The 50s

Saturday my wife, daughter and I went walking on a local trail through a nature preserve. Just off the parking lot was an old caboose used as a ranger office. The hiking, biking trail was once a rail line.

Seeing the caboose I was reminded of youth when a lot of us boys wanted to be train engineers. Partly so we could ride in a caboose, the coolest car on a train. Of course we would be able to drive the big engines. Walking from the engines back to the caboose would be adventurous since we would have to walk across the top of the box cars.

A also started to reflect on how much the world has changed. These imaginative flights were in the 50s. Trains were the major way to travel long distance.

Planes were still noisy, rattling, and slow reciprocating engines, jets had not been introduced to commercial aviation yet. In 1959 our flight from New York (probably La Guardia) to Frankfurt, Germany with an hour layover in Shannon, Ireland, took 26 hours.

There were no seat belts in cars and a front end collision at speed frequently meant the front seat passengers wound up with an engine on their laps, if they were still in the car.

Phones were hardwired to the wall. Long distance calls often required an operator and were expensive. A Christmas phone call from Germany to the States required months of letters back and forth to coordinate the time and payment.

Computers were huge, expensive, and slow. Most were still built with vacuum tubes. Computer languages did not appear until the late 50s. The first integrated circuit (chip) was built in the late 50s.

Few people had clothes dryers, dishwashers, or garbage disposals. Refrigerators were not self defrosting. Most houses were heated with hot water or steam, using coal as the fuel. In the four apartment building we lived in in 58 my brother and I cleaned out and fed the coal furnace every fourth week during the cold season. Air conditioning was box fans in the windows.

A couple of times I helped my grandfather tar and put screens for the summer. The screen material was made with steel then so we had to tar it to prevent rusting out. Aluminum screening was very expensive.

Movies had Saturday matinees for kids. For the price of admission we got a cartoon, a serial (think Buck Rogers) and a movie, sometimes a double header.

There was no Kleenex or hand sanitizer. Most men and women carried a cloth handkerchief  changed every day. We often wore pants that were patched to make them last longer. There was a good market in iron on patches for pants. No permanent press. No Nikes, only high top basketball shoes (preferred) or low top tennis shoes (for sissies) all the same. No pantyhose.

Only three channels of Television. Televisions were mostly black and white and took up to five minutes to show a picture and sound. On Sunday nights on of us kids had the responsibility of firing up the TV while the rest of us helped clean up after diner. That way we could catch the beginning of the Disney show. Radios were also slow to start up; transistor radios did not show up until the 60s. There were vacuum tube testers in a lot of stores as replacing a tube was cheaper than buying a new TV.