I for one would love to hear from someone who remembers 1955. The 50's certainly seem like a time of relative peace and prosperty sandwiched between times of real turmoil and heartache.
At either old Clark Field, or maybe there was a minor league park, I remember watching the Austin minor league baseball team play a game. Much of the seating had an overhang that kept you out of the brutal Texas sun; but the end section down the first base side wasnt covered. It was where the "colored section". Shark's point about the domestic horrors of the 1950 is spot on.
And married women couldn't get credit in there name, where expected to quit their job when they got married, etc. The 60s happened for a reason folks.
I remember 1955, it sucked. Parents would tell you that you couldn't go in swimming after eating lunch for one hour or you would die of a cramp. I was five.
Then of course was "The Bomb." I spent a lot of nights as a kid seriously contemplating how our family would survive a nuclear attack. I'm one of the kids who was taught the "Duck 'n Cover" drill in school. __________________________________________________ They still had the drill in the 1970's and into the 1980's. As a little kid, i used to lie in bed listening to planes flying over head wondering if one of the planes was rissian and might be dropping the big one.
People in south Texas got plenty mad when blacks or hispanics stepped out of line or failed to get off the sidewalk and keep their distance. Only whites could use the public swimming pool. Strangely enough, blacks and hispanics were allowed to enter the military, just not the restaurants and theaters and pools. But nobody was mad.
I tell you what sucked in 1955, south Texas with no air conditioning!!! I was 12/13 and on weekends I got home from work around 1 a.m.. One of my three younger brothers had our only fan. It was not big, maybe 10 inch blade but it was the difference between going to sleep or not. You can be sure that I am an expert at removing a fan from a sleeping human and not waking them up. There are two senses the fan imparts onto a human. One is the feel of the breeze, the other is the noise of the fan blades and motor. Remove both simultaneously and that sleeping human will awaken! First, remove the breeze, turn the fan away from the recipient. The subconcious mind slowly accepts the lack of a breeze but knows everything must be ok because the sound of the fan is still present. Wait two minutes and pull the plug on the fan! Evidently, after a while, fan noise alone not combined with cooling is not missed since no one woke up. My parents built the "boys room" on the NORTH side of an east/west one story house, along with a small guest room. The boys room was not large and there were bunks for four of us brothers. No south breeze to cool off that room. It was a torture chamber! The roof was a "built up" roof, as in tar paper, tar and white rocks sprinkled on the tar. HOT? Are you kidding? 92 degrees at midnight. You want to go to sleep and there is no fan, get out of the bunk and lie on the cool tile floor. COLD in the winter? North wind, no insulation, don't remind me. Being the oldest, I took over the guest room in the summer so I could escape the top bunk, which was unbearable in summer but ok in the winter. Had our family had A/C in 1955, the quality of life would have been greatly enhanced. Back in those days when mother says she was "cooking over a hot stove", she wasn't kidding. 1955 do over? Nuh-uh!
Thankfully, I'm a 70's kid(72), but love to hear the old folks talk about the 'good old days.' Lot of stories about growing up during segregation and then having to integrate. Going to town and trading. Some crazy times indeed. But, I've also heard stories about how they celebrated holidays and birthdays(a lot different than today), seems that the families were a lot closer, also.
I left air conditioning off my list because I never got mad about something I did not know I was missing. Favorite air conditioning story: In the summer of 1955 we moved to the little town where I grew up. It was hot and a fair number of the streets, including the one to the side of our house, were unpaved. Which meant that your house got a lot of caliche dust if you left the windows up to catch a breeze. Which you did. One morning my mother came to me and said she had found a building that had air conditioning like the department stores in Corpus and San Antonio. The only problem was that it was a public library and if we went we would have to act like we were reading. But so long as we pretended we could stay as long as we wished. That sounded great. That summer I acted like I read every book in the children's section. And then hit the history section and pretended to read all of them several times. And I have not broken that habit 55 years later. I think I was about 30 when I realized I had been tricked. I have always been pretty slow but well read.
Dien Bien Phu. The French surrendered on May 7th, 1954. French casualties totalled over 7,000 and a further 11,000 soldiers were taken prisoner. The following day the French government announced that it intended to withdraw from Vietnam.
Eisenhower/Cox/Swing...Operation Wetback 1954, over one million illegal Mexicans return/returned to Mexico. The following year, 1955, children of cotton picking illegal Mexicans ride my school bus no more.
And as late as 1967, 12 states, a full one-fourth of the lower 48 states did not allow or did not recognize interracial marriage that had been performed in other states. I always found great irony in the name of the couple that sued that state of Virginia and won before the Supreme Court. Their last name? Loving.
Interesting how the article in the OP admitted that the idea that everything was fine was false, and yet people are arguing with it all the same.
