This is a revised version of Do You Remember the 1950s with many new things to remember.

Lots of people have written about what the past was like. It has been done so many times, I was tempted not to do it. But then I figured I would try to do it better!... to mention things that were more interesting, significant and/or educational. Some of the things about the past were funny, some disgusting at times. Some things were very strange. If you are a baby boomer, it will bring back memories. If you are not, you will learn some strange and curious history. This asks if you remember things from the 1950's.. Remember: When boys took girls to drive-ins to make out....Having to call an operator to have her dial a long distance call for you. Remember when boys rode in cars with their girls sitting right next to them on the bench seat. The boy would ride with his arm around the girls neck. Clothes had to be dried on clothes lines. Gay people were called queers and faggots and no one admitted to being gay. This is the way things were. Some things were better and some were worse. You will be entertained.

Growing up in the 1950s with the baby boomers Some things got better and some worse. Do you remember .
When families went to restaurants and drove in cars, they actually talked because they didnt have mobile phones, built in car DVD players, game devices, etc. Guys used the term hot often. They would make out and try to get the girl hot (breathing heavily, etc.) and then they would French kiss and pet above the waist and/or below the waist as they used to say. Most small stores didnt have cash registers and didnt have scanners. The clerk would take the paper bag and write down the prices of everything and then add it all up. The he would put your stuff in that bag.) That was your itemized list! Girls couldnt go swimming during their periods because they had to wear Kotex pads. If a girl had a period, the saying was,She has the rag on. Think of it Her mothers generation had to use rags. There was no Kotex! There was only one bathroom in almost all houses. Some people had showers but people took baths (at least once a week whether they needed it or not!) If you worked in the woods or along a stream you would see actual living frogs, toads, box or snapping turtles or snakes.

No one ever saw deer inside city limits. If a deer was anywhere near civilization, he was dinner. In the Autumn everyone raked leaves into the street and burned them. People like the smell of Autumn leaves. The idea of putting them in the garbage or having them collected and hauled away would have been considered just plain ridiculous. Elementary schools and most other schools did not have cafeterias. Hot meals! (You got to be kidding!) You brought your peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a candy bar. Many movies and all TV were black and white until Technicolor revolutionized movies. If you had anything electric or electronic and you dropped it, for sure it would not function. Radios, for instance had fragile glass tubes, and would surely cease working. Cars radios had to repaired every couple of years. Most parents never talked to their children about sex until they finally told them about the birds and the bees. Girls would have their periods for the first time and go hysterical thinking they wee bleeding to death. If a penny was on a sidewalk, the first person to come along would pick it up. You could go to a bank and get a silver dollar in exchange for a paper dollar People just hit the floor and died. Many more people died young and unexpectedly. No one took precautions about high fat diets. There were no routine cholesterol tests or statin drugs. When you went to bed, your parents might let you take the kitchen radio to the night table next to your bed and let you listen to radio shows like The Lone Ranger or Hop along Cassidy (both Westerns.) If you had old furniture or junk, you would wait until you had too much of it. Then you would just drag it in the back yard and have a huge bon fire. There were no laws against that! Trillions of bills such as electrical bills had to be written by typewriter or by hand. Millions of people had jobs doing work that computers now do in milliseconds. There were rooms as big as warehouses with hundreds of desks, manned by accountants (no women) who did nothing but calculate and write bills. When you called a business, you got a live person not a recorded message or a menu. There was no such thing as a menu except in a restaurant.

If you did something illegal and the police tried to stop you and you keep on going, the police would eventually stop you and probably beat you up pretty badly. Your parents usually didnt object when they found out because they figured you deserved it and no one questioned the authority of a policeman (no woman police) to do whatever he saw fit to uphold the law. Without caller ID, obscene or crank calls or joke calls were very common. Tracing phone calls was impossible. If you had a dog, you just let him out by himself to roam free just like you would let your kids roam free when they were about six. No one had smoke alarms. If you had a fire when sleeping, you got cooked. That was just a fact of life. There were practically no chain stores except Sears and Macys and a mall was not even a dream yet. When you wanted school clothes you went to the mom and pop shop downtown. (I went to Greenburgs Clothes for Boys.) If you wrote a letter and wanted a copy, you had to use carbon paper or go to a print shop and pay $1.00 a(adjusted for inflation) for one Photostat (copy). If you drove with a girl on a date, if you saw a car with one headlight, it was called a pedidil (pa-did dal) And that meant you were supposed to kiss the girl (while driving.) If you wanted research information, you had to go to a library and look topics up in the book card index or Readers Guide to Periodical Literature. There was no googling. If you lived more than 1.5 miles from school. You had to walk no buses to nearby schools.. If your family went to a restaurant, you had to dress up. Men and older boys had to wear ties and jackets. You were often refused admittance without ties and jackets. Of course, girls ad to wear dresses. All girls always wore dresses! At school you wrote with fountain pens that you had to fill with messy ink that ran when papers got wet. Ball point pens were expensive and rare. Everyone practiced penmanship and also knew how to print legibly too. When you waited for the bus you stood in the rain or snow or cold etc. You didnt sit inside mommies' Suburu with the heat on. And in the suburbs, the buses didnt stop in front of every house. You had to walk to a bus stop.

When you wanted to communicate with someone long distance, you wrote a letter. Long distance phone calls beyond a few hundred miles were $15 for three minutes and five dollars a minute after the first three minutes (adjusted for inflation.) Kids didnt have TV sets in their rooms. Parents put them [the kids] to bed and read stories to them. On dates, guys would do what was called go parking. That meant the couple would go to the beach road overlooking the water and make out. If romantic spots were not available, a dirt road in the country or ANYPLACE would do. If you went to someplace far away, you drove. Very few people flew anywhere in the noisy DC3s! If a hurricane hit, there was no warning. How could there be? There were no weather satellites. Box springs were not covered in cloth. You could see the springs. Schools staged air raid drills where you crouched under your desk in case the Russians dropped a nuclear bomb. You were instructed to put cup your hands behind your head and put your head between your legs. (So you could kiss your ass goodbye!) Condoms were the only birth control and boys carried them in their wallets. You had to call an operator to have her dial a long distance call for you. (The operator operated the telephone for you and made the long distant connections.) All operators were all female. Other jobs that were almost entirely performed by females: elementary school teachers, nurses, and secretaries. Females were excluded from jobs like truck driver , construction worker, executive, engineer, financial analyst or stock broker. Most of the top colleges did not accept applications from girls. Cthe cheer leaders of such schools had to be males. Telephones had dials. However, dialing was fast because all telephone numbers were 5 digits. (My number was 60871.) There were no area codes because like I said above, there was no direct dialing for long distance. Coke and 7Up were in 7 ounce bottles with caps that you needed an bottle opener to get at. Record players and vinyl records that got scratched and sounded awful.

Fi=rst class letters required three Cent stamps. There was always one really smart kid in the class like Stephen Gertzhoff who skipped a grade and still got As and everyone hated him for it. (You might even beat him up on the play ground for being so smart.) Elementary school children sometimes sat in the teachers lap during reading circle time. (Your parents didnt sue he for sexual harassment.) You shared a telephone line because the telephone company didnt have enough wires. Such lines were called it a party lines. Sometimes you would pick up the phone and the other party would be on it. If the call was urgent, you would ask them if you could have the line for an important call. Black and white 12 inch TVs had only 5 channels. The stations signed off at midnight. At midnight, the station played the Star Spangled Banner. After that, all you could see was a test pattern that was the number of the station with a square around it. If you wanted to change the TV station, you had to get up and walk to the TV and turn the channel selector knob. The channel selector knob had 13 position but only five stations were available. Practically no one listened to FM radio. AM stations often came in with static. Tv staions were governed by moral laws. Kissing for more than four seconds was not shown. When Elvis Presley moved his hips when he sang on TV, the camera showed him from the waist up. Rock music and the dancing to it was branded as animalistic, disgusting, and depraved. Many communities did not allow rock music. Rock n Roll was thought to be a short lived fad. People were sure it would fade away to the dust bin of history. Elvis Presley took up acting in movies because he worried that when rock n Roll died, he would not be able to earn a living. Roller skates were attached to your shoes and they had four wheels. C;amps were tightened that gripped the heels and soles of your shoes. You had to have a roller skate key to turn the clamp. Almost everyone had one speed bikes. They were heavy steel and outweighed the rider. Some rich kids had bikes with three speeds. These bikes were called English bikes because America did not manufacture there speed bikes. They were imported from England. Almost everyone smoked 24 cents a pack cigarettes everywhere except in church.

You had to type term papers with a typewriter. If you mad a minor mistake you could erase it and type over the smear. If you made a major mistake you had to retype the whole page. All cars weighed 5200 pounds and got 10 miles to the gallon. However, gas cost 28 cents a gallon. Boy rode in cars with their girls sitting right next to them in the middle of the bench seat. The boy would ride with his arm around the girls neck. You always knew if a girl really liked you if she sat near you. Teenagers had make out parties with dim blue and red light bulbs. Refrigerators had to be defrosted once a week because ice would build up on the metal insides. To defrost the refrigerator, you had to turn it off and put pans of boiling water inside the freezer to melt the ice. Water was collected in a tray under the freezer. Early refrigerators (around 1950) had freezers that were the size of a shoebox. The condenser of the refrigetor was a big cylinder at the top of the refrigerator. Because people of the previous generation had actual ice boxes, refrigerators were called ice boxes. Ice boxes were things that looked like refrigerators but had no motor for cooling. An Ice Man delivered ice twice a week from his ice truck. Almost no one had air conditioned houses, schools, offices or cars even in southern parts of the country. People complained a little but it was just life as usual, no big deal. Coal was burned in home furnaces and people had to shovel it in now and then. Men put on lots of cologne and women put on lots of perfume to cover up B.O. (Like I said, people took baths once a week.) Old female relatives didnt shave their legs. (Skirts were so long that you never saw legs anyway.) Most women wore nylon stockings all the time (sometimes not at home though.) Girls were not allowed to wear pants in school or wear skirts that had a hem above the knee. Boys were suspended for having long hair. Only girls had long hair anyway. No boys wanted to have long hair anyway.

Colleges did not admit black students. Colleges asked for pictures of students on applications. It was said this was so they could see your color and nationality. Looks counted. Disabled kids were called cripples and were not allowed in schools. Challenged students were called retarded. They were not allowed in schools either. (No one wanted to see them.) Clothes had to be dried on clothes lines. If it rained, you had to run out and bring in the clothes. In the winter, the clothes froze on the line and dried when they defrosted on warmer days. Many cars didnt start in cold weather. Car had carburetors that mixed a spray of gas with air. To start the car, you needed a richer gas mixture so you had to pull the choke lever out on a car when you started it to let in less air (choking it.) Then you had to try to remember to shut it off when the engine was warm. Tires were so bad that they ripped or fell apart while driving. This was called a blowout Many people died in accidents caused by blow outs You never locked your front door and you usually left the keys in the car. Kids would leave the house in the morning and be on their own all day with neighborhood friends. Kids walked home from elementary school to have lunch. Gay people were called queers and faggots and no one admitted to being gay. Drugs were what the doctor and your mother gave you. Marijuana was portrayed in the media as a drug that would make you so crazed you might go on a killing rampage. All men wore hats and tipped their hats when they saw a woman. Black people were called negroes. To call a negro black was a racial insult. Realtors told Black people that houses they called about were sold or unavailable. Black people could go to restaurants but would have to wait 30 minutes to get service. This was meant to encourage them to go to restaurants in the black part of town. Milk was delivered by a milkman and left in a milk box. If you forgot to bring in the milk in the summer, it went bad. In the winter, it froze and expanded pushing the paper cap off the bottle.

Milk bottles were collected by the milkmen, washed and re filled. Some soda and bottles were also re used. Movies always had double features, news, and cartoons. TV did not have much news and most people did not have TVs so the only news you might see was film clips at the movies. Nothing had tamper proof tops. No one tampered! You went out with your friends on Halloween without your parents. No one ever heard of poison candy or candy with glass or razor blades. All of your Aunts, Uncles, and cousins lived in the same town all their lives and so did all your friends. Families got together at Christmas and other holidays. Cousins were often your best friends. If you said the f - - - word in school, you would be suspended. Everyone wore ties and jackets to work. In the previous generations, offices were not heated so vests and suit jackets were worn for warmth! How could big offices have fireplaces or wood stoves for warmth? Most girls either became secretaries, nurses or teachers for a few years until they got married. Very few women had jobs outside of the home. When girls said they wanted to do to college, people often said,Why bother? Youre just going to get married anyway. Schools did not sponsor female athletics. Bad kids were called hoods, wore their collars up, and carried switch blades. (Switch blades were knives that had the blade in the handle. When you pushed a button on the handle, the blade sprung out. Scared the hell out of people!) Older people spoke the languages of the country that they or their parents came from, especially when kids were around and they wanted to tell secrets or just didnt want the kids to know what they were talking about.. Not too many people lived beyond 70. Anyone who was over seventy was thought of as people in their nineties are today (in 2010.) The whole family had dinner together at 6:00 oclock and you better be there or explain why. People talked at dinner. They did not watch TV or listen to the radio.

Doctors made house calls. They carried little black bags. They shoved thermometers up your butt, not in your mouth. Then they washed the thermometer with alcohol and used it on someone else. Doctors and nurses never wore gloves, even when taking blood or giving injections. The only antibiotic was penicillin. If you had a serious infection and if the penicillin didnt work, you died. Men in horse drawn carts or old trucks drove around and sold vegetables and fruit on the street. There were lots of empty lots to play baseball in and lots of woods nearby to go hiking through. Kids built tree forts. People used to brag about how they were smashed (drunk) and somehow made it home. They bragged if they didnt even remember coming home. Police didnt arrest people for drunk driving because everyone did it. People knew how to do long division and calculate square roots using a slide rule or did it on paper manually. If you had a birthday, you would hear the man on the local radio station say Happy Birthday to you. Starting at age 12, kids hitch-hiked everywhere without fear. Catholics went to confession on Saturday to tell the priest their sins. At the end of the fifties, Swanson frozen dinners were introduced and were called TV dinners. The idea was that you could be in a hurry and make a dinner in minutes and watch TV while eating. TV dinners became possible when freezers were larger. People used racial insults and epithets for every nationality but their own. The town was divided into neighborhoods - Italian, Irish, Jews, Polish, German, Negro, and Puerto Ricans, etc. You would go the stores of the neighborhood to buy specialty food of the particular nationality (kielbasa, bratwurst, canned sauce.) Marrying someone outside your religion was a no-no (do-able but very complicated). There was often a big to-do about whose church to be married in. (Often Jewish children were dis-inherited after they married outside their religion.) Parents had wakes for such children as though they were dead.

Ads proclaimed radios that had 5 transistors (!) for $50. It took one or two minutes for radios and TVs to warm up before they worked. Mothers spent hours ironing all the family clothes. (There was no such thing as wash and wear fabrics.) No one wore un-ironed shirts. Boys looked in National Geographic to look for top less girls in primitive countries because pornography was not available. You would sometimes find condoms floating in the water when you swam at the beach because the raw sewerage was just dumped into the rivers and oceans. When girls got pregnant, they were sent far away to have the babies. Coffee was made in percolators that bubbled the boiled water up a tube to a little metal basket with coffee in it. Plenty of hard-to-find dirty books were hidden underneath mattresses. To play a sport, all you needed was a tin can. (Kick the can was like soccer but with a can and two big rocks to serve as a target to kick the can through). Neighborhood kids played tackle football without helmets or padding. High school and college football players had fairly useless leather helmets and thin shoulder padding. No other padding. Washing machines had wringers (two wooden rollers that squeezed the water out of clothes.) Clothes were washed in the tub of the washing machine on a corrugated washing board. Diapers had to be washed in the primitive washing machines. Disposable diapers did not exist. Fans had big heavy metal blades and very inadequate grilles. If you put your finger in the blade area, you were hurt. Cars had no seat belts. Cars had metal dashboards with knobs protruding out to kill you. Steering wheels were mounted on straight metal rods that pushed up toward the driver and killed him. Though speeds were slower, more people were killed per mile of driving. Old cars had running boards and rumble seats. Cars were higher off the ground. To get in the car you stepped on the running board and then could get into the car.

Sometimes parents let their kids stand on the running boards while they drove the car. Most cars had no brake lights and no turn signals. When you stopped or turned, you were expected to put your arm out the drivers window and use hand signals. For left hand turns, you pointed your finger to the left. For right hand turns, you waved your hand round and round to signal Go around me. For braking, you held your hand straight out to signal Back Off. Mothers shoved rectal thermometers up their kids butts to take their temperatures when sick. Women used very heavy make-up and very red lipstick. Boys at the YMCA had swim times for boys only and none of them wore bathing suits until about third grade. You had to sit in the corner when you were bad at school (without your parents suing the school!). There were no super highways all the way between major cities and you had to drive on roads with houses, stores, and traffic lights. Towns had lots of rotaries for traffic instead of major intersections with traffic lights all over the place. Kids had only one pair of shoes at a time. Everyone sent greeting cards for every occasion. Cameras were big black boxes that you had to put rolls of film in. You had to thread the rolls of film through spindles. If your forgot to roll the film between shots, you wound up getting a double exposure (one picture exposed over another.) Telephone numbers were five numbers and their was no area code. Kids played marbles and flipped baseball cards. Boys gunked their hair up with a gel that hardened or with greasy Breyl cream making it look frozen in place. They advertised, A little dab will do ya Detroit haircuts were popular with Hoody kids. (Hoody kids were trouble makers who got in fights and carried switch blades.) Detroit haircuts featured long hair on the side and a flat top on top with a DA (Duck Ass) in the back.

Hoody kids had DAs, wore their collars up, had their belt buckles on the side, and watch out ....they might carry illegal switchblades. Girls teased their hair into huge bees nests on their heads and sprayed it all in place with hairspray. You would try to run your hands through a girls hair when you were making out and find out her hair was cemented in place with hair spray. Boys used their sisters hair spray. Stores sold lemon ice and popcorn right near the Rialto or Palace movie theatres. Boys would take girls to drive-in movies and make out all night and never watch the movie. Boys would take girls to indoor movie theatres and try to sit as far away from other people so they could make out all night and never watch the movie. The boys who made out all night would get a very painful condition that was called blue balls because they had an erection all night and didnt have an orgasm. The girls who never saw the movie because they made out would tell their mothers that the movie was about a Russian. Parents let their kids have booze parties in Senior year of high school because they figured that it was good to have kids drink in a semi-supervised setting. Everyone knew one boy who drank too much and drove into a tree. It was such a shock seeing a casket and knowing a young person was inside. If you were a little kid, you could be really quiet like you were asleep and catch the baby sitter making out with her boyfriend who snuck in the house. You could make pretty good money being a caddy who carried golf bags for the rich people who belonged to golf clubs. There were no golf carts. Lawn mowers did not have engines. You had to push them really hard because that force made the reel type blades go around. If you tripped on something left carelessly in the neighbors yard, it was your own damn fault and your father didnt think of suing the neighbor. Practically none of your friends had parents who were divorced.

Women would be beaten up by their husbands and not call the police. And if they did, the police wouldnt arrest the husbands anyway because they figured that the wives probably deserved it. Some people were suspected of being communists because they believed in things like Roosevelt's social security and Trumans proposed health care. When a foreign country offended America, everyone said we ought it nuke em especially when we were the only ones who had The Bomb.) In war movies, the Russians were always the enemy unless it was a WW II movie and the enemies were Germans (Krauts) or Japanese (Japs). Everyone knew lots of nice negroes that they really liked but they said all negroes were bad anyway. No one noticed the bad logic. Every doctor, dentist, engineer, and accountant you knew went to school on the GI bill. There were hardly any Men teachers, and the men who did teach were usually promoted to principal. You brought your lunch to school in a metal lunch box with a movie, cartoon character painted on it. Mothers brought their kids to the library on Saturday to get books and the kids actually enjoyed reading the books. Kids read books they loved and were not able to put it down until they finished it. Kids held a thermometer near a light bulb to get it to read a high temperature so they could stay home from school. There was always one kid that the class bully picked on and most of the time everyone else joined in. Sometimes the kids friend would be a hero and tell every one to stop or else. Every one knew at least one kid whose father was killed in World War II or Korea. Old people were anyone over 50. Almost everyone read comic books and collected them.

Every comic book had an ad at the end that showed a big guy purposely kicking sand onto the blanket of a boy and a girl. The caption read, Dont be a 98 pound weakling. You were supposed to send away for a book on how to get muscular. Heat in houses never came out of baseboard heaters but rather out of iron radiators that were the size of large suitcases. Storm windows were additional outside windows that hung outside regular windows and were removed in the summertime. If someone asked if you had a dishwasher, you would probably answer, Yeah, my mother. Houses were swept clean because only the rich had vacuum cleaners. People put chains on cars when it snowed because there was no such thing as snow tires. The only slow dance anyone knew was the waltz. Boys and girls danced the waltz at arms length in dancing school. Many boys and girls ere sent to dancing school to learn the waltz, cha-cha, and rumba. Later on they taught the jitterbug that was a fast dance for rock n roll. When it rained or snowed, boys wore slip-on rubbers or boots over their shoes. America had factories and men and women worked making shoes, hats, shirts, socks, and all the things that are now made in foreign countries. Some things were better and some things were worse. But they sure were different like two different worlds.