My family and I have been living in our house for three score and three months. Even a nostalgia fanatic and "dates-nut" like myself was a bit shocked reflecting upon this length of time when I filled out a finance application form today, something I had never done before. A little box requests an indication of how many years one has lived at one's current address (and months too: implying to me that residencies of just a few years may be quite more common situations among applicants than mine). It felt odd to write '6' and then '0' alongside "years." The '3' alongside "months" seemed a tad weird too: reminiscent of an old acquaintance who used to brag about his plump paycheck quite unashamedly and reported the "take home" amount, including the cents, to anyone who'd listen. I don't suppose that living in one place through twelve presidencies and several sea changes culturally and in so many other ways necessarily qualifies one as an expert about America then and now (any more or less than a sixty-something year old who has moved numerous times might have a legitimate perspective on matters), but it certainly entitles one to an observation or two about the past and the present, at least within the narrow bailiwicks of neighborhood, street and home with hopefully, minimally gaseous pronouncements and opinions. There's so much information and material to remark upon after six decades worth of living and I certainly won't and can't tackle such a mountain of history. I would however, like to rivet attention on 1951, the year we moved to our present home and to just try to remind the reader (and myself) of what things were like back then. My personal remembrances are few: as that year closed when I was but nineteen months old. But enough primary sources remain, together with my more numerous memories of the remainder of the 1950s and the wealth of recorded information through film, television, radio and literature, to give us a good sense of what life was like nationally, personally and of course, how things have changed for both.
What little I do remember of the second calendar year of my life is perhaps aided by several black and white snapshots taken by my Mom with our family's old Zeiss Ikon camera with the black leather bellows. There are a couple of shots of my brother and I playing in our new kitchenette alongside a tricycle (permitted indoors with the start of winter and before my grandfather built a large wooden storage shed in our backyard in 1954) and of a calendar on the curtained and windowed back door (leading to our patio and garden) near the wall where a calendar (2012) is still hanging today. The photos clearly show the month and year: December, 1951 and the room's objects are all very familiar, but appear newer, shinier and the space is devoid of the clutter slowly developed through all those then future decades. Less painted surfaces and more polished woodwork describe much of the scene. Flowery, cheerful wallpaper shouts "mid-century, peace, prosperity, domestic bliss!" Our black and gray checkerboard asphalt floor, its unforgivingly hard surface, "living" again in these photos, is recalled for the many glass jelly jars (used as drinking glasses after their sweet contents had been eagerly devoured along with peanut butter and Silvercup white bread by us wee tykes) that it instantly doomed when a little hand or elbow's careless owner suddenly focused on an imaginary Indian or bogeyman he decided needed dispatching with his silver toy six-shooter. T.V. was still in its infancy, or at least still a pre-schooler (as was I). I do remember changing the channel on our ponderous dark brown and mustard colored, black and white R.C.A. set. I accomplished this task with great difficulty, the "clicking" mechanism requiring a certain degree of strength in one's fingers, a power that I was just developing in this year of Lucille Ball's premiere season of "I Love Lucy" and ubiquitous "Hopalong Cassidy" reruns.
But what of the world beyond our little friendly confines? What were folks thinking, what were they dreaming, hoping, fearing, loving, loathing, planning to embrace and deciding to shun? How fundamentally different were we Americans as a people than we are in the second decade of the 21st century? Surely, human nature does not change after a mere 22,000 days. Yet mores, habits, ways of doing things, mindsets and the zeitgeist of 1951 would perhaps be deemed strange, if not unrecognizable entities to very many of us alive today, particularly if born after, let's venture to say: 1970. Some obvious "biggies": did most or even some young couples in 1951, from all walks of life and economic backgrounds, in exclusive relationships, mutually describe their mates as P.O.O.S.S.L.Q.s? That is, did any significant number of young sweethearts in the middle of the 20th century in North America or most of Europe find themselves living together "without benefit of clergy?" Safe to say "NO!", emphatically not. And no cutesy acronym like the one above ("person of opposite sex sharing living quarters") was even invented yet, nor would have such a state of affairs (pun intended) elicited a wink (which, ironically, it rarely does now) or have not been countenanced without at least some contempt for the promiscuous pair. These are just the facts, as laughable as they may strike someone sexually active and not married to his or her significant other in 2012. Not unrelated, the subject of pornography and its seepage into mainstream culture (much like the ocean into the bowels of the R.M.S. Titanic) in the last forty plus years has expanded into our consciousness and daily lives to a degree that would have truly frightened most citizens of the western world in 1951. Smut was just that, the monosyllabic word at mid-century, somehow matching the simple ugliness of that world, that was marginalized back then and that sought the dark in which to operate, much like cockroaches do. "Pornography" sounds, comparatively, like a term that unneccessarily dignifies the tsunami of filth that it signifies. That generally seems so for some reason for words of Greek or Latin origin as opposed to those inherited from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers. But back to our subject at hand: what else distinguished then from now? How about the dreams of the nation's citizens in the year that General MacArthur was fired for having the balls to tell Red China to go to hell (plus the will and the firepower to send them there until a Chicago-styled politician, vulgarian and erstwhile haberdasher pulled rank on the old soldier). What of their hopes in the year that Judy Holliday taught us that blondes from the other side of the tracks aren't necessarily "dumb" and that gave history "The Shot Heard 'Round The World" (a game winning "Chinese" home run that capped a miraculous season for a Manhattan baseball team at the costliest expense of a Brooklyn baseball team and its long suffering and loyal fans' psyches)? Their dreams (those of all our nation's citizens) were quite like ours today, I suppose, but I'll wager that they were more colorful, less nightmarish and simply more numerous and high minded: both day and night. Though living in the new Atomic age, no endless doomsday programs on t.v., or routine governmental cautions about terrorism, or a death toll in the millions from legalized abortions on demand existed nor were these phenomena imagined (save for nuclear war). The dreams and the hopes certainly included children as the "Baby Boom" was in full swing in this year of an official end of the Pacific war against Japan, the relevant treaty signed by over forty member states of the United Nations in San Francisco, a city noted chiefly then, only for its beauty and critical position as a gateway to America's Pacific hegemony, not its present image as the capital of homosexuality, counter culturism, decadence and decline. Life in 1951 was good, as pride, strength, democracy and prosperity were all thriving realities, though perilous times were still with us amazingly, after having vanquished a phenomenally virulent disease known as fascism in a cataclysmic world war.
No one worried about "green" issues. The earth was still a place to tame and to mould into making our lives more comfortable and bountiful. A caucasian man or woman was not constrained to apologize for all the accomplishments of his or her fathers and forefathers. Automobiles were built predominantly by American industries, with no foreign company anywhere near their near peerless positions in the world market today. Vestiges of the nineteenth century were less difficult to find than they are today. I do remember seeing the very occasional horse drawn vehicle as well as trolleys and an elderly gent or two strolling by in a straw cady. Other old timers in "Andy Capp" styled hats, indigent and/or crippled, could be seen gathering junk, especially stacks of old newspapers in seemingly huge, squeaky baby carriages that they negotiated down the sidewalk or alongside the curb between traffic and the pavement (parked cars often being only intermittently situated in the streets of the then almost semi-rural landscape of most of New York's outer boroughs' neighborhoods, like the one I grew up in). Folks generally embraced excellence though as striving and self-improvement, were common virtues. Working class people were known to increasingly attend symphonic and operatic performances, men from all economic classes rooted for their team at major league baseball games more often than not, wearing ties and even suits. The value of a good education was more and more becoming well understood if not attainable for all. Fame and fortune were not seen as goals to be achieved through chicanery or notoriety via sociopathic behavior or litigious maneuvering. Hard work was still valued and not feared or belittled. And yes, immigration was not a critical issue or even of slight concern. Foreigners seeking a life in America waited their turn, by and large, to enter our country LEGALLY and sponsorship and other rules were actually obeyed by government officials as well as aliens. Crime, poverty, ignorance and cruelty were all alive and well in 1951, to be sure. But evil seemed on the defensive and church attendance was at an all time high throughout the 1950s. The greatest abhorrence and object of concentrated shunning was, of course, the communist presence in society. The Cold War was really a natural outgrowth of the deep seated distrust of The Other (a projection, in part, of one's own dark side as Jung asserted) that first germinated, justifiably so, in 1939 and which was now trained upon and aimed at totalitarian regimes around the globe. With the collapse of Nazism and Fascism, Soviet Russia and Red China more than took up the slack of supplying antagonists to feed our fears, and a sometimes mutual paranoia of nations, especially between those of the West and these communist regimes resulted.
Leon Errol was an Australian comedian born in 1881, the same year as my Sicilian maternal grandmother. He eventually came to Hollywood via Broadway and enjoyed more than a modicum of success in his career. I learned of his existence when his film "shorts" were regularly shown on late night television in the early 1970s. A talented vaudevillian, his brand of slapstick comedy was so passe by the third quarter of the twentieth century that it enjoyed a kind of renaissance at that time, being so "out" that it was deemed "in" by certain trendsetters (hence the program's title "Reel Camp"). Perhaps he was emblematic of a world that was starting to pass away when he did, on nearly the very day that we moved into our modest attached brick house in October of 1951. It was a gentler time, when drunkenness was not condoned but was also not yet viewed humorlessly (Errol was quite the rubber legged inebriate through so many of his roles) and his creations of henpecked husbands abounded. These two stock characters of his did not completely die out actually; they were often portrayed by other comics up until and even beyond the mid '60s. Still, this less sophisticated world of silly men who (unlike too many of today's performers with profanities or prurient remarks on their lips, offered to an audience to elicit a harsh snicker or revealing of a flippancy bereft of warmth) instead, touched millions who lovingly recognized in these entertainers like Errol and their work, the truths revealed by such an art of exhibiting relievingly (as all great comedians do), human foibles and weaknesses. It was a changing period if only embryonically. Certain last hurrahs through the close of the decade, thanks to the likes of Berle, Gleason and Skelton, kept the flames of farce and old vaudeville flickering, but the future lay in more realistic family comedies and gimmicky sitcoms ("Father Knows Best" and "Bewitched" were representative of these two genres respectively, in the then near future).
By the chronological measure of my life, 1951 was a very long time ago. Comedy, as so often presented and performed today would be incomprehensible and probably largely offensive to most audiences back then. Despite a world war and the severe wariness towards anti-democratic societies, cynicism was unusual if not rare among Americans. Now this bitterness that passes for mirth in the twenty first century is all too prevalent. We craved normalcy sixty years ago: a return to a time before the war that perhaps never really was, but that we dreamed of in profusion, our hopes stoked by the fuel of peace and the genuine prospects of prosperity. We wanted to be safe and we wanted to preserve what we loved and what we now became increasingly confident of: a world of beauty and promises achievable, conjoined with a healthy conservatism that the war's end encouraged, namely a second chance if we do the right things in the right ways and adhere to our Judeo-Christian and democratic values. Optimism was in the air regardless of the international perils and the old American virtue of the "square deal" was not yet deemed square (the adjective's use as a pejorative not popularly established until the decade's close). A reservoir of trust toward our fellow citizens was only surpassed in importance and in depth by our confidence in ourselves and it was simply an oh, so much better time to be an American.
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