Women in the fifties

I was just a tot in the fifties. But apparently, Caucasian White men were treated wonderfully during this decade. Your wife stayed at home, cleaning your house during the day, ironing your shirts, did the family shopping and chores, taking care of the kids and cooking you and yours nutritious home cooked meals.

At work you were addressed as Mr. So and so while the women at work were girls and were addressed by their first names. The women made you coffee and brought in home made streudel for you to sample.

Of course most housewives didn't have it that bad either. They stayed home. Coffee clutched with their neighbors, smoked, played cards, and watched Arthur Godfrey during the day. After the kids came home they made sure they did their homework and allowed no shenanigans.

Women were limited to women only professions. This created a supply and demand advantage for education and nursing. A principal could choose the pick of the litter from the local normal school and the town would have a dedicated, smart, hard working, non-unionized teacher for life, or at least until the sounding of wedding bells. The hospital administrators could in turn get hard working non-unionized nurses for a song. America was the envy of the world for it's schools and health care system.

Bachelor men were pampered at work and even the ugliest of them were looked up to by the ladies. His social card was filled with dinner engagements. He was considered "eligible" and was constantly being given home made baked goods by the eligible bachelorettes at the office. Keeping his waistline was a problem for a bachelor in an office setting.

After work he could pick and choose the apples off the tree. As this was before "the pill" he had to be ginger in choosing his apples as otherwise, he might have to acquire a plant for his backyard.

In the sixties everything changed. It turns out that bra burning was an urban myth. Women didn't burn their bras but various women's groups were created and demands were made for equal pay and equal rights for women. For men, life was never the same.

editor's note: to be continued.

Norman Mailer

I should have loved Norman Mailer. Worshiped at the feet of the co-founder of the Village Voice, and author of the Naked and the Dead. Actually his writing is not bad. One day I'll finish the Executioner's Song.

As a baby boomer, a pseudo-intellectual, and someone from the New York Metropolitan area, demographically, I should have been Norman Mailer's biggest fan. But I was too young. Norman Mailer was the god of my teachers in the English Department of Rutgers in the 70's. But not of my crowd. He would have scoffed at young men who didn't know the rules of boxing or betting at the racetrack.

He was a man's man. He was a working class intellectural. He was welcomed at the bars he frequented. He knew how to order a drink, play pool at the bar table and fight a man when he had too. He knew how to flirt with the pretty girl at the party. He was sort of the Jewish New Yorker's Ernest Hemingway. He fought Rip Torn.

The younger baby boomers couldn't always relate to him. He was your older brother or your TA's favorite writer. He had a pre-Pre Beatles sensibility and did not tranlate as well as, say, Allen Ginsberg. He was too old school.

editor's note: for a hilarious account from Jimmy Breslin on the 1969 Mailer for Mayor campaign click on Mailer segment on this page.

Gentrification

The dream of the fifties for most Americans was to move from the crowded cities and buy a home in the suburbs. The GI bill, the interstate highway and developments like Levittown New York made this transformation from ethnic urban dwellers to suburban nuclear families the norm. Of course, with the sixties, baby boomers rediscovered the cities. Here they could become independent of Mom and Dad (receiving the occasional Care package) and indulge in bohemian lifestyles in older urban housing, that was in the beginning, low in rent.

As more baby boomers moved to the inner cities, Gentrification took place. Over the years, renters became homeowners and the urban fixer upper became the pet child of the baby boomer of the sixties and beyond. This Old House has its roots in this movement.

At the other extreme was the back to the land movement. Here young baby boomers flocked to join rural communes. They ate squash that they raised, made their own organic toothpaste, and lived like modern day Shakers, but with sex. Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm is an example of a hippie commune.

The young person in 1969 faced a number of choices. He could move to a commune, move to the city and live on the streets, or take the path of least resistance and go to college.

Most of us took the path of least resistance with the acknowledgement that we were simply passing through the academic world on our way somewhere else. We liked to think our final destinations was an ashram in India or a carpenter shop in New Hope. Yeah, right.

Youth hostels, backpacking and the John Muir trail

The summer of my junior year in high school I went to typing school, band practice, and at the end of the summer went to Mo No Mo Nock in the Pocono's with the folks. I knew I had missed Woodstock. What I didn't know until going to a Philosophy Club meeting in September was that the hip kids had all gone backpacking in Europe and stayed in Youth Hostels or, if they traveled domestically, they had hiked the John Muir trail.

I thought my sleeping bag days were over after Boy Scouts. Now I found I needed my camping gear again if I wanted to stay au courant. I scoured the cellarway for my back pack and sleeping bag. My mother had given them away. Funny these things disappeared right after Woodstock.

Travel is one of the many things that changed with the sixties. Previously travel meant getting in the family sedan and going to an overnight resort that had a pool for the kids and a golf course for Dad. If you were an outdoorsman you went on camping trips and hunted deer with your father.

Now you were supposed to backpack the Appalachian trail and travel overseas with a rail pass and stay in Youth hostels. You and your guitar were supposed to have adventures and experience life. Meeting fellow travelers of the female persuasion along the way.

I was a slow learner. I didn't have a girlfriend until my seventeenth birthday and I didn't stay in a youth hostel until I was in my thirties.

editor's note: I recently came back from a brief vacation in Portugal. On the second to the last day my wallet was stolen and the only money I had left was an emergency stash, rather paltry it turned out. Squashing the thought of staying in a posh hotel I was looking for cheap quarters to crash for the night before I could take my plane back in the morning. I was walking down the main boulevard of Lisbon and noticed a sign on a building that said "Travellers House". What the heck. I went up the stairs and was greeted by two friendly ladies who let me stay for twenty euros. The place had Internet access, a color tv, a kitchen and a beer party for guests. The beer party was swell and, the hostesses encouraged the guests to dance to the records. Thankfully, my shared quarters was in a room with quiet men instead of the British young men, drunk with beer and rugby stories.

Woodstock

Woodstock, was the great event that defined the late sixties. Yet while at once showing how young people in America had changed from their co-horts in the fifties, the seeds of destruction were laid at the same time. Instead of the counterculture being a relatively small group of like minded souls, after Woodstock everybody got hip. College campus became filled to the brim with "freaks". "Far out","bummed out", "down on..." became expressions that everybody used. No longer an exclusive club, everybody went to Woodstock that summer or at least pretended to.

The girl next door started wearing granny dresses. The kids in high school majoring in auto mechanics grew their hair long and started smoking pot. The pharmacist at the drug store started riding a motorcycle. Anthony Cavalo took up the guitar.

High school underground newspapers

Being a high school intellectual, at least in the 60’s, made one wiser, smarter, hipper, and more worldly than our elders, especially our teachers, principals, political leaders, parents and ministers. A high school intellectual, with one witty comment, could show an awareness of the intricacies of life and the world that older people could not grasp.

Between classes, we had the wisdom of the ages and were not afraid to share our knowledge of life. One of my personal favorite axioms of that time was that the major difference between high school and college was that at college you could get chocolate milk. In this axiom my own personal acumen and knowledge was shown to understand the entire misguided American educational system.

We were wise sages masquerading as high school kids. And high school underground newspapers were one of the principal manifestations of the superiority, morally as well as intellectually we had over our teachers and our straighter classmates.

By weaseling my way into the high school hip intellectual crowd, I was invited to attend a meeting of Smuff, the soon to be high school underground newspaper of Hackensack. Working for Smuff was a great honor, albeit one that did not appear on my college applications. Prudence, as they say, is the better part of valor.

Why the paper was not burned and all the distributors expelled I do not know. The high school administration allowed it to go on. Maybe they realized that the Smuff thing was just a fad that the writers would appreciate later when we were getting our graduate degrees. At any rate, it was tolerated.

Some times I get nostalgic over a few beers and get out my old Smuffs. They are enjoyable reads.

editor's note: the long out of print "Our Time is Now" edited by John Birmingham (the first editor of Smuff) contains excerpts from a number of high school underground newspapers (including Smuff) as well as an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut. It is available quite cheaply in paperback on the Internet.

the new Democratic coalition

The New Democratic Coalition of Bergen County supported Eugene McCarthy for President and sat on their hands during the 1968 Presidential election that ultimately elected Richard Nixon.



That spring some of the members decided to join the Hackensack Democratic Club. My father, at that time was the club president, and as a kid I got to listen to some of the phone calls the old man made. I remember he called people like Tony Andorra and said, "Well we've decided to let some of these young people join the Democratic Club but I thought it would be nice of some of the 'old timers' came to the meeting too."



A kid with big ears learns a lot from his parents.