I remember people not being very educated mostly then in the early 1950s. They were very "homespun" which means very provincial and mostly wouldn't eat in even foreign food restaurants mostly because they were expensive but also because they didn't trust anything foreign then. Also, World War II just ended and people were still pretty screwed up in their heads from that too.
Just like many people are going to be scary coming out of the Covid-19 Disaster Pandemic we are presently living through. Though a majority of people in the U.S. and Europe will survive this thing it can't help but wound everyone to a greater or lesser degree.
And the worst thing you can do is to be in denial of your feelings if you want to come out of the other side of this in the next few years.
Crying some now or later might be helpful for all the fallen that are now gone, the 180,000 tested and untested dead Americans.
By the way I used the word "Fallen" like in a war to make more sense of what we are going through.
If you have ever seen a battle scene in a movie with thousands of dead soldiers that is what we are experiencing now, except the dead are hidden from us mostly here in the U.S. by Police, and Firemen and Ambulance drivers and doctors and nurses. They are the ones now self destructing from PTSD watching the real battlefield (or at least one of them) on the battlefield trying to save Americans and people of the Earth's lives all over the world.
Sorry, I sort of got sidetracked which seems to happen a lot lately in the Coronavirus war to save lives worldwide.
People in the 1950s were much more afraid of doctors than now partly because doctors couldn't be trusted as much as they can now, and partly because they didn't know 1/4 as much as they do now then. IT's not that there weren't some very good doctors, it was that there were some very unethical doctors without as much supervision on them as now. So, they got away literally with murder very easily because of the general ignorance of the average person in the U.S. However, if someone suspected foul play by a doctor it was much more common for someone to just take out or kill that doctor then than now too. So, the increased education has actually saved probably hundreds of doctors lives now. With more people with a scientific education you cannot lie to people like some doctors once got away with in the 1950s.
For example, a doctor might go on the TV advertisements and say "Smoking cigarettes is good for you" or at the very least "Not harmful" and then tell you that they smoked and considered it a safe thing to do.
This is what the 1950s were really like which was crazy in an entirely different way than now.
Did I think the 1950s at the time were crazy? Of course. But, I also Didn't know anything else but my life so I expected that life was suffering and I girded myself to survive whatever came.
But, the word I would use to describe the 1950s both then and now would be "Harsh". It was harsh when they pulled out all my front teeth at age 4 without novacaine. it was harsh what I saw happen to many children then who were beaten literally for no good reason within an inch of their lives.
I wasn't beaten that I can remember unless I really really deserved it which was good. But, other parents might be drunk or just having a bad day and then beat the hell out of their kids while I watched or something. This was pretty horrific. I saw a lot of blood of kids beating the hell out of each other and torturing each other and screaming and crying a lot back then. Kid went to the hospital from falling off roofs and off bicycles and running into cars or getting run over by cars or because there were no seat belts smashing into the front windows of cars withe their faces and hopefully this was at slow enough speeds that their heads didn't go through the front window and get beheaded.
This was the 1950s when I grew up but luckily my Dad was a good driver and didn't throw me into the front window with my face unless a bad or drunk driver cut him off and then my father would swear at the person.
But, in 1954 as my mother was learning to drive the old 1941 Century Buick Coupe she ran over someone's mailbox and threw me into the front window when I was 6 and I drove a tooth through my front lips and it bled and I cried. But, if my father had been there I wouldn't have cried because I had to always be tough for him to respect me even at 4 to 6 years old.
By the way a coupe is a 2 door vehicle so you lean the front seats forward to get in and out of the back seat. There were no bucket seats then in regular cars pretty much until Mustangs and Camaros and all during the middle to late 1960s. Dad had his century buick coupe painted light blue and it had a column shift and he used it sometimes to race other cars on the freeway even when Mom and I were there. It had a lot of power but I never drove it because he traded it in on a 1956 Century Buick in 1956 when I was 8. Because I was older he did let me drive the 1956 because it was an automatic. He bought the automatic transmission for Mom because she had trouble shifting gears and the clutch bothered her left knee on the old 1941. Dad had the rear wheel covers on his 1941 and I think it also had a visor because they didn't have tinted windows to keep out the glare of the sun in the 1940s.
Dad wound up buying the Yellow and White 1956 Century Buick Coupe when I was 8 years old.
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