Do you count 1945 through 1963 as part of the Golden Era?

[CaramelSmoothie]

The Williams sisters were a surprise (a mild one at best) more from how they came up through the ranks than from where they came from. In US tennis history there have been a good many champions who were products of the "public courts", both black (Arthur Ashe, Athea Gibson) and white (Billie Jean King, Jimmy Connors). The thing that made the Williams sisters unique to these others is that they rarely participated in age group tournaments, prefering instead to train against each other in private under their father's tutelage. So while the tennis world was well aware of them, there was too little tournament play to accurately indicate how well they would perform at the professional level. But even as they were flying somewhat under the radar, you had Bud Collins touting their play from their early teens.

I see, I was under the impression that their "wrong side of the tracks" upbringing was the focus of attention early in their careers. I guess that could have been more of a public relations angle to further their careers. Also, the father Richard Williams was not a tennis instructor. He said that he saw a tennis match on tv and saw how big of a check was handed to the winner and that's when he decided he would make his kids become tennis players. I believe the first two daughters didn't work out but once he tried out Venus and Serena that's when he knew he had his future champs and when he told this to people they thought he was crazy, lol.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Very true. And as you know it wasn't just White on Black, "ethnic Whites" bore the brunt of stereotypes too. The drunk and criminal Irishman, the greaseball Italian, the greedy Jew....Now those groups are considered mainstream White with the exception of Jews, so that shows that even when among those with the same skin color there can be tension.

And even within the same ethnic group: where I come from the descendents of the Lace Curtain Irish still hate the descendents of the Shanty Irish, and vice versa. I think the biggest racial myth of all is that there's any such thing as a single "white race." There's always been just a bunch of little tribes, and whatever tolerance they've developed for each other is usually no more than a couple of generations deep.

I remember you telling me about this woman in another thread. I remember asking you if the house was still standing but I forgot what your response was.

It is -- and it's a big tourist attraction. The local art museum mantains it as the "Farnsworth Homestead," and it's just as it was when old Lucy died in 1935, except maybe not as dusty.

Hopefully when I go, they'll maintain my house as well. It could use a good dusting.

 

[GHT]

I guess my question is at what point in history should a modern person not dress the period? I hope this question makes sense as I am having a hard time articulating it, lol.

My answer to that would be: "Wear what you like, when you like, cock a snook at convention, look on the stares as attention. You see my avatar, that's how my wife and I dress all the time. We were at a forties inspired, jive dance, weekender, last weekend. The following day, at the same venue was a military fair, where both military and civilian clothing artifacts, weapons and paraphenalia were sold. I was dressed, as usual, in one of my made to measure suits, styled in the early forties period. A guy complimented me, well sort of: He said, "I like your fancy dress, you look like: George Melly. I've posted Georges' name as a link to give you an idea of how flambouyant he was. (George passed away recently.) The fellow looked amazed when I told him that the suit was made to measure, and then told him the price. For the record, my wife and I were dressed much the same as you see us in our avatar.

And speaking of avatars, is that you in your avatar, or have I just made a monumental faux pas in not recognising a celebrity?

 

[CaramelSmoothie]

I think there've always been people "outside their era," people I call "atavists." In my town in the 1930s there was a woman for whom the world stopped in the late 1880s -- she lived in an 1880s vintage house with all its original furnishings, and until the day she died she dressed in an 1880s style. The neighborhood kids were convinced she was a witch and steered clear of her, but she was otherwise unmolested.

I keep hoping the neighborhood kids will think I'm a witch, but I must be doing something wrong because they still let their damn dogs pee in my driveway.

Look what I stumbled upon just now, reminded me of this discussion:

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/sony-w...ional-shortlist-has-been-announced-slideshow/


Go to the 17th picture in that slideshow if the above link doesn't take you directly to it. Now look at these comments for this picture:

Anonymous 16 hours ago
5
11

I wonder what drives people to force-fit themselves into a series of life-style choices that come pre-packaged from someone else's ideals? I mean it's one thing to like the clothes of an era or the music of an era, but to live your life in its entirety in a sort of movie-set with props and costumes while acting "in character" 24/7 seems nothing short of disingenuous, at best. These people are living cartoons of the images that appeal to them. They are empty shells who have managed to fill themselves with the identity of others in order to have one. They're hollow. It's incredibly sad.


Natasha 54 minutes ago
1
3

And what ideas are you living with? Modern? Then what exactly makes you different? You are living with the choice that's been pre-made just the same, but they have guts to jump out of the conventional way and enjoy what they truly like. They cherish the image and they try it on.
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[Natasha]
Natasha 41 minutes ago
0
2

I think with the progression of social history you will see more of that, since we can now record and save everything that belongs to this or that epoch. People are rarely happy with the present, they either look forward, or get nostalgic about past. With the global traveling, internet that feeds your interest in cultures, general tolerance to sub-cultural trends, people are facing wider choice of life style then they used to. Not surprising you can pick what appeals best to you and submerge into it. I am not sure why it bothers you. It makes life brighter and it conserves unique traditions that would be gone otherwise.



Electric Boogaloo 18 hours ago
1
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Kind of hard to "live in the now," when you're busy living in the then.
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Reply

 

[Flat Foot Floey]

I use "the golden era" for the 20s to 40s only. Kind of big band / swing era.
I really don't think it helps to bring lengthy discussions of taste into this. It is just a name. A broader definition would wash it out and make it unclearer than it already is.

 

[CaramelSmoothie]

GHT, the link doesn't work but I googled George Melly and see he was quite a character!

No, that isn't me, lol, that is the dancer Jeni Legon.

I like your attitude and confidence in the way you dress. I thought about my question some more and what I was really asking is are all eras fair game or does the practicality of dressing another era play a role in whether one should do it? Using the hoop dresses again as an example, I don't think it would a good idea to try to go vintage with Civil War attire. Can you imagine trying to get on public transit with that thing? lol. Or suppose a man admired the 1700s so much that he decided to dress like George Washington, would that not be ridiculous?

 

[CaramelSmoothie]

Well, I think it can, but not overnight. And by overnight, I mean within 50 or even 100 years, which is what I thought was your earlier point.

No, but I re-read it and can see how it sounded that way. I think the differences in skin color, hair texture, eye color and just the cultures that are created from living in different parts of the world make it impossible to "not see race", imo. The Bible says Adam and Eve didn't even realize they were naked until God threw them out of the Garden of Eden then once they realized they were naked they got embarrassed and ran for cover. From then on nudity was seen as "wrong". I believe this is akin to race relations and awareness of cultural differences.

 

[GHT]

GHT, the link doesn't work but I googled George Melly and see he was quite a character!
No, that isn't me, lol, that is the dancer Jeni Legon.

How remiss of me not to recognise Jeni LeGon. I love the way she reworked her name from that of her father. His name being Ligon.
Jeni of course, famously danced with Fred Astaire and was, I think, the first African/American to do so on screen. Didn't she sign up with MGM?

My recollection is scant, I'm sure that my wife would know better. For what it's worth, my wife and I reached a standard in Latin & Ballroom in the late 60's that might have been good enough for a professional career, but the money a dancer could earn back then was pathetic, when you consider all the intense training it required, to say nothing of living your life out of a suitcase. We chose a different path, remained amateurs, and just danced for fun.

 

[sheeplady]

LOL!

It's funny you should mention those other time periods, because even though I wear vintage hats, I don't think I could ever be "that girl" who goes full on vintage in my everyday life, but I support people's right to do it. But I can't help but wondering what would happen if someone liked one of those ancient eras as many here like the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s and decided to dress as they did back then could that be justified? Or what about those hoop skirts (don't know the technical name for it) that were so popular during the Civil War? Could a person decide that is their personal style and start wearing hoop skirts in this day and age because they identify more with that era in the same way that people here identify with the Golden Age? I guess my question is at what point in history should a modern person not dress the period? I hope this question makes sense as I am having a hard time articulating it, lol.

There's people who do that. I know two families I used to know (one a couple, the other a couple with a child) who did a Victorian lifestyle. No fridge (they use ice and an icebox), wear the old-inspired clothes, use no plastic, use foot-pedaled machines, etc. Both couples (who when I knew them didn't know each other) lived way out in the middle of nowhere. The kind of place where you could seem a bit "off" and everybody would leave you alone because: you never know who has a gun; there's not many other people to be friends with if you want friends; and nobody lives out that far unless they are a little off themselves.

They also lived in a heavy Mennonite/ Amish area and in place were it wasn't unusual to not have a phone (lack of lines) or electric (lack of lines). The one family with the little girl sent her to school. I know the couple supposedly got into the lifestyle when they bought a house in really rough shape (needed all new wiring, lots of repairs) but lived debt free and after saving for a decade to redo it themselves realized they didn't need power. The other family lived in an area without electric.

I think the biggest racial myth of all is that there's any such thing as a single "white race." There's always been just a bunch of little tribes, and whatever tolerance they've developed for each other is usually no more than a couple of generations deep.

That's partially because who we see as "white" in the US changes with the passage of time. Right now latinos tend to be seen as "not white" just like at one time the Irish, Poles, and Italians were seen as "not white." They weren't black or hispanic or american indian, but they were "not white" insomuch as they were specified as their ethnicity.

There's a theory that the people that tend to be hated the most by one ethnicity are the people who are most ethnically like the ethnicity while *not being exactly the same.* Your cultural enemies tend to be right over the border or in the next segment of your country.

 

[CaramelSmoothie]

.
Jeni of course, famously danced with Fred Astaire and was, I think, the first African/American to do so on screen.

:eeek::eeek::eeek:


Hunh! Fred Astaire???? Dancing with a Black woman??? In the 30s/40s???? Nah, I think your memory is failing you. If not, then somebody just has to post a Youtube video or some long lost home video or any ole video to prove this 'chere statement. :eeek:

 

[LizzieMaine]

:eeek::eeek::eeek:


Hunh! Fred Astaire???? Dancing with a Black woman??? In the 30s/40s???? Nah, I think your memory is failing you. If not, then somebody just has to post a Youtube video or some long lost home video or any ole video to prove this 'chere statement. :eeek:

Jeni Legon was in only one picture with Astaire, "Easter Parade" in 1948, and she played a maid in that. No dance with Fred.

However, she had been a colleague of Astaire's at RKO in the mid-thirties, and she and Bill Robinson and Astaire and Rogers all shared the same rehearsal hall, watching each others' routines, which is as close as she came to dancing with Astaire.

 

[GHT]

Internet searches are not my forte, but if you are to believe Wiki, which I have learned, is not always the gospel truth, then following up this quote, might bear fruit, if you know what you are looking for: I'm sure that there are some members who know how to uncover said film.

While in Hollywood, LeGon had the opportunity to work with performers such as Ethel Waters and Al Jolson. She danced with Fred Astaire and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, becoming the first African-American woman to do so on screen. During this time, she was given a role in Hooray for Love, which led MGM to offer her a long-term contract, making LeGon the first African-American woman to receive such an opportunity. In 1969, LeGon settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she taught tap and point. In 1999, the National Film Board of Canada released Grant Greshuk’s prize-winning documentary Jeni Le Gon: Living in a Great Big Way.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Bible says Adam and Eve didn't even realize they were naked until God threw them out of the Garden of Eden then once they realized they were naked they got embarrassed and ran for cover. From then on nudity was seen as "wrong". I believe this is akin to race relations and awareness of cultural differences.

I think that's a brilliant analogy. If you go back and read 1940s-era books on race relations, things like Roi Ottley's "New World A' Comin'," and Gunnar Myrdahl's "An American Dilemma," one thing you'll keep running into is how many white people in that era didn't have any personal experience at all with black people -- there were many, many areas of the North where the only black people you ever saw were the ones in the movies, or maybe a porter on a train if you went on a trip. If you talk to people who lived in those areas in those days and you ask them about race you'll often get a shrug: "We didn't *know* there was a race problem. We had other things to worry about."

That may sound callous in a world where race is an omnipresent issue, and people today might wonder how anyone could have lived thru an era of segregation and lynchings and such without knowing there was a race problem -- but the country was a lot bigger, figuratively speaking, and a lot more provincial than it is now. It was only when major stories broke that were unavoidable -- the Harlem race riots of 1935, the Detroit riot of 1943 -- that people en masse were forced to confront these issues. And eventually these reports piled up into a critical mass -- and only then did America realize that it was naked.

It's worth looking up a 1943 radio broadcast called "An Open Letter On Race Hatred," produced by William N. Robson of CBS in the wake of the Detroit riots. It's one of the earliest instances of the broadcast media being used to openly and unambiguously hold up a mirror to the state of race relations in the United States and to force ordinary people to confront the situation. It may mark the specific moment where that critical mass started to be reached.

 

[Tomasso]

From Ms LeGon's NYT obituary:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/12/1...on-singer-and-solo-tap-dancer-dies-at-96.html


"She remained angry for decades at Fred Astaire, with whom she shared rehearsal space in 1935 but who she said refused to acknowledge her on the set of “Easter Parade” (1948), one of many films in which she played a maid."

 

[HudsonHawk]

Big Joe Turner, the grand-daddy of Rock & Roll, a true legend, covered by many a white guy......................but, never bettered.

Turner, Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, Lightin' Hopkins...all those old blues guys, who were the foundations of guitar-driven rock n roll...who learned it all from Blind Lemon Jefferson.

 

[rjb1]

Segregation in the North was just as prevalent as Lizzie says, although by habit and custom rather than by law. I grew up in a near suburb of Detroit during the 1950's and the only black people we ever "saw" were on "Amos & Andy", or on the rare occasion when we went "downtown".
I still have my kindergarten class picture and it's easy to count the number of black kids in it. Start at zero and then stop counting. The same could be said for the neighborhood as a whole.
Even though there were race riots in Detroit 1943, that was "then" and that was "there". As a kid I probably would not have been aware of those events anyway, but I don't remember any references to such by my parents or their friends. And those riots certainly didn't affect the nature of our community, and many others.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was also a matter of great swaths of the country where black people simply didn't live in any great numbers. In 1940, the population in the Northeast was less than four percent black -- and the vast majority of that population lived in New York, Philadelphia, and to a lesser extent Boston. Smaller cities and towns had microscopic or nonexistent black populations. The Western states had even fewer black residents: the black population there in 1940 was 1.2 percent of the total, and again, most of it was concentrated in the major cities, especially Los Angeles. Even the Midwest, with the major manufacturing centers of Detroit and Chicago, only had a black population of 3.5 percent.

The vast majority of African-Americans in the Era still lived in the South -- where they made up almost a quarter of the total population. It wasn't until the 1980s that the black population in the Northeast cracked the ten-percent-of-the-total mark, and it didn't reach that point in the Midwest until the '90s. And to this day, the black population in the Western states is still less than five percent of the total. To this day you'll find plenty of adult white Americans who have had no meaningful interaction in their lives with a black person. Startling, but true -- and perhaps that's why race is still such a dodgy issue in these Enlightened Times.

 

[CaramelSmoothie]

There's people who do that. I know two families I used to know (one a couple, the other a couple with a child) who did a Victorian lifestyle. No fridge (they use ice and an icebox), wear the old-inspired clothes, use no plastic, use foot-pedaled machines, etc. Both couples (who when I knew them didn't know each other) lived way out in the middle of nowhere. The kind of place where you could seem a bit "off" and everybody would leave you alone because: you never know who has a gun; there's not many other people to be friends with if you want friends; and nobody lives out that far unless they are a little off themselves.

They also lived in a heavy Mennonite/ Amish area and in place were it wasn't unusual to not have a phone (lack of lines) or electric (lack of lines). The one family with the little girl sent her to school. I know the couple supposedly got into the lifestyle when they bought a house in really rough shape (needed all new wiring, lots of repairs) but lived debt free and after saving for a decade to redo it themselves realized they didn't need power. The other family lived in an area without electric.




That's partially because who we see as "white" in the US changes with the passage of time. Right now latinos tend to be seen as "not white" just like at one time the Irish, Poles, and Italians were seen as "not white." They weren't black or hispanic or american indian, but they were "not white" insomuch as they were specified as their ethnicity.

There's a theory that the people that tend to be hated the most by one ethnicity are the people who are most ethnically like the ethnicity while *not being exactly the same.* Your cultural enemies tend to be right over the border or in the next segment of your country.

Yes, I know about the Amish and Mennonite communities, they are very good people. But I was moreso speaking of living a vintage lifestyle in urban areas, not away from it. As people here in on the FL live the Era lifestyle but are fully integrated into modern cities and jobs. A man wanting to dress like George Washington would be sent to the asylum and would not be taken seriously in Corporate America, that is if he could even find employment in the first place, so this leads me to believe that certain eras are off limits if you want to succeed in the modern world. Otherwise he would have to go out in the sticks and live with the Amish so that he can get his 1700s on.


There is a book called "How the Irish Became White", I have been meaning to buy it but just haven't got around to it. It talks about how immigrants who face discrimination when first arriving in this country and how they used the climate of discrimination of Blacks to their advantage to be accepted into the White fold:

http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095

 

[CaramelSmoothie]

I use "the golden era" for the 20s to 40s only. Kind of big band / swing era.
I really don't think it helps to bring lengthy discussions of taste into this. It is just a name. A broader definition would wash it out and make it unclearer than it already is.

This mirrors my own personal definition too. 1920s-1940s. Those are the decades of hats that I collect.

 

[CaramelSmoothie]

I think that's a brilliant analogy. If you go back and read 1940s-era books on race relations, things like Roi Ottley's "New World A' Comin'," and Gunnar Myrdahl's "An American Dilemma," one thing you'll keep running into is how many white people in that era didn't have any personal experience at all with black people -- there were many, many areas of the North where the only black people you ever saw were the ones in the movies, or maybe a porter on a train if you went on a trip. If you talk to people who lived in those areas in those days and you ask them about race you'll often get a shrug: "We didn't *know* there was a race problem. We had other things to worry about."

That may sound callous in a world where race is an omnipresent issue, and people today might wonder how anyone could have lived thru an era of segregation and lynchings and such without knowing there was a race problem -- but the country was a lot bigger, figuratively speaking, and a lot more provincial than it is now. It was only when major stories broke that were unavoidable -- the Harlem race riots of 1935, the Detroit riot of 1943 -- that people en masse were forced to confront these issues. And eventually these reports piled up into a critical mass -- and only then did America realize that it was naked.

It's worth looking up a 1943 radio broadcast called "An Open Letter On Race Hatred," produced by William N. Robson of CBS in the wake of the Detroit riots. It's one of the earliest instances of the broadcast media being used to openly and unambiguously hold up a mirror to the state of race relations in the United States and to force ordinary people to confront the situation. It may mark the specific moment where that critical mass started to be reached.

Thank you for the name of these books and the link to the transcript of the radio broadcast. I can totally believe that many Whites were detached from the whole racism thing since they were just struggling to survive like everyone else. They weren't part of the country's elite who were responsible for creating a racial hierarchy in the first place.