The Fifties

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

As I creep up upon my 79th birthday this May, I find myself reflecting on how the country has changed since I was a boy back in 1950s Long Island.

Permit me to take myself back there – in Malverne, Long Island – in the fall of 1956 for a short visit.

I was 12 years old and in 8th Grade at Our Lady of Lourdes grammar school. My classmates were a year older as I’d been skipped from 1st to 2nd grade earlier and was now forever playing catch-up with my older peers. A year or two makes a big difference when you’re a kid and almost no difference as an adult.

Funny how that works.

I have fun trying to re-summon the sense memories of that time: the delicious smell of burning autumn leaves by the curbside; the faint sound of bass drums from Firemen’s Field, where the local high school football season was unfolding; the crisp air of northeastern autumn; the way the light changed once summer was over.

I no longer rode my bike to school that fall. Not cool. The ethos was all about being a “rock,” a “hard guy.” We had watched too many James Dean movies and junk like “Blackboard Jungle” with a Bill Haley soundtrack and we aimed at what I’d now call “jitter sheik:” dark colors, thick garrison belts buckled to the side, motorcycle boots and leather jackets. Hair featuring a big pompadour frozen into place with an industrial strength elixir like School Hair Tonic. You needed a hammer to break my hairdo…although my father was happy to slap it out of shape every morning at breakfast.

The Dominican nuns had a strategy for dealing with pubescent lads of a certain age: I would later recognize it as following the core principles of terrorism: random abuse of the innocent; the regular application of overwhelming force, and the use of the large rosaries they wore like num-chucks.

It worked.

But we were growing larger and it probably wouldn’t work beyond the current school year.

American society outside the school was very different as well.

The adults in our neighborhood were mostly in the same age bracket – the World War II?generation.

Most of the men commuted on the Long Island Railroad to Manhattan for work; most of the women stayed home. Every family belonged to a church or synagogue, and most parents were involved in other civic organizations. Our neighborhood provided the equivalent of group parenting in the sense that – if you stepped out of line – someone would let you know. Then, they’d tell your parents. It took a village.

The extended family was also a reality. Every Sunday, after church and a late breakfast, we trooped over to my grandparents’ house in Garden City where the rest of the clan would have gathered. My grandfather held court there, out on his enclosed porch, always sitting in the same chair and holding forth to assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins. He had grown up in Trinidad in the West Indies and carried a British accent until the day he died. I can still hear that voice.

People ate different food then. Steaks and Pork Chops. Lamb and Liver. Mashed Potatoes and Green Beans. The only fish on the menu tended to be tuna…from a can. Nobody drank wine. Beer was the yellow, fizzy stuff and no one had any idea what a “craft beer” might be. Cocktails were the main choice for drinkers, and included Manhattan’s, Martini’s, and Scotch & Soda. Vodka was for the Russians.

Oh, and almost everybody smoked. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly thrust back into that environment, I’d be quickly reaching for a gas mask.

A certain set of children’s names were popular: James and John; Margaret and Kathleen. My grammar school was full of them. But they were better than the previous generation’s Gladys and Doris and Herman and Clyde…if only by a small margin.

It was just over ten years after the end of the Second World War and our parent's generation was experiencing a well-deserved break from Depression and war and getting a taste of the good life. Cars were sprouting chrome and fins and automatic transmissions. There was a steady diaspora of former city dwellers out into the suburbs across the country. Barbecues and lawns replaced stoops and fire escapes.

In many ways, it was a better time…in others, it wasn’t.

We regularly held air raid drills in school, hiding under our desks as if they’d protect us when the walls blew in and the roof collapsed. We had just finished one war in Korea and were a few years away from another in Vietnam. We’d lose classmates in that one. Senator Joe McCarthy had finally been tamed by the Senate, but it had been an unpleasant experience for the country, not to mention the individuals whose lives he’d ruined. Race relations were nowhere, and the Civil Rights Movement was only in its earliest stages.

I am struck by the tendency of memory to enshrine the good and erase the bad.