Memories of the Fifties

Fun to watch...

I always thought of the fifties as the decade of television advertising. We darn well knew 'where the yellow went', which card to send when 'we cared enough to send the very best', which cigarette 'satisfied' and which we would 'walk a mile for'.

You do not have to watch all of it, but the first few minutes.
A policecar in the 50ies in Stockholm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynFl1wonRcQ

A lot of it was still around in the 60's.

Thanks for sharing. I enjoyed it.

Did you forget to specify "white" middle class people? Or, "straight" middle class people? Or, "Christian" middle class people? Better yet, one would be most accurate to specify, "straight, white, Christian middle class people."

Oh the shame of myopic history.

Oy gevalt. You don't like to be wrong, do you?

One other thing I notice, the rockers of the 1950s could all actually sing, even Elvis....

I was hoping that this thread would spark some childhood memories and be a fun and nostalgic place to be.

I'm disappointed that politics have entered the discussion.

Although one of the photos showed a plastic Mr. Potato Head, I preferred using a real potato. You weren't limited on where things went.

I was just waiting for somebody to prime the pump.

When I was a kid, I got a red wagon for my birthday. Then, my older brother got a silver wagon. So they gave the old rusty one, without any rubber on the wheels, to my next brother. I recall us running around the field, pulling them, with Sam just as proud as we older boys. I didn't stay in love with the wagon very long, because I came into a cap pistol and somebody gave me a kerchief slide that was a steer's head, just like Hopalong Cassidy's. For the next year or so, shooting one another was our favorite pass time. No script, just run around shooting. Then we moved and I became friends with a Mexican girl, who decided to be Tonto to my Lone Ranger. She led and organized the games and I missed her when we moved again.

O.K., my mother voted Republican when Ike was running, since he said he'd get our military out of Korea, and my older brother was there. My mother couldn't watch a war movie during those years without crying. My brother came home safely, but my mother never learned to like a war movie. I guess she would not qualify for this thread's "fun and nostalgic place to be."

I was born in 1954.

Overall I had a wonderful early childhood.

I think the 50's (and 1960-1963) were the "Wonder Years"

In 1964 it all started to go to hell.

Comic books. A dime bought 52 color pages and if you didn't want to follow super heroes there were cartoon characters, Classics Illustrated (which actually adapted the books from movies, not the classics and at first had 64 pages), Western Publishing Four Color Comics, which adapted novels and almost anything else and was the original publisher of Pogo Possum. They introduced me to Max Brand westerns which I bought paperbacks of for years thereafter. Brother Sam wisely bought all the number one issues of Marvel Comics, when they began introducing Spiderman, the Hulk and such stuff. He started a comic store in Providence.

Forgot about EC comics, which offered Mad Comics, Tales From the Crypt and Weird Science Fantasy.

That sounds great, hope it worked out.

Sam's Comics store, Iron Horse Graphics, was a big success. If he had sat on it he would have done well, but he tired of it and decided to sell it to finance a video store. A bad move, as the small video stores did not do well, generally speaking, and quickly became obsolete.

I remember being surprised when video stores started failing. 'Course, I'm not always acquainted with what's happening in the music business.