“Life in the 1960s was a completely different world. Do you remember?”
I saw this on a Facebook meme the other day and was more than a little amused. At first I found myself laughing at the thought that people could think the world was “completely different” in a decade I went from age 10 to age 20. Hey, it wasn’t that long ago.
Or was it?
The middle of the decade was basically 60 years ago. If the 16-year-old me looked at a meme of life 60 years earlier, it would have read like this:
“Life in 1906 was a completely different world. Do you remember?”
Now that was a different time. My grandparents were 11 years old in a world without radio, television, commercial air travel and dial telephones. In fact, most homes outside major cities didn’t have phones or electricity.
Home refrigerators weren’t invented until 1913 and weren’t available for anyone except the richest people until the mid 1920s. A survey done 34 years later reported that 45 percent of American homes lacked indoor plumbing.
Mass production of automobiles was still a few years away, and only about one in 10 Americans owned a car in 1906.
A completely different world?
Absolutely, in these and a hundred other ways.
But the 1960s? Yes, there are big differences, but many of the biggest ones are questions of degree. Here’s that meme:
Much of it is exaggerated or untrue.
— Color television was available in the 1950s, but was expensive and most people saw no reason to buy it with the limited number of shows available and the poor quality. The premiere of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in 1961 was one of the major spurs to sales of color TV.
Even so, it was 1979 before the last black and white shows were produced. A much bigger difference between then and now was that there were far fewer channels and most networks stopped broadcasting by 1 a.m. each night.
— Walking to school? The last time I walked to school was 1961 in Ohio. I was in the sixth grade and the school was about 200 yards away across Harshmanville Road. My children walked to school in the early 1990s when our California home was basically in the same block as the elementary school.
When they attended junior high and high school, we dropped them off because our small city didn’t have school buses. There was a free shuttle bus that they used to get home in the afternoons.
— Bottled water? I think it was the 1980s before I first had bottled water, but I don’t think that means we were primitive. I think it just means the water has gotten worse since the 1960s. By the way, I still have no problem at all with tap water.
— Mail delivered twice a day? Not in my lifetime, although maybe that’s because I didn’t live in New York City or a few other places. As for letters being widely used, so what? If you write an email to someone, that’s essentially still a letter.
I actually looked it up, and in most cities, twice-a-day delivery ended on April 17, 1950, to cut operating costs.
— Stores closed on Sundays? This became somewhat controversial because it was designed to make people obey the Christian Sabbath, but the Supreme Court approved it in 1961 (when there was a real Supreme Court) as a general boon for the health and welfare of the country to have a day of rest.
Interestingly enough, the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy was part of the Decalogue brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses, s thousand years before Christ. Why is that significant? Well, the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, not Sunday.
As for stores being closed on Sundays, there are still places where that is true. In Bergen County, N.J., for example. even shopping malls are closed. And of course, Chik-fil-A’s all over the country are closed Sundays. Far more different then was that stores were open a lot less the rest of the week.
When I was growing up in Ohio in the late ’50s and early ’60s, downtown department stores were only open late (till 9 p.m.) one evening a week. I remember I was so surprised when we moved to Austria in 1976 to learn that not only were stores in Vienna not open late, they close at noon on Saturdays for the weekend.
When I asked about it, I was told that people who worked in retail had the right to evenings and weekends with their families.
— As for swimming pools, salesmen and landlines, meh.
But I will say you must be a hell of a salesman to sell a vacuum cleaner to an encyclopedia.
In my next post, I’ll talk about things that really are different.