CHAPTER 1 -- Post # 5

While the Fifties might have seem Paradise to a six year old, they were far from idyllic. The Cold War was raging. The two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, tested ever larger atomic bombs with reckless abound. Doomsday seemed to be marked in red on the calender. Fear of nuclear war was real. People were urged to build bomb shelters in their back yards and stock them with canned food and portable water against an nuclear bomb attack. At school we practiced air raid drills. Our teachers instructed us to go single file to the basement or if there was not time, dive under our desks at the first sound of the air raid horn; Duck and Tuck. In the basement we lined up and faced the whitewashed walls to avoid flying glass and blinding radiation from an atomic blast. We kids enjoyed these air raid practices, they broke the monotony of classes, yet they were a poignant reminder, the world was a dangerous place.

Television was new, they were expensive and to own one was a status symbol. My Dad love gadgets and as soon as he could afford it he bought a new RCA 14 inch screen black and white television which was set in the place of honor in the living room across from the sofa. Afraid of damaging the precious set we kids were not allowed to touch it. We had to wait until Dad got home and we had dinner before the family would gather around the television and watch the news and variety shows. My favorite after Disney World was Topper and later Sky King after whom I named my first dog, a toy Boston Terrier.

Like most families we only had one television and each summer we’d carefully wrap it in blankets, place it in the back of the Ford station wagon and take it with us to the bay front Cape Cod cottage in Pocasset. By the mid-fifties, as disposable income soared, a sea of TV antennas sprouted from every home like a month’s worth of old stubble. Even people with no televisions hitched up an antenna from their chimney roofs. Not to have one was a scarlet letter of poverty. It was the time of keeping up with the Joneses, of greener grass than your neighbor, and Detroit telling us that a two year old car was obsolete. Later they’d do everything in their power to make that true. Then the Japanese took over and the unnatural spectra of ‘planned obsolescence’ was finished. At least in cars.

Morning shows were restricted to Author Godfrey and other variety shows. I especially remembered Bob Emery beginning each of his shows strumming a ukelele and singing,

“The Grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard,
Oh that mortgage we have to hold, oh boy that’s hard.
Now if we could all wear green glasses it wouldn’t be to hard
To see how green the grass was in our own back yard.”

Not exactly rap or hip-hop music.

But this was before the Japanese, and Cuba and Viet Nam. It was before the race riots, Watergate and dope and free sex. It was thirty years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We owned the world, or at least the free part. The dollar was king and we had a television set.

Then there were the Russians. While we were distracted by growth and progress, they cooped the high ground of space by rocketing Sputnik, the first man made satellite, into orbit around the earth. We now had an enemy flying over our heads.