong by watching the quality television family shows and westerns of that era. Compare that to what kids are exposed to today, and it's no wonder young people have such problems and there is so much senseless violence.

I'll take the 50s and Presidents Truman and Eisenhower again!

Anybody remember the sturdy Tonka Toys made of heavy metal?  I recall one year for Christmas in the 50's I received a Tonka hiway construction set that had a couple of hydraulic dump trucks, a road grader, and a pick-up truck.  Extremely well made toys that lasted me years.  I haven't a clue whatever happened to them... but boy it was fun while it lasted!  A friend and me would use our construction trucks/toys to build mud roads in his back yard, complete with "formers" we would make out of sticks... and pour "concrete" (thin mud we mixed)!  We used cans with both ends cut out for our "culverts" and would dig the ditches using our construction toys to create our water drainage "system"!  We would do this by the hours.

Also enjoyed the playsets that were made. (Like Fort Apache.) However, those may have been popularized in the early 60's instead of the 50's?

Seems as if many of our toys were "imagination stations" that really helped us develop our abilities to think, create, and improvise?

Yeah...

We didn't need no stinkin' apps on an i-whatever, they were in our heads!

Rusty

...and hearts.

Frank

Rusty, you are correct, my folks had very little disposable income, across the alley was a cabinet shop and wood scrap pile. Me and my Italian, Polish and Slovak buddies, all kids from blue collar families, would rummage through this scrap pile for wood to make rifle, bows and arrows, etc. and had a great time doing it. Played sandlot baseball with base pads and homeplate(cardboard from the local Ma and Pop Italian grocery store), played tackle football in cut field no uniforms/gear, also played tag football in the street under streetlights, also Halloween Trick and Treating, no costumes, to expensive for our folks, they would dress us as hobos, I am now 63 and these were found memories, although we kids did not receive many toys or fancy new bicycles we sure used our imagination and had a good time, also although our parents were strict we were taught discipline, responsibility and respect. Reflecting back on my childhood and teenage years and the way things were in the 50's and 60's I have NO regrets in growing up during this period.

John

Pick Temple!  Now, there's a memory.  He was sponsored by Giant's Heidi Bakery and used to do grocery store openings and other appearances around the D.C. area.

I had a friend two doors up who was going on the show and needed some "western wear" for the show. I had this Lone Ranger outfit (a really weird powder blue) that he borrowed along with my holsters and "six shooters."

Also remember Ranger Hal.  Fun stuff.

Oh, wow, yes.  They were fantastic.  I had two that I dearly loved. Both gifts from Santa Clause.  One was an eight-wheeled monster steam shovel type thing in yellow, the other a pretty big dark green tractor-trailer with a lowboy trailer for hauling bulldozers, etc. - or my little brother!

" I had this Lone Ranger outfit (a really weird powder blue) that he borrowed along with my holsters and "six shooters."  "

Back when I (most of us probably) watched the show, we saw it on small B & W (that is black and white for you younsters!) TV's and I guess I never really thought about the color of his clothes when I watched. I assumed they were like his horse....white! I kind of knew Amos and Andy were not.

Then I saw a movie or perhaps saw the show in color the first time, and-  Lo and behold, his clothes were blue! What a hoot. But I do not really ever thinking, "Oh boy, no longer gonna like this guy because his outfit is blue. Guess it will only be Hoppy in his black or Wild Bill in his buckskins for me from now on."

Nope, just watched the shows and enjoyed them.

Funny thing. Try waking up at 6 AM on Sunday morning and turn on the satellite or cable TV. What to watch? Okay, start flippin--------------------

A couple of news shows, 20 sports channels, 100 "try to sell me something I don't really need" channels, and a few with old shows.

Darned if I did not wind up this morning eating breakfast on the couch, and watched Lucy light her nose on fire out in California - for probably the tenth time.

I can never figure out why she does not learn after the first couple of times and hold the lighter away from her nose! Still had to laugh, a true comedienne! 

Later, Greg

The 50's. Ya' had t' be there.

Then, you would get smoke in your eyes.

Greg... 

Re still having your marbles...   People tell me I lost mine long ago!! 

Seriously, though, I have a lot of my childhood stuff...mostly the trains..., but the guns/holsters/bows and rubber-tipped arrows are long gone.  Mom was particularly careful to include us kids in any decision to let our stuff go after we had outgrown it.  Thread discussions like this stir memories, but not regrets re having let the 'toys' go.

Re your Halloween prank...   Ours was a bit different, but fully intended to irritate!!

I learned if from Mom who claims to have been part of a neighborhood girls' gang for Halloween night in her home in Wisconsin.  You take an old wooden sewing thread spool and file serrations along the edge of the two flanges.  Tie a long string to the center of the spool and wind the string up on the spool.  Take a nail or dowel to put through the center of the spool that will allow it to spin freely. 

THEN, you sneak up to a window on someone's house.  Mom said the most fun was finding a window next to the chair in the parlor where someone was reading the paper, knitting, snoozing, listening to the radio, ...whatever.  Carefully, quietly hold the spool against the glass and pull the string real fast!!  !!!  The rat-a-tat buzzing sound from the spinning spool on the glass would usually get the unsuspecting to leap our of their chair and make a beeline for the door.  Of course, you needed to have your escape route all planned in advance!!!

Ah, yes...  No halo's on Halloween!

KD

Bill...

Akron!  Wasn't that the 'home' of the Soap Box Derby??  There's something else that boys (and girls, too) and their dad's would do in the 50's...build and compete with a 'soap box' racer...which were WAY more sophisticated that a soap box on wheels!!  When they had the competition in D.C. (Pennsylvania Avenue S.E....just a couple of blocks from my aunt's apartment) the whole family would go to watch.  It was a BIG DEAL!!  No, Dad and I never did build an official racer, but I threw some scraps of this-and-that together to go down the alley hill behind our house.  It used old metal wheel roller skates and it sounded like H___ when it got going...that and our screams of abandon!!  

Geeze, all it takes is one word, one name, one town and the memories start flowing.  This is crazy good stuff!!

KD

All right.  I am back to defend myself against Dewey and others.  Did you not read my post that my allowance was 50 cents when I was going to cowboy movies and the like.  It was in high school when I was dating girls that I had the $5 allowance, i.e. I was paying for two then.  Plus I had to earn it by mowing the lawn, help clean the house with my sisters, do dishes etc. My mom worked outside the house.

Also, Dewey, going sockless in any shoes wasn't done back then.  That is a recent thing. My kids did that, not me.  In my day everyone wore white sweat socks in their penny loafers.  In college, the "in" shoe was dirty white bucks and we still wore the loafers too.

.....

Dennis

P.S.  Laming, you should have kept those metal Tonkas.  They are worth money as antiques now.

 Okay Dennis I will pull the "needle" out and behave before you reveal more characteristics of your frugal lifestyle. 

That really is what the 50s were all about when we were kids.  Our parents maybe worried about the important stuff but we were happy with little, and no electronic gadgets to entertain us.  I could play a complete ball game by myself bounding a ball off the front steps.  I knew every Yankee batter in order, and every Tiger batter in order.  A grounder off the steps I would have to throw back to the steps and catch the return for an out. A liner or fly ball I could catch for the out.  Anything that got past me was a hit according to where it landed.  Over my head into the street was a double.  Over my head past the center of the street was triple, and over my head all the way over the street was a home run.  I also had the tigers play Cleveland and Boston and knew their batters in order too.  The ball in this game was a tennis ball.  Good bounce but not hard enough to break the front door window with a foul ball off the steps. 

.....

Dennis

Okay.Okay.Okay.

We used to play baseball in the alleys in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood.  Once in a while we'd get everyone to WALK to the nearest park (a mile or two away) and make an afternoon of it.

As I look back, what was amazing was that our "world" was normally the east side of our block between 26th and 27th streets.  ALL the kids lived on that side, there were no families with kids on the west side of the street.

Rusty

Saturday afternoon at the movies. Wouldn't get out until four or five in time for dinner.

THANKS so much with the roy rogers tv ad-he sure wore the wildest shirts and boots for a cowboy-my favorite was cheyenne with clint walker

Aw, Dennis, you did it again!!...another memory dusted off!!  Of course!! My friend across the alley, Ronnie, and I played 2-person baseball with a tennis ball and the front steps.  What a hoot!  What EXERCISE!!...no sitting on your butt staring at a teeny-tiny screen pushing teeny-tiny buttons with your thumbs.

Speaking of baseball...   Anyone else ever 'flip' baseball cards with one or more pals back in the 50's? Totally mindless...and fun. 

KD

Mindless!?  I won a lot of cards that way.

Think of that W.C. Fields movie - "Is this a game of chance?"

"Not the way I play it."

Pete

I never knew a kid who had a "shooter hat"....belt buckle, yes- hat, no. Maybe that was a '60's toy. Too new for me maybe?

How about these? Memories anyone? Greg

Hate to say it, but anyone in my group with a "shooter hat" would have been laughed at. And if a kid had shown up riding a bike wearing a HELMET ??? Yipes!

GREG-thanks for posting the pic of the derringer-it was a must have as a kid-yancy derringer was a big tv western show-if you only have the mini winchester-length-size of my hand.big sellers

i do not remember the roy rogers hat-i had the roy rogers fix it stagecoach.between davy crockett cards-dc comics-baseball and football cards-it was tough buying everything that came out for us kids.great times-everything was made in the us to.

.

 Ok, we get it jaygee.

Your favorite TV show from back then was "The Invisible Man."

Or was your favorite comic book "Little Dot?"

G

Nicole, We have home 3-D slides also. Hundreds of them. The lady that took them traveled all over the world from Africa to Russia and shot 3-D slides. She left them all to my wife Vicky when she was a little girl. We even have two powered 3-D viewers in the box. I have been trying to buy a 3-D projector so we can watch them on a big screen but every time they come up on E-bay they are way to high in price. A side note, my Mom took me to the first showing in Hollywood of "Buana Devil" and I was hooked. Don

HONDO withnjohn wayne and THE CREATURE from the black lagoon were in 3d.

I remember Bwana Devil.  It was a terrible movie and even at that tender age, I had Nigel Bruce typecast as Watson and kept wondering why Basil Rathbone wasn't in it as Holmes!

My favorite from back them was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.  I realize that it was actually in the early '60s.  But geez, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin - wow!  And it's where John Wayne's iconoic term "Pilgrim" (for Jinny Stewart, in the movie) came from . . .

NEAT! I have collected 3-D slides from the '50s for 12 years, and have 4,500. I have a TDC projector as well, plus a silver (needed) screen and 3-D glasses.

There are as many ways to comment  on this question as there are people on this forum and they will all be different. My 30,000 foot perspective as an adult living today after growing up in the entire decade of the 1950s is this. In the post war period America had few international rivals as a global military or commercial power. This created a different tone for the era than we have today, living in our complicated world of intense global economic competition, frequent and widespread terrorism,and perceived or real military threats from nuclear proliferation and numerous regional wars. Individual families had their own individual problems then, just as we do today, but the tone of the society as a whole was much different. It felt and was more optimistic for the reasons cited above. This complicated modern world with all these threats weighs heavily on our national psyche in my opinion, and is the reason we even ask these questions about a perceived better time that was recent enough for many of us living today to have experienced for ourselves.

My parents "perceived" the 50's better than later decades, so much so, that they seldom bothered to lock their doors.

I think this article deserves its own thread.  I found it fascinating, easily the most researched and interesting article ever seen in the TCA Quarterly (my apologies to those "Who Dunnit?" fans ).

George

 . . . and I would add, Peter, our parents had lived through the depression and then rationing during the war.  The 50s were a much better time than that.

.....

Dennis

I love to read all this, it's moving, even if I can't share those wonderful memories from you people at the other side of the Atlantic.

regards, Kieffer

Peter,

   Because I was raised in Potter County and spent more time with my Grandfather

Fly Fishing and Grouse hunting as he taugh me a fantastic back woods way of life, 

my view of America is very much like my Grandfathers who slept with his doors unlocked, and his gun loaded.  I grew up in the early 50's, it was not optimism, it was reality and God, men knew right from wrong and would not put up with evil in their homes, or society as we are doing today.  These men were also violant, they lived in a different manner than we do, if someone threatened their family, they handeled it with quick and deadly force, as they did the war they had just faught, some how after Viet Nam men changed. We became more willing to accept evil in our cities and hand outs from the government.  The world is no more complicated than it was in the 50's, little boys however have become a lot more femenized,

spending massive time with mommy, due to family break ups.  Which was another planned event to undermine our society.  When I was a boy we were taught the

US Constitution in school, we knew that God fearing men wrote that Constitution

and that we lived in a Representive Republic.  No sir the world has not changed, men however have changed, we are not the same as our fathers and fore fathers,

it seems we are willing to accept the evil our fathers did not accept.

PCRR/Dave  

I think you're right. There was optimism, and a feeling of relief. But I think there was a lot of angst too. The war generation here, people discussing and deliberating to emigrate, and quite a few did. Almost half of my family went to Australia, and certainly not out of an economic perspective. They simply had enough, and that new threat rising just some 800km away was the limit.

I still see my dad, pale and quiet sitting for the radio. The Red Army rolled over Prague.

That was '68, not the fifties any more, but that uncanny feeling, a frightened dad and a nervous mum I'll never forget. That's the time my dad started his war habits again, with closing the curtains, and instructing his kids to be silent as a mouse. People might hear us. He shut of the telephone and the door bell. he parked his car outside and sneaked into the house through the back door. Our footsteps made him outraged, so we walked around on socks. Then, all was feeling very strange. Much later I understood he was back in his shelter again.

On my shelf is a Lionel engine from the forties.

That toy was played with by some kid, at a time that US serviceman, may be even his dad, or uncle, came over, fought it out and gave my dad and my family their life back.

I allways have to think about that, with that toy in my hands. You me call me sentimental, or a melodramatic.

God bless America, that's what I would like to say. It's not 'very European', the God blessing and all, but I just do feel like that.

Kieffer

Ditto my parents, too, Dennis.  I do understand where you're coming from in saying 'the 50's were better'.  I've said it myself.  I know a lot of that post-war generation had the attitude 'My kids are not going to have to live through that!', and were able to deliver on that commitment.

But, perhaps, in hindsight we all lost something for not having to face the necessity of personal responsibility in making ends meet, providing basics, learning to save, re-use, extend.  We had this discussion in a church group just a couple days ago.  We're several...many...generations into a different way of viewing 'hard times' now.  Many are not ready for it.  The surviving few from that 2nd quarter of the last century are dismissed as daft or demented, senile, ...charming and quaint.  The personal and social lessons, victories, survival strategies of that part of our history are neither taught nor celebrated in the home, school, or media.  Only the suffering is reminded...as a means through which to promote today's agenda.

So, I'm not so sure that the 50's were a 'better' time in terms of self-development.  I'm starting to think that 'recess' is over, and we're too tired as a nation to get back to the school of life...seriously.

BTW, re your avatar quote...People tell me that my being a PITB comes naturally!

I still think this is a great thread.  Hope it continues on for a long time....!

KD