The picket fenced yards with their majestic Elms — no litter in the streets. June, clad in heals and accessorized with a pristine white apron and pearl necklace. Cookies a baking, and of course coffee simmering. Ward, the bread winner, the patriarch; logical, sane, firm, but fair hand of justice. The boys — well your typical all-American good lookers, slightly impish, but fine lads, mostly impeccable hygiene. Now their friends pushed the envelope. Lumpy; never really sure if he needed help, or was beyond it. Eddie -- oh Eddie — if not for Wally’s stellar example he would have been a social outcast. If the “Beaver” was not to your taste how about “Father Knows Best,” or “Ozzie & Harriet.” Mostly just the same idealized 100% American unit with slightly different glitter. Ed Sullivan was a smash. Not always sure what he said, but liked the way he said it. “Variety Show” it was. Erich Brenn was spinning plates on a stick and Elvis was twisting things that polite people never admitted they even had. The TV Western was riding the ranges, talking to the horses and maybe locked in lingering stares (careful, not too long) with the local beauty — woman, not horse. The “Muscle Car” was boss, gas was cheap, Barbie and the transistor (whatever that was) were introduced. Interstate highways, NASA, hotel chains, drive-ins were a novelty, then quickly the norm. The telephone party line came of age, and everyone knew they were being listened to, and listened in. Weekly, Lassie saved some poor schmuck that had fallen down the well -- yet again. And mostly, most did not have any trouble with immigrants in our plants or harvesting them. Well okay; still not really sure about Germans, Japanese, the whole racial equality debate, and woman’s place -- home or not. And religion — as often as not your average American affiliated with their mirror images. As long as any dissension stayed behind closed doors, if you did not admit to a problem — hey, everything is fine here, nothing to see.
Outside of TV Land we were practicing duck and cover under a new anagram, MAD (looks almost quaint, it wasn’t) — mutually assured destruction. Communist infiltrators everywhere — Hollywood, our churches, schools and government. We had lists, except, really there weren’t any. There was rumblings of a “police action” somewhere over there and about 40,000 Americans never came home — before shipping another generation to a different over there, about ten years later. Over 58,000 did not see the end of that “conflict.” Some talked, some marched, some died in regard to racial issues. One thousand paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division were ordered in at Little Rock High School to protect nine black students because — because they wanted to go to school. In 1957, Russia flung Sputnik into the air, and it went beep, beep, beep, circling the earth instead of up and down — great another race. Another threat? Polio, displayed a stark contrast of our worst fears and best hopes. Of unknown cause or where it would strike next, it could, and did paralyze / kill, the most innocent. We witnessed a wonder of medicine, a vaccine -- not a cure. December of 1958, Chicago, “Lady of the Angels” — 92 elementary students and three Catholic Nuns perished in a elementary school fire. Some wondered with just cause, could that happen in their schools, to their children? Once more, after the fact, fire codes / procedures are revisited, debated and changed.
And these were simpler, saner, safer times ?
It is easy to romanticize the past; attempting to contrast the wrongs of today with an idealistic past. Personally what makes it even a little stranger is I was born in 1950’s, which means that my actual memories of that decade are minimal. It seems that maybe as part of the aging process it is normal to simplify, to select what we want to remember. Maybe the neurons just don’t fire at the same rate. I have heard some speak / write of the 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s as the days they long for. Some also perceive personalities as having the same definite, definitive clarity; Roosevelt(s), Eisenhower, Truman, Carter, Reagan etc. It would be nice, if it was so simple. All good, or all bad. But many postulate that our memories are just not that accurate. Ask law enforcement about the reliability of eye witness testimony, compare events of your youth with your siblings. Do I (you) have on matching socks, which pattern, what color?
in 2013 in regard to pseudo, false, or selective memories -- the field of psychology has numerous names for what is basically the same phenomenon, Kimberley Wade of the University of Warwick, UK. wrote, "I've been studying memory for more than a decade, and I still find it incredible that our imagination can trick us into thinking we've done (or seen) something we've never really done and lead us to create such compelling, illusory memories.” The reason our memories are so malleable, there is simply too much information to take in. "Our perceptual systems aren't built to notice absolutely everything in our environment. We take in information through all our senses but there are gaps." She adds,"when we remember an event, what our memory ultimately does is fills in those gaps by thinking about what we know (or think we know) about the world."
“The Past Is Never Where You Think You Left It.”
― Katherine Anne Porter
The first link is for the eight part You Tube documentary, based on his book.
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