Newton’s Third Law of Motion; For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. I mentioned that rock and music was equal parts music and social movement. This was a totally new event for music. In earlier episodes, we’ve seen how jazz was borrowed by the US Government for global PR purposes, and of course, music has always given a voice to the hopes, dreams, hurts, and fears of people everywhere. But this was something totally different. Ever since the ‘50s, we’ve never been sure whether art imitates life, or life imitates art. The most dramatic examples were still in the future, but it started in the 1950’s, and I’ve wondered why then, and not some other time. Let’s look at the 1950’s together for a few minutes and see if we can’t figure out why that might be.
Rock and roll was a youth movement and in the ‘50s, family life was changing. Husbands came home from world war II, having witnessed and participated in some of the most awful events in human history. With the sacrifice, and grief, and horror behind them, they wanted to come home and forget the war and enjoy what they’d fought so hard for. Being the only industrialized nation NOT to have been blown to smithereens, our economy was totally ready to meet the needs of … everyone. Money poured into the US and these were boom times – baby boom, marriage boom, housing boom! With money mostly a non-issue, families – at least families that were lucky enough to be white - were stable and intact. Children were the center of attention. Mom’s stayed home or if they worked, they did it in part-time jobs and still had plenty of time for their families and ‘motherly’ duties. When she did work, mom’s money was used to buy more for the kids, or to help the family afford a bigger, nicer house. Also, the Great Depression was still visible in people’s rear-view mirrors, and holding onto financial stability was, of course, a major motivator, too. Two income families also created a large middle-class, another first.
Father always knew best; he was the breadwinner. He doled out sage advice, and when needed, could pull out his can of ‘whoop-ass’ as mom warned, ‘wait til your father gets home!’ The typical white family had plenty of money, and with the support of VA loans, found it easy to move to the suburbs and buy ready-made, brand new homes. The same wasn’t true for other families though, so while Mr. and Mrs. White moved out to the suburbs, the cities became concentrations of left behind black families and with the tax base cut do deeply, many residential areas within cities slowly slipped into decades of decay and the people left to live in them began to know experience a new type of segregation and financial hardships.
Parents doted on their kids, and wanted them to have more fun and to be more comfortable than they'd had it during the depression and the supply rationing years of WWII. Girls were raised to be good little wives; not many went to college, and if they did, it was mostly to find the right young man to marry. Career planning for girls was strictly a Plan B thing in case other options didn’t work out. The boys were raised to be ‘winners’; this meant excelling in school, sports, and going to college. They were expected to have a mischievous side – after all, ‘boys will be boys’. They were expected to stake out what they wanted in life and take it. The worst of these kids became little Brett Kavanaughs.
Overly permissive parents were creating an entire generation of kids that never knew hardship or lacked for anything. These years gave birth to American consumerism. It was a 180-degree swing from the 19th century values of doing for yourself, self-control, and saving money. We’ve never been able to shake it since then. Americans were totally hypnotized by the artful schmooze that advertisers surrounded them with. More than anything, TV was the source of magical incantations that got us to spend more and more on needs we never had, for things we never wanted and ultimately only made us more unhappy. A nation of independent, sensible Yankees had been hocus-pocused into a nation of buy-now, pay-later, status-craving, social climbing, salivating Pavlov’s dogs panting after every imaginable thing under the sun. (“That is America to me”)This was the era ushered in the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ neurosis we’re still plagued with. Our neighbors and friends told us what kind of furniture to buy, what kind of car to drive, what kind of music to like, what kind political opinions to have, in short how to think and live.
White, spoiled suburban teens became petulant rebels and the racial and economic segregation was creating future racial tensions between people who understood each other even less than before.
Living in their safe little suburban havens, families were ginning out the world’s first-ever teenage culture. They had spending power youth of that age had never collectively enjoyed before. With parents who were enjoying this opulent age, and teens making their own money, teens who owned their own cars was pretty common place. Cars gave teens more freedom than ever, and a place where a teen couple could go to be alone, out of sight of moms and dads. Cars did begin changing the ‘no sex before marriage’ values their parents had grown up with.
A famous anthropologist one defined the average teenager as “someone who is better prepared for a zombie apocalypse than tomorrow’s math test.” Is it any wonder, with so much social change going on, that by the 1950’s, the world experienced the arrival of an entirely new kind of adolescent - the world’s first-ever generation of true teenagers. Before then, American adolescents didn’t have the luxury to roll around in that kind of extended childhood. Instead, they’d traditionally gone to work to help support their families or to start one of their own! The nation needed a holding tank to keep these new specimens out of trouble.
High school became an entire world unto itself, and teens developed their own speech patterns, clothing styles, beliefs, hobbies, and social rules. Just like they have now, but in the ‘50s, this was all new. The nice little boys and girls who’d grown up in their starched white dresses and little suits and ties grew into free-minded, pleasure-centered little rebels – compared to what had come before, but NOTHING like the next generations. Missing from the mix was the binge drinking, drug use, and sexual abandon. In the ‘50s, most teens were shy little virgins.
As pampered as the white kids were, most of them did have part-time jobs. Unlike what was happening in the cities, the kids in the ‘burbs earned money for their own use. Add weekly allowance money, and that made them a heavily ad-targeted group, another new trend in the ‘50s.
In a time and culture where there was so much blurring between traditional reality and the fiction that ad agencies and recently developed tv were creating, it’s no surprise that the movies suddenly went Technicolor with films catering to purely teen audiences. Like their cars, teens loved the privacy that dark theaters and drive-ins provided. Movie producers smelled teen money and quickly started cookie-cutting entire catalogues of teen flicks like High School Confidential, Blackboard Jungle, Teen Rebel, The Wild One, and Rebel Without a Cause – these were the best of the lot. And then there were the Elvis, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funnicello films that quickly followed…. Not bad unless you like movies with a plot!
In an anxious, Cold-War age where teens watched ‘duck and cover’ films in classrooms for practical tips on how to survive a Russian nuclear attack – just hide under your desk, everything’s going to be just fine.
To the Hollywood film producers, public anxiety and primal fear always smell like cash. So, riding the cold war trend, the studios obliged teen fears by cranking out films about giant, radioactive mutant ants, and titles like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them! – a film about atomically mutated spiders come to destroy mankind, The Creature with the Atom Brain in which an ex-Nazi scientist uses radio-controlled zombies to return a mobster to power (hold on, isn’t that what’s happening now, since Trump keeps threatening to run for office again?), or The Brain Eaters, where an infestation of parasites from the center of the Earth take over the minds of the townspeople…. Actually, I think this was the original inspiration for Fox News.
And since we’re talking about how Grandma and Grandpa dated back in the ‘50s … in those long time ago days before Gramp’s hair fell out … let’s take a little closer look, shall we?!
So, let’s make like Marty McFly and hop into our DeLorean time machine. Set the controls for 1955, ok Doc? It’s time to for a sock hop! A sock hop, by the way, was a school dance, on the gym floor, and everybody had to take their shoes off so’s not to scuff up the floor boards. If it wasn’t at the sock hop, you’d could see a flutter bum (a guy) out with his classy chassis (girlfriend) at a pizza or ice cream parlor, the drive-ins, bowling alleys, coffee houses and record shops – these were all fat city (cool places to hang out)!
The ‘50s were the decade when dating – like we’ve known it since – started. In those days, dating usually started as doubles going out. It made it safer and less awkward, lots of times one of the couples was out on a ‘blind-date’. After one or two double dates, if anything was going to develop, couples would move into single dating.
Guys were expected to pick up the tab at all times. In today’s money, it might cost a guy about $60 a month to date. This could cover two high school basketball games, six cokes, three movies, two bags of popcorn, gasoline for the car, and an unlimited amount of television dates. Not bad, if you consider that the cost of a Coke at the movies these days is at least $5.00 - six of those and you’re half-way to $60 already! Most guys thought of these expenses like an ‘investment’ though, and like any investment, some paid back well, and…. A 1959 issue of Seventeen magazine quoted a teenage boy saying this “When a boy takes a girl out and spends $1.20 on her (like I did the other night) he expects a little petting in return (which I didn't get)"
If the relationship got serious – like exclusive – they called it ‘going steady’. Pre-war, going steady was pretty serious stuff; it meant you two were well on the way to getting married. After the war ended though, things loosened up a lot. You could ‘go steady’ and not have that big expectation. Still, there were little rituals that meant you were a ‘steady’ couple; the guy would give his girl his class ring, or letterman’s jacket or sweater. If it was a ring, she had to wear it on the third finger/ left hand. Going steady also meant that the couple was getting more intimate with each other. In lots of cases, going steady was like a ‘play-marriage’. The next step in the relationship, if it ever got there, was an actual wedding engagement and then – finally - marriage. Since only about 20% of marriages ended in divorce back then, these were all pretty serious steps. Today, we’re at about 50%, and where I live, in Calfornia, the average is actually 65% in 2021. Going steady, by these standards, has all the seriousness of an evening at the Hollywood Improv.