The Romance of the '50s

Kenn,

   Your are definitley from a different generation than I am.  Your view of the world is quite different than mine, and so is your experience level.  Before you shoot off your mouth about us men who have caused so many problems, you need to fight a war to understand just where we come from, and where your freedom comes from.  I did not see any reference to the founding mothers in our US Constitution, although many of our founding fathers were highly influnced by their incredible wives.  Feminized little boys are an endangerment to our coutries freedom.

You better hope those femenized little boys eventually become men, or you will loose the freedom that men like my Great GrandFather, Grandfather, Father and myself gifted you.  Freedom is not free it is the most expensive commodity on earth,

payed for with mens lives.  Men & ladies in the 50's knew it and acted accordingly.

PCRR/Dave

The crossovers are gone now too.

If your parents did a good job, you would hopefully romanticize whatever period of time during which you grew up because your parents made it a wonderful time.

The 1950s were a good time for many.  For others, not so much. 

Kids today are no different than children born in the 1950s.  In fact, human beings haven't changed that much in 10,000 years -- read Herodotus or the Bible and that becomes clear, quickly.

What is different today is the level of technology.  Like most developments, it is used for good purposes -- think of medical advancements and the improvements in efficiency that have come about.  It can also be used for bad purposes -- lunatics on the internet can have more access to children, and kids can have greater access to things they shouldn't see. 

But romanticizing one period of time over others typically involves a tremendous amount of selective recollection by the people doing the romanticizing.  As they say, it is what it is.

I grew up in the 50's, I'm a veteran and a sportsman.

There were good time and bad times, wars & suffering

but we as a Nation continued because we United against outside

threats, regardless of our individual Political or Dogmatic leanings.

There were many black times that occurred in the 20th Century.

Conversely, there were some very wonderful times.

Some people want to recapture the "Beaver Cleaver World" that never existed

in reality.

Some wish that it was 1913 instead of 2013. When White Men were King and Women and Minorities knew their place and were punished if they objected.

Change is a difficult thing for some people to accept.

Some people will  never accept change that did not originate from their side.

Some people have only a hammer and see everyone and everything else as a nail to be beat upon.

Yes, tell it like it was bigkid. No antiquated, sexist drivel, just cogent right on comments!

The comments regarding "selective memory" (AKA nostalgia) ring true. I am 70 years of age, and I am very pleased that my two grandchildren, Emily and Rachel, will have many more opportunities than their mothers or grandmothers ever had.

The comments above about "feminization" were very inappropriate and distasteful, not to mention false!

Women have contributed much to our country since its founding, even with the restrictions imposed upon them over the course of our history.

When women come into the same kind of power as men traditionally have wielded they generally act no better and no worse then the men, Eva Peron, Leona Hemsley, Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir, Cleopatra come to mind.

Jerry

I know you said "OUR COUNTRY" but the gist of your argument was that MEN screw things up and we'd be better off with women running things and my argument is that given the same oppurtunity women do no better. I didn't think I would have had to explain that part! Do you honestly believe women would run things any better than men could simply because they're women? That's ridiculous and horrendously sexist!

Jerry

Speaking strictly from my own personal perspective and having no idea whatsoever how my experiences might have been shared by others, I was a child in the 50's and did not acquire Lionel trains as a hobby because they were only brought out once a year - at Christmas; then, packed away for another year, Plus, they (two sets: #1666 & a Scout) were my father's trains, not mine. It took me thirty years to pick then up as a hobby of my own, and I think I was looking for something much larger than a hobby when, in 1994, I knelt on the empty cement floor of a new house, newly shared with a new wife, de-boxing my deceased father's old Christmastime trains.

In the 50's, it was TV that quickly began to dominate recreation in life, from the games we played to the characters we emulated as heroes. Our house had the neighborhood's first television set (Admiral, blonde cabinet; b&w) and neighbors readily came over after the supper dishes were hand-dried to watch shows with us, every day. If there were any kind of hobby for us kids, it was awaiting, discovering, and celebrating the newest models for each American-made car, like being able to surgically recite the precise changes that appeared from the '57 Chevy to the '58 models; the latest Cadillac fins, etc. Keeping track was an annual rite that lasted all year long; then, resumed anew the next year.

For play, we were left up to our own devices and made the most of it, with sticks, piles of dirt, and a few new toy cars and trucks.. Happily.

Frank M.

Thanks for that, Moonson. We're back on track!

I visit after a couple of days off and find this. What happened to trains, and the Romance of the '50's?

Is this a government run site?  

Greg

We are seeing a reoccurring theme here in these rememberances of our youth in the 1950's. While toy trains were always popular around Christmas not too many people had them up and running year round as we do now.

TV was also a new phenomenum that entirely changed our culture. TV introduced new forms of entertainment for everyone in the family and soon our other hobbies and interests were competing against the TV for our time.

TV started out small with black and white screens which soon developed into color TV and than we had VCRs and DVD players and now the technology continues to push us further into the entertainment realm with DVRs, etc.

All of these technologies have created demands for our time and we have to choose how we want to be entertained. The lore of reliving our youth is ever present today and perhaps that is why so many of us have train layouts and other things we couldn't afford or didn't have in our youth. 

Steve Tapper    

Steve, probably two more reasons trains were mainly only set up for the holidays were the size of homes back then and the size of the families who lived in them. More kids back then in the average familythan  today and smaller homes with fewer smaller rooms meant less space for a permanent layout for us kids. And for those families back then in a house with a garage, the garage almost always stored the family car with scarcely room for little else. If you had a basement in the 40's or 50's it didn't resemble the finished ones today but was generally dreary, dingy, often frightening unfriendly place for kids with an air of coal dust from the coal bin contained within along with the musical cacophony of clanging and banging water pipes as they brought water heated by the belching furnace to waiting radiators on the floors above.

Frank, I think we were brothers some how. Of course Mom liked me better. We also had the first TV in the neighborhood. In 1951 nothing came on the set tell about 3:00pm. All the kids in the area would come around to watch the live kids shows. I being a showman, set up all the kitchen and dinning room chairs like a movie house. I even used one of my Moms silk scarves as a curtain. When "Buzz Corey http://youtu.be/XJDJjHe2TJc and the Space Patrol" came on I would slowly raise the "Curtain". As more and more families purchased TVs I started loosing my audience. Is it any wonder why? Maybe that's why I went into television. Don

Maybe so (to both points.)

Oh, and,why does the guy in the lower-right foreground look similar to your avatar photo? Eh? Huh? And who is the Heddy Lamar-type smiler in the upper-right?

Frank M.

You know me better than you think. That's Buzzy Corey of course, it was my nick name. Buzzy. Don

Kenn,

The house we lived in was a three bedroom row house or nowadays a townhouse. The rooms were small and we had a lot of steps. We did have a knotty pine finished basement in our house as my uncles were very handy. But the only time my friends had trains out and running was around their Christmas trees. We had a small utility room with a washer & dryer and not much room for anything else.

Steve Tapper

During a couple fairly recent storms here in NJ, I had occasion to have my perspective on such considerations "refreshed". That is, all the electricity went out, and did so for a few days. Wow, we sure found out about the value of good conversation (and having a cache of plenty of candles permanently, readily available in the house) as well as having somebody whose company one actually enjoyed in close-quarters with oneself, esp. at night. Fortunately, for us, we found that we had adequate candles and more than enjoyable company, but when we didn't have an electronic device to activate for company and/or entertainment, we quickly felt we were like the original American Colonists, who placed great value in good friends, family, and good conversation - plus some good candles.

Frank