Looking back, I can remember my childhood as an idyllic time. If I was able to choose any era in time to go back to, it would be the 1950s. Prices were low, the economy was booming. People actually got dressed up to go shopping downtown. Of course, most women didn't even wear slacks in those days, and glamour was “in”. Teens were listening to a new music form called rock and roll, and television programming was still in its infancy. And then, right in the middle of my childhood, the 1950s turned into the 1960s.
I can remember going to Henry's Hamburgers to get really bad hamburgers for $.10. My mother wouldn't let us go down the street to the new McDonald's because the burgers were too expensive at $.25. We could get a candy bar or a package of baseball cards, with gum included, for a nickel.
There was no air conditioning in our house when I was little. What we had instead was a huge window fan that was in a window at the top of the stairs in our Cape Cod style home. By propping the stair door open and opening the windows downstairs, it was possible to go to sleep with a lovely breeze blowing in. My parents set the fan on a timer so that they wouldn't have to pay to run it all night. I always worried that I wouldn't get to sleep before it turned off and would then have to lay there sweltering.
We went on a two-week vacation every summer, and we had a brand new car every other year. New cars back then were under $2000. Cars were huge, too. My dad built a platform that would fit on the floor between the front and back seats. While we traveled at night because it was cooler than daytime travel, I could sleep on the seat, and my brother, who was smaller, could sleep on the floor with an air mattress lying atop the wooden frame.
Tourist spots weren't touristy back in those days. You could drive clear back to the Royal Gorge without running across any souvenir shops. You could visit Deadwood and actually feel the semblance of an old western town. At the White House you only waited in a short line to get in, and no one worried that you might be a terrorist who wanted to blow the place up.
On Sundays we often went for car rides to cool off. That meant packing my parents and little brother in the front seat while I sat in back between my grandmother and great-grandmother. Both of them lived with us in an era when kids still cared about what happened to their aging parents. Some Sundays we would take off earlier and take a picnic lunch to one of the regional parks. Picnic lunches were always either fried chicken or else pot roast with all the veggies. I can remember sitting in the cold and the rain eating some of those lunches.
It was a big deal when the hula hoop came out. Since they were relatively cheap, my brother and I each got one. His was green and mine was blue. We actually got so that we could maneuver those things pretty well. I had a girls blue Schwinn bike. There were no gears on bikes for kids then. Our legs got very strong, and we could actually pump those old bikes up all but the highest hills. My brother, who didn't want to learn to ride a bike when he was younger, zoomed around our driveway on a metal police motorcycle. We also had a red wagon and a white metal pedal car.
Our toys were limited. We didn't get something new every time our parents went shopping. Mostly we just got toys on our birthdays and for Christmas. I loved dolls and having different outfits so that I could dress them. When I got my first and only Barbie doll, we bought numerous outfits to fit her. It wasn't like today when you had to buy a new doll in order to get the outfit. The outfits then were well-made. I remember that some of the little dresses actually had tiny working zippers in them. One Saturday I went downtown shopping with my grandmother. We saw a Betsy McCall 8” doll in one of the stores, and I absolutely had to have her. After trying to talk me out of it, she went ahead and paid the $2.98 for the doll. I still treasure that doll after all these years.
There wasn't much children's programming to be had on TV. It wouldn't have mattered anyhow, because Dad controlled the set, and the only way we got to watch was if he wasn't there. We watched Captain Kangaroo in the mornings. The Mickey Mouse Club was on in the afternoons, but don't remember much about it, because I was still too little to watch it. I do remember Winky Dink on Saturday mornings, though. Oh how I loved that show. We had a plastic screen which we had to share that stuck to the TV screen. Then we could use our magic crayons to save Winky Dink from a multitude of perils. It became a problem when my brother got his own screen, but we didn't have a 2nd TV to put it on.
