I didn't care much for the 1950s. As a child I found them pretty boring. What I miss the most about the 1950s is all the people I loved. When I heard Jackie Kennedy's voice from her new book published posthumously by Caroline Kennedy, her daughter, it made me think of the years 1950 to about 1965. During those years I was 2 years old to 17 years old. My formative years. I think back on my Grandfather's 2 1/2 acres of land covered with Black cherry trees, apple trees, pear trees, raspberry bushes, and Boysenberry bushes and of picking those berries as a 2, 3 and 4 year old and getting my fingers stuck on the prickers (thorns) and of the combination of joy of eating those raspberries and boysenberries ripened on the vine and of the pain of the prickers and getting used to all that. Eating vine ripened berries just outside our kitchen door sort of spells the bittersweet life I led then. I had it really good. But I didn't know it then. It was only years later when I could actually value it all and put it into perspective. When I heard Jackie Kennedy saying something to her husband President John F. Kennedy like, "I don't want to live if you die in a nuclear blast here in Washington D.C. The children would rather die with you too." I remember when people actually talked like that because it was very common in the 1950s and 1960s during the cold war and potential world nuclear Armageddon. Everyone sort of felt like this then. Her statement was from during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the U.S. and Russia almost went up in smoke with the whole world watching on.
Sometime between ages 12 and 14 I read Alas, Babylon which was about life in the U.S. after most of the cities were blown up by nuclear weapons. This really put the fear of God into me because this was something most people thought was actually going to happen. It was not if but when for us then.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alas,_Babylon - Cached Alas, Babylon is a 1959 novel by American writer Pat Frank (the pen name of Harry Hart Frank). It was one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age and ...
So, going back to when I was 2 to 4 living in Lake Forest Park near Seattle I lived on the 2 1/2 acres of land owned by my Grandad. My Grandpa and Grandma and Aunt and her husband and 2 kids and my Dad and his wife (My Mom) and her Mom all lived there. Grandpa and Grandma had the main big house and then my Aunt and her husband and kids live in a duplex built next to the 2 vehicle garage. Under the Garage because the house and duplex and garage was built on a slope of land so there was the other unit of the duplex built under the garage by my father which my mother and I and her mother lived with my father in. My father worked in my Grandfather's Electrical Contracting Business in order to support us all. My Aunt's husband also began working with my Grandfather as an electrician when he got out of the Navy after World War II. So I could walk out of the door to my parent's duplex and walk directly into the orchard or walk directly out the back door into the berry bushes which I loved to do. It was overcast or rainy a lot as that is what most of the weather is like in Seattle. So when the sun comes out it is a very green and lush place to live, especially then when things were not very built up yet in 1950.
There weren't light signals like we have now in Seattle in the early 1950s. Instead there were things that looked a little like railroad crossing signs where short 3 foot arms mechanically moved up and said on them "Go" and then it would switch to "Stop". There was no caution or yellow in between so this caused some accidents until the new green light, yellow light, red light thing probably started all over the U.S. in the late 1950s:
I remember standing on the back seat behind my Dad holding onto his seat while I stood on the seat cushion of the rear seat. When he went around a corner sometimes I would hit my head on a door knob but even though I was only 3 or 4 I wouldn't cry because when I was with my Dad I had to act like a man. That was just the way it was then. While I held onto my Dad's seat from behind I pretended I was driving the car just like my Dad was then. It was cloudy or rainy or snowing most of the time while we lived in Seattle.
Then when I was 4 years old my Dad wanted to move to San Diego because he was tired of working in the rain all those years as an electrician building houses and buildings. So he drove to San Diego and once he had rented a place he sent for us. We first lived in Vista California where I first went to Kindergarten. It was a completely different place than I was used to. Also, I missed my two cousins and my Grandparents a lot. So, even though I loved the weather I felt sort of out of place too. Because I was from Seattle and people acted very different in San Diego than Seattle. It was like moving to a different country where people talked pretty much the same but did different things because the weather was just so different. the ocean water was very warm compared to the Puget Sound near Seattle too. One of the first things my mother did was to get caught in a rip tide and almost drown near Del Mar. So my father left me alone on the beach to save her life and almost drowned himself. So, I was left alone to watch them drown together. But somehow they made it back to shore. I was 4. More was expected of children then even at 4 years of age. A few months before my parents had all my front teeth pulled out at once because they said my baby teeth were rotten from too much candy from my grandparents who used to compete for my attention since I was the youngest of their grandkids around them then. I'm not sure they gave me novacaine for that. So I learned to be very stoic and just to bear any pain I had to bear.
We lived first in Vista and then we moved later that year to El Cajon and then the summer just after I finished Kindergarten we moved to Tujunga near the mountains in the Los Angeles Area because my parents were put in charge as ministers of a church there. I finished first and second grade there and then we moved to Glendale where my 5 years older male cousin lived with his mother who was one of my Dad's younger sisters. She said that the public school system there in Glendale was the best in Los Angeles which is why she moved there. We moved to Glendale in 1956 and stayed until I was 21 in 1969 when my father moved to San Diego with my mother and Grandmother. I moved in with my aunt for awhile in the Hollywood Hills because she had a great swimming pool but soon I got tired of that and got a job in Venice, California and got an apartment on the Beach there.
During the 1950s growing up there was always something new being invented and going on. It was a very progressive time in America. We were then the wealthiest country on earth because we had survived relatively unscathed compared to most other countries from World War II because the mainland really wasn't seriously attacked ever. The same could not be said for England, Russia, Germany, France, Japan or China. America had only been attacked at Pearl Harbor and Hawaii wasn't a state until 1960 so then it was only a territory of the United States. Alaska became the 49th state in 1959. So during most of the 1950s there were only 48 states.
Though some people had black and white TVs we didn't have one until 1954 when I was 6 years old in Tujunga. But I started watching television regularly in 1953 in El Cajon, California when I was 5 with my friend Danny Barsocks. We watched cartoons and Superman with Steve Reeves. Finally, my Dad when we lived in Tujunga didn't like me going over to another friends house to watch TV all the time so he finally broke down and bought us a 17 inch Black and white TV. This changed our lives a lot because before then we only listened to programs on the radio before I went to sleep at night. My grandmother and I would listen to Gildersleave and Fibber mcGee and Molly and show like that. But soon programs started to come on TV like Maverick with James Garner and Disneyland with stories of Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett. So television began to change all our lives a lot. Even Twilight Zone opened up our minds and later Star Trek with William Shatner opened all our minds to new possibilities.
What I liked least about growing up in the Los Angeles Area was first the smog. The smog was really bad then and because of the high sulfur content in Gasoline then if you started crying from the smog you couldn't stop on a bad smoggy summer day. If you went to the pool for relief from the often during the summer 100 to 110 degree temperatures in the Los Angeles area where I lived the clorine interacted with the smog so when you breathed the air riding home from the public Olympic sized pool it was like someone was stabbing you in the chest with each breath. The final straw for me regarding Los Angeles was about when I was maybe 12 years old and we dropped my Mom off at the LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) and she was flown to Seattle and driven to Kent 2 hours before we could get home to Glendale in the traffic. It was over 110 degrees with no air conditioning in the car for 4 hours to get home. I had had it finally with Los Angeles traffic and I still just refuse to drive in heavy traffic when I go there. If it is bumper to bumper I just pull off the freeway and go to a restaurant or a movie. Years of heavy traffic bumper to bumper probably was the final straw that made me move away from the Los Angeles area in 1969. I only returned once to live in 1977 for a few months but ever since then I have lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, San Diego Area, Mt. Shasta Area and the San Francisco greater bay area (and also I lived in Hilo, Hawaii and on Maui. I sort of have a love-hate relationship with all of southern California now. Most of my good friends have now moved away from there or died but I still have many relatives that live in Southern California.
One of the reasons that I wrote about my Grandad's property in Lake Forest Park near Seattle in the 1950s is that everyone that lived there with me then is dead including my two cousins one 5 years old than I and the other 7 years older than I. I'm now the last one that remembers the old place that is still alive.
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