Wednesday, November 13, 2024

What was good about the 1950s for me?

 I liked Cowboy shows on TV like "Have Gun Will Travel" and "The Rifleman" and Jim Bowie and Bat Masterson and Maverick and others and I also liked the Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched and in the 1960s I liked Star Trek and in the 1970s I liked Star wars and in the 1980s I liked the rest of the Star Wars series that went on and on and on and is still going it seems.

I had good parents and I was well cared fro in that I had my mother and my Grandmother to care of me living with us. My father would come home on weekends from work and sometimes spend time with me. He liked Travel Logs on TV with Bill Burred and other travelogs and animals shows and he also liked the News. But, it took me a long time to want to watch the news because thousands of people were dying a lot around the world and often then they showed the mangled bodies of American Soldiers and others in foreign lands or people in India attacking each other with hoes and pitchforks especially between the Hindus and Muslims then in the 1950s and early 1960s.

I liked hiking in the mountains with my father and mother sometimes on weekends especially after we moved to Tujunga and later Glendale in the Los Angeles area. I liked going up into the snow above Los Angeles and my father had a pair of Army surplus skis from World war II and I taught myself to ski using them. But, I wasn't rich enough to go skiing at a ski lift until later in my life. But, I always had a bicycle from the time I was 5 years old and I was allowed to ride almost anywhere I wanted to even miles away between 5 and then on in those days. Since. 

Since you were a boy you were expendable like a Soldier which many boys my age became through the draft and were killed in Viet Nam.

I was able to work and buy myself a 1956 Ford STation Wagon that I used for surfing during high school so often we would cut school and go to the beach. Public School attendance wasn't as big a deal then as it has become now where schools are only paid by the hourss a student is in class like it is now.

So, we had a lot more leeway of when we had to be in school than now on many different levels. 

Though I loved to learn new things and still do I hated being forced to go to a publich school where often it wasn't safe to be.

However, I didn't fully realize just how good I had it until I was 18 and had to work and go to college a lot. Then I longed for the times between birth and 18 once again like many people do.

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