Was it scary to grow up in the 1950s? Yes.

 It was scary in a completely different way than now I believe. Of course it all depended upon where you lived then and what your parents were like and how crazy and violent children might be from being abused at home a lot then. So, fighting (with fists mostly) happened a lot especially between boys in and out of school. Teachers then sort of looked the other way then a lot so children often wound up in the hospital or died then.

The value of children and human life in general was not as high as now. No one then wore seatbelts except in planes or on carnival rides and even then it was so you didn't die doing things. For example, my father would put both back seats down in our 1960 stationwagon and a friend of mine might lie down in the flat area. His ONLY request was that we put our feet towards the front of the car so we didn't die or break our necks when he stopped the car. So, we laid down in the back of the 1960 mercury Stationwagon and sang (IT's an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polkadot bikini while laughing and every time he stopped it was for us like jumping off a porch onto grass as our feet hit the front seats of the station wagon.

Often teenagers would die in fast car accidents and be found scattered all over the place hundreds of feet from where the car or truck crashed because no one was wearing seat belts in the 50s except in planes and on carnival rides.

Part of the reason children were not valued like now is that they died so often. So, adults prepared to lose up to 1/2 of the children that they had just like what happened to their parents and grandparents.

It wasn't until the Viet Nam war with friends of mine from high school dying almost every day in the Viet Nam war that human life suddenly began to become more valuable because at least small children weren't dying so much and the older generations where 1/2 of their brothers and sisters died from diseases or accidents died and so attitude changed a lot from what they were during the 1800s and early 1900s.

I met people in the 1950s who had traveled across the U.S. in wagons and also on the early trains from the east coast to the west coast in the 1800s when I met them as a child in the 1950s too. Many people didn't own cars or know how to drive until the 1940s or 1950s by the way. People in the U.S. were mostly very different than now in the 1950s.

Also, people talk about the 1960s being wild but that was just the start of the wildness. The wildness really got going in the 1970s actually and only ended because of AIDS which killed millions worldwide then and now.

A good example about the driving part of all this is that my mother didn't learn to drive until I was 6 years old and this was pretty common then. It was only when my parents were put in charge of a church in downtown Los Angeles that she got tired of taking the bus from Tujunga far away and decided to learn to drive my Dad's Stick Shift 1941 Buick that had been his brother Tommy's Race Car before he was gone in 1942. I remember being thrown from the front seat into the windshield  as she crashed into a neighbor's mailbox in trying to drive and use a clutch when I was 6 years old in 1954. She was scary to drive with at first but then she got pretty good at it over time by the time I was 7 or 8 years old. She drove until she was about 80 or more years old or until 1999 or 2000 AD. And like I said men were much more likely to drive than women even if they were rich then in the 1950s.