How clearly do we really see 30s/40s/50s Style?

[Fletch]

I must agree that talking with older people and reading magazines, literature, and movies can be an enormous help. However, as mentioned by another member, far too often, movies of a given period were not in the least realistic. There are, of course, exceptions.

Hi Mary. I'm new here too.

Yes, people took a lot of their stylistic cues from the movies, and movies sometimes reflected real life visually. But they were a law unto themselves. (Especially the ones with the women in frilly gowns in every last scene.)

While many of us are well aware that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were far from perfect human beings, their murders symbolized a shattering of hope, idealism, direction and stamina. My generation was confronted with the grim necessity of reassessing our perceptions of reality and ethnology. Yes, things like this could actually happen in America.

I was born about that time to socially aware parents (sadly they've retreated long since). Talking with them I get the sense that '68 was the beginning of "tuning in, turning on, dropping out" = throwing out the cultural baby with the political bath water. In 1964 campus protesters dressed up like they were going to a city hall meeting. You could be a radical and still show your ears. 4 years later "that dog didn't hunt."

It's best that people have choices and not be judged by appearances, of course. But back in the day you didn't have such a choice. I have a friend, Pat, who worked at Neiman-Marcus in straight-laced Dallas in the mid 60s. She's always been a bohemian and one day got a nice little note: "Please remember girdles must be worn on the sales floor." Now Pat was rail-skinny and never had a need for such a thing. It was just the idea of not wearing a girdle and what it represented then.

In '64 there was a national news item about a kid who got suspended from a Des Moines high school for wearing - get this - Beatle bangs. All this reminds me that there was a lot of reactionary feeling then – class, race, religious, political resentments in all directions – that really stirred the pot.

A lot of our culture is based on our politics, I've always believed. We were a more regimented nation after we came back from WW2. The center, as so often, didn't hold. The individual got lost; all you were was a member of a group. That didn't change so much until after '68, in the wreckage of the mass movements.

Strangely enough, that was when people started to figure out that you could borrow from the past in your own life...

 

[Fletch]

The [GI Generation] are the people that this country (and also many European countries) great. They were totally up to the challenges of the times. They are called the greatest generation, because they were well...the greatest. Sometimes adversity adds character that ease just never will.

The boomers, the me generation and generation X just can't compare. See also the "Lost Generation" (those who came of age in the 30's).

...as in, the Lost Generation can't compare either? They had their adversities, too. A lot of them helped out in the Big One, too.

I'm not sure the GIG made America great. (Europe...once was great until That Man laid waste to it.) But there's no question they made America greater. And freer – as they did the world.

 

[Ccc]

I was born in the late 50's, and grew up in the 60's and early 70's. I clearly remember the kitchen designs of my grandmother, mother and aunts. I remember how they dressed, even the maternity fashion of my mother when she was expecting my brother.

So if your assumptions about age are correct, I'm a "senior" member of the Lounge, Yikes!

In many respects, life was better, at least in my estimation. Our society/culture has made many strides in our lifetimes, not all of them healthy or wise.

But that's life, the good and the bad, the not-so-good and the not-so-bad. Life goes on, and we do what we can to keep our heads above water, look destiny in the eye and live a good life.

 

[Elaina]

I think that the people on the FL have a standard that they choose to live up to either in dress or lifestyle.

Was it better back then? Depends on the what. Was it better for kids? Yes. Men could make enough money to support their wives in relative comfort and paid the price of not really knowing their kids too well. Food didn't have all the additives and junk, a woman took off and looked like a woman, and washed her dishes by hand.

I'm an 80's kid. My mom stayed at home, had the typical "I'm depressed and I hate my life" attitude, and I paid the price for it. She's gotten help and it's better for my little sister, she's lost 100 pounds (although she's still fluffy) and learned that passing on an eating disorder to the third girl isn't really a good idea.

But if I'd of been born anytime other then the Gen Xer I am, I would be dead in the ground comparing bone mass with Karen Carpenter. You trade off. But how I present myself doesn't change whether I would have been born in 1941 or 1975. I want to appear that I have my stuff together, I'm polished and well dressed and I try to be polite and carry myself with dignity. Something I think is the common dominator here on the lounge.