Ok, so some things in the golden era were not too cool...

[LizzieMaine]

In relative terms, what was the average person bringing home in the month then?

$35-$50 a week was about average in the late thirties for someone with a upper-working-class/lower-middle-class income, so figure $200 a month or so, or $2400 a year to live decently. Your rent -- most people rented, rather than owned -- might be $50 or $60 a month, and you probably walked to work or took a streetcar, so you likely didn't have a car payment to worry about. If you did, for a cheap car like a Ford or a Plymouth you might pay $35 a month or so. Groceries might run $10-$15 a week or so for a family, utilities maybe $20 -$30 a month or so for electricity, telephone, gas, or whatever. So you could get by all right, and if you were careful you'd still have a little left in your pocket for some mild recreation.

It's interesting how the deprivations of that period affected people. Many became so very concerned about waste, while others almost went the other way when they suddenly had.... stuff - a sort of watered down version of the materialism Elvis displayed when he suddenly had everything after growing up with nothing.

This is exactly where the Golden Era generation blew it, I think -- and why I wouldn't mind deleting the whole postwar era and having the whole world start over again from there. Maybe they'd still blow it, but maybe they'd have the sense to avoid the pitfalls next time.

This is an unfortunate by product of real world economics, alas. A shrinking world is the reality, a global village, and therefore it is inevitable that when it comes to manufacturing goods will be produced where it is cheaper to do so. That's just a reality.

Change is inevitable, as you say --- but that doesn't make it *good.* It doesn't make it good for us as a society, and it doesn't make it good for the peoples we exploit for our benefit. Economic colonialism is every bit as vile as the imperial sort, and to condemn one while rationalizing the other isn't something I much care for.

 

[Marc Chevalier]

We didn't have central heating until I was 18 -- a kerosene stove in the kitchen and another one in the living room, and the only problem with it was having to get up early to light it. Didn't bother me then, likely it wouldn't bother me now.

I lived a bit like that in Chile. In Santiago, the capital, few houses and apartments built before the 1980s had central heating. I had to use a portable gas heater with a big, reusable compressed gas tank attached. When the tank was empty, I'd call the gas company, which would send over a truck to pick up the empty tank and replace it with a filled one. No big deal.

 

[Deco-Doll-1928]

I see good and bad things about both eras.

Thank you! You said exactly what I was going to say. There's always pros and cons to every era (whether it be now or then). It never helps to be so naive to think that bad things didn't happen then. Part of my ancestry is German and I can't begin to imagine what life would have been like if I had to live in Germany during the war. That would be one place I would not like to visit if I had a time machine. My mom lost her Dad (my Grandfather) when she was 16. I would have loved to have met him. He had a heart condition that my mom says that if had waited a few more years, they might have been able to treat.

I think when it comes to the more positive things of the Golden Era, most people seem to recall more of the pop culture of the time (music, fashion, architecture, etc.). Some people recall a sense of manners and common courtesy than seems to be a lost art to today's society. Those always seem to be a very redeeming part of the past. I have a ton of gripes about what I can't stand about living in the 21st century (mostly about pop culture--lol!), but I can't be too judgmental. Every time I find myself being really bitter about something, I always see something on the news that makes me believe there are still good people out there. People that care about others and want to make their lives better.

My family through the "Golden Era" has seen it's share of hardships (alcoholism, racism, poverty, etc.). Their stories have largely shaped me into the person I am today. I would think it would be a great disservice to them to just forget the bad parts of their story. You have to take the good with the bad.

I had read somewhere once, that it's a bit unfair to judge the past by today's standards. I think the opposite is also true. Being human doesn't mean that you are perfect. You make mistakes along the way and learn what to do better.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, I grew up in California, lived in Virginia for about 6 years (2001-2007) and then in Ohio and now I'm in Arizona. The only place where I ever found truly blatant racism was in the rural town where I lived in Virginia. I'm not saying it doesn't exist everywhere or that the entire south is racist, but for just two examples... I saw bumper stickers that say Coon hunting with a picture of a man in black face on the backs of people's trucks and someone burned a cross in the yard of a black family that moved into an all white neighborhood. Those two things among many others and including the fact that they are still called the N word when they are not around tells me a different story.

I grew up in an almost-all-white town -- the only folks who weren't white were a few Penobscot Indians who worked on the docks -- and spent my entire education in an all-white school. N-words were flung around playgrounds, but we had no idea what they meant, or that they actually described any person. Race for us was an abstraction, and we never really *thought* about it -- so we didn't actually have any racial views at all, one way or another. We knew there were people of different races, but we never developed any feelings for them or against them. Did this make us racist? Depends on your perspective, I guess.

But I think that's the thing to keep in mind when thinking about past generations. The vast majority of white Americans in the Era simply didn't have any opinion one way or another about racial questions -- they may have had murky views about "stay with your own kind," but that attitude applied as much to social class or religion as it did to ethnicity or race. When Gunner Myrdal wrote his landmark study of the American racial question in 1944, "An American Dilemma," he noted this -- that most white Americans had neutral views on black Americans, neither negative nor positive, and that this was bound to change as a result of the war, with the races being brought into closer contact -- and that's exactly what happened.

Today, unfortunately, we seem to be moving back toward self-segregating ourselves as a society -- for all the self-consciously anti-racist white kids who brag about their "cool black friend," you've still got an Us and Them mentality, which doesn't show a whole lot of sign of improving any time soon.

 

[vitanola]

Thank you Lizzie, people talking here how toasters and refrigerators are cheaper now than 30 years ago...no doubt, they are made to last about 5 years, throw it away buy a new one. When was the last time you had a TV repairman in your home, nope throw it out buy a new one.

Yes. I have been using a Hotpoint "El-Toasto" which predates our entry into the Great War by a year, for twenty-seven years, now. I suspect it has another fifty years service left in it. This toaster originally sold for $3.75, which in infaltion adjusted dollars would be about $84.00 today, expensive, yes, but not unreasonably s considering the toaster's then cutting edge technology. A similar unit made by a low-cost producer in the mid-thirties would have retailed for but 95 cents, around $15.00 dollard in today's money, comparable to a cheap modern unit which will fail in a few years.


Miss Maine's excellent post regarding racial attitudes is on the money. Aside from a generalized suspicion of "the other", much of White America had no direct experience with other races. Here in m ycommunity, which had been a stronghold of the revived Klan during its political peak in the early 1920's, the prejudice was more against the new immigrants than overt racial prejudice. This of course changed with the second revival of the Klan during the Civil Rights era, but then most of the "Kluckers" in these parts in the 'sixties were recent immigrants themselves, having moved here from Kentucky, Missouri, and Missisippi during the wartime boom in manufacturing.
I live in a very large 1850's home which I largely heat with coal. Unit heating is not a terrible inconvenience. Central heating is rather overrated. I'm in the process of restoring a 1912 vintage one-owner bungalow to its approximate condition in 1931, and do not expect that it will be unlivable by any means.

 

[scottyrocks]

We are so limited in what we really know of the past. For most of us, it is what we experienced. Everything we hear from others, or see in films or photos, is a secondary source and is somewhat biased. Most of us are also influenced by all the intervening years between our earlier memories and the present.

I remember my childhood for what it was in the 1960s. Thinking about being in that time, everything was fine and life was basically okay. I didn't know what I didn't have because it was not part of my world at that time, whether it was a 1968 Rolls Royce or an Ipod Touch.

We had a couple of spin-the-selector TVs, a victrola, a phone with two cords, a radio, and air conditioning. Electronics were not anywhere near part of the mainstream, at least in my neck of the woods. It was nice to live that way, even contrasted in some ways with how I live today. People couldn't get in touch with each other at a moment's notice, but then, it wasn't expected so it was okay. Cars broke, but the average father could fix them, or at least had a friend down the block who could help. No computers or packed-to-the-gills engine compartments to make shade-tree mechanics impossible. TV was seven channels and you had to walk to the TV to change them ('Don't spin the dial so fast!'). TV and radio was 'watch it when it as on.'

VCRs in the '70s began the big change. Cordless, and then mobile phones accelerated it. And most of us go through the 'I don't know what I do without my (insert appliance here).' Looking back is usually based on what we know now. For me, ignoring hindsight, I was, and would be, fine living in my past.

 

[Tomasso]

I can only go by MY parents and Grandparents who all said times were much nicer to live in back then.

See, I got a different take from my people. While they would fondly reminisce about the old days, they would also recount some god awful remembrances which were also part of those times. Wild horses couldn't have dragged them back.

 

[Edward]

Well, I grew up in California, lived in Virginia for about 6 years (2001-2007) and then in Ohio and now I'm in Arizona. The only place where I ever found truly blatant racism was in the rural town where I lived in Virginia. I'm not saying it doesn't exist everywhere or that the entire south is racist, but for just two examples... I saw bumper stickers that say Coon hunting with a picture of a man in black face on the backs of people's trucks and someone burned a cross in the yard of a black family that moved into an all white neighborhood. Those two things among many others and including the fact that they are still called the N word when they are not around tells me a different story.

While I'd never regard racism as a problem of the past, I do regard it as a small sign of progress if out and out racists are made to feel uncomfortable enough about expressing their prejudice that they can't be as blatant as once they were. It still horrifies me though that even in the early twenty-first century there are people who still have that sort of Tom Buchanan attitude towards others they perceive as "lesser".

$35-$50 a week was about average in the late thirties for someone with a upper-working-class/lower-middle-class income, so figure $200 a month or so, or $2400 a year to live decently. Your rent -- most people rented, rather than owned -- might be $50 or $60 a month, and you probably walked to work or took a streetcar, so you likely didn't have a car payment to worry about. If you did, for a cheap car like a Ford or a Plymouth you might pay $35 a month or so. Groceries might run $10-$15 a week or so for a family, utilities maybe $20 -$30 a month or so for electricity, telephone, gas, or whatever. So you could get by all right, and if you were careful you'd still have a little left in your pocket for some mild recreation.

Trying to get an idea into my head as to whether in real terms things like live music were cheaper or more expensive back then - sounds like they weren't that far different?

This is exactly where the Golden Era generation blew it, I think -- and why I wouldn't mind deleting the whole postwar era and having the whole world start over again from there. Maybe they'd still blow it, but maybe they'd have the sense to avoid the pitfalls next time.

Ha, well.... as a dieselpunk that's probably not all that far away from my ideal.

Change is inevitable, as you say --- but that doesn't make it *good.* It doesn't make it good for us as a society, and it doesn't make it good for the peoples we exploit for our benefit. Economic colonialism is every bit as vile as the imperial sort, and to condemn one while rationalizing the other isn't something I much care for.

Sure - change as a general rule can be good or bad. I'm not opposed to you on the evils of economic colonialism (let's just say I'm no free market capitalist myself ), but I consider it more realistic to fight for fair treatment and conditions for those who make my stuff wherever they are in the world (I am prepared to, and indeed have, boycott companies and give up products if I am aware they they are exploitative) than to try to buy everything local. I do think there are laudable reasons to do the latter where realistic, of course - not least the environmental concerns about transporting stuff all over the world. At one point the Police service in Northern Ireland were sending UK-made uniform components to Eastern Europe for final assembly to them be shipped back the the Six Counties. Lower bottom line in cash terms, but what cost to Mother Earth?? Less keen on 'buy local' when it descends to petty xenophobia, which I've seen all too often, but there you go. I very much appreciate the work of the Fair Trade movement. I was aware of that in the very early days when yo had to go to a Christian charity catalogue for it and you could only buy tea, coffee, wooden ornaments and wild hippy clothes at a significant mark-up from the high Street; to see that progress and become mainstream the way it has in recent years is really something.

I lived a bit like that in Chile. In Santiago, the capital, few houses and apartments built before the 1980s had central heating. I had to use a portable gas heater with a big, reusable compressed gas tank attached. When the tank was empty, I'd call the gas company, which would send over a truck to pick up the empty tank and replace it with a filled one. No big deal.

I was without central heating for a few days last week and I sure missed it. Wouldn't give it up for anything, but that said I do cringe when I see people cranking their radiators rather than put on a sweater in the Winter.

I grew up in an almost-all-white town -- the only folks who weren't white were a few Penobscot Indians who worked on the docks -- and spent my entire education in an all-white school. N-words were flung around playgrounds, but we had no idea what they meant, or that they actually described any person. Race for us was an abstraction, and we never really *thought* about it -- so we didn't actually have any racial views at all, one way or another. We knew there were people of different races, but we never developed any feelings for them or against them. Did this make us racist? Depends on your perspective, I guess.

Sounds a lot like my experience too. A lot of people back where I came from are quite racist. Not in an ideological, Klan type way.... it's simply ignorance. A certain generation may only ever have even seen a non-white person in reality when they went to the doctor or were admitted to hospital. Inevitably this leads to a lack of understanding through lack of experience. Different sort of issue. Still needs addressed, but in a very different way. Somebody - my grandmother is a prime example - could well take unkindly to being called a racist for referring to non-white people as "darkies" if they aren't prejudiced against those peope but simpyl don't realise that certain terminology isn't appropriate, for example. Different issue, requires different handling.

But I think that's the thing to keep in mind when thinking about past generations. The vast majority of white Americans in the Era simply didn't have any opinion one way or another about racial questions -- they may have had murky views about "stay with your own kind," but that attitude applied as much to social class or religion as it did to ethnicity or race. When Gunner Myrdal wrote his landmark study of the American racial question in 1944, "An American Dilemma," he noted this -- that most white Americans had neutral views on black Americans, neither negative nor positive, and that this was bound to change as a result of the war, with the races being brought into closer contact -- and that's exactly what happened.

Certainly seems a fair assessment, for better or worse. Racism in Northern Ireland actually spilled over into being a significant problem only after the indigenous conflict started to settle down and some required new hate figures while other tensions that hadn't been addressed before were brought to the surface as people of other ethnicities started to arrive in bigger numbers. It's not far off parts of England in the eighties in many ways from what I see now.

Today, unfortunately, we seem to be moving back toward self-segregating ourselves as a society -- for all the self-consciously anti-racist white kids who brag about their "cool black friend," you've still got an Us and Them mentality, which doesn't show a whole lot of sign of improving any time soon.

I think part of that is a fragmented popular culture. I look at a lot of my own interest groups and they're very much all-white, or almost so. Sometimes for understandable reasons, sometimes coincidental. I do think it's a shame as having grown up in a culture that was (aside from the obvious) so mono-dominant for the most part, I love living and moving in a city where so many cultures and ethnicities come together. Always something new to learn from someone else.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Trying to get an idea into my head as to whether in real terms things like live music were cheaper or more expensive back then - sounds like they weren't that far different?

I'd say there isn't much difference except that there were far, far more opportunities to enjoy live music than there are today. Aside from the name bands, which toured and did one-nighters all over the country, there were a great many territorial bands, which stuck to a localized region and played a lot of smaller venues. And then there were strictly-local bands which played anywhere people wanted to dance -- my grandfather led a band in the early thirties, which played at lodge halls, Granges, school proms, private parties, tea dances, and anywhere else that would pay for six musicians and a girl singer. If you could play an instrument at all in the Era, one way or another you could make money at it. There was live music for every taste, for every social group, and for every pocketbook.

Sure - change as a general rule can be good or bad. I'm not opposed to you on the evils of economic colonialism (let's just say I'm no free market capitalist myself ), but I consider it more realistic to fight for fair treatment and conditions for those who make my stuff wherever they are in the world (I am prepared to, and indeed have, boycott companies and give up products if I am aware they they are exploitative) than to try to buy everything local.

My approach is more to refuse to support the global economy at all to the extent possible. I've never paid money for a computer -- I've had a series of ones I've scrounged from the side of the road or otherwise obtained secondhand, and I refuse to buy any other item made by foreign slave labor. I make my own clothes, I buy only shoes union-made in the USA, and everything else I need I find secondhand. If I can't in good conscience support this kind of stuff ideologically, I'm not going to support it financially. I realize this will make absolutely no difference in the greater scale of things, but at least I'll be able to sleep nights. (On cotton Pequot sheets, union-made in Massachussets in 1940.)

I think part of that is a fragmented popular culture. I look at a lot of my own interest groups and they're very much all-white, or almost so. Sometimes for understandable reasons, sometimes coincidental. I do think it's a shame as having grown up in a culture that was (aside from the obvious) so mono-dominant for the most part, I love living and moving in a city where so many cultures and ethnicities come together. Always something new to learn from someone else.

I just find it disappointing that we started out with a grand ideal of Integration -- and if you look at the popular media of the 1940s onward, this was an ideal that had a lot of support on both sides of the racial line. Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, but he couldn't have done it if two million white people in Brooklyn hadn't rallied behind him. But what we've ended up with after all that turmoil and strife is Dis-integration instead. It's still You People this and Us People that, tokenization, mistrust, and "tolerance" being more important than "acceptance." Phooey.

 

[Fletch]

My approach is more to refuse to support the global economy at all to the extent possible. I've never paid money for a computer -- I've had a series of ones I've scrounged from the side of the road or otherwise obtained secondhand, and I refuse to buy any other item made by foreign slave labor. I make my own clothes, I buy only shoes union-made in the USA, and everything else I need I find secondhand. If I can't in good conscience support this kind of stuff ideologically, I'm not going to support it financially. I realize this will make absolutely no difference in the greater scale of things, but at least I'll be able to sleep nights. (On cotton Pequot sheets, union-made in Massachussets in 1940.)

:eusa_clap:eusa_clap:eusa_clap

 

[John in Covina]

On my last trip to NY I saw a greater display of working racism than i have had in many years.

 

[filfoster]

I am guilty of the time travel fantasy but any five minutes of today involving tissue of several types is enough to make me very glad to be in the here and now.

 

[Blackjack]

On my last trip to NY I saw a greater display of working racism than i have had in many years.

Want to see racism? In Chicago we've had what they are calling "flash mobs" groups of black youths that pick a spot to meet to attack white people. Of course the news media won't touch these incidents unless they're so blatant like the Milwaukee State Fair this last summer where 200 young black men blocked off the streets, jumped fences and just started beating on people. When it happened on Oak Street beach last summer, they said they closed the beach because "it was too hot" (what???) I was there, they closed it because about 50 young blacks were throwing frozen bottles of water at anyone who wasn't black. look it up on youtube, the videos are all there...

 

[Deco-Doll-1928]

Want to see racism? In Chicago we've had what they are calling "flash mobs" groups of black youths that pick a spot to meet to attack white people. Of course the news media won't touch these incidents unless they're so blatant like the Milwaukee State Fair this last summer where 200 young black men blocked off the streets, jumped fences and just started beating on people. When it happened on Oak Street beach last summer, they said they closed the beach because "it was too hot" (what???) I was there, they closed it because about 50 young blacks were throwing frozen bottles of water at anyone who wasn't black. look it up on youtube, the videos are all there...

"La haine attire la haine"

 

[Blackjack]

"La haine attire la haine"

Maybe, but I think it's more a complete lack of parental supervision and total disregard for everything except themselves.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Funny, we were talking today, my dad and I. We both talk about how life would be easier for us back in the 50's or so, not saying it would for everybody. My dad laughed and said he always figured I should be dropped off somewhere around 1954 and be left to go on from there. He said I would "be in my glory." I negotiated to 1955, since I'd be able to watch Lawrence Welk lol

 

[Blackjack]

[video=youtube;U9NGB9c8rCA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9NGB9c8rCA[/video]

 

[Feraud]

On my last trip to NY I saw a greater display of working racism than i have had in many years.

I assume you are not talking about NYC proper. Considering the size and diversity of the city we are one of he more tolerant and safe places to live and work in this country.

 

[Emily the Storyteller]

Just some personal thoughts here from a long-time lurker .

I am extremely lucky to live where I do (on the edge of East London on the border of Essex). I can have a group of friends who are incredibly racially and religiously mixed (one Bangladeshi Muslim, one Irish Catholic, one atheist with Lithuanian/Mauritian heritage, one Protestant with mixed African background). I actually had to rack my brains then to remember where each of them were from, because it is just not an issue. No-one blinks an eye where I live about having such a diverse group of acquaintances. No-one cares or gives me any stick for being bisexual, or my best friend for being gay.

However, I can say with absolute certainty that had I lived where I do 60 years ago, this would not have been the case. I am fully aware that unfortunately there are still thousands of places where people of different racial backgrounds/genders/sexualities/etc. are discriminated against, but my point is that there are less of these places in 2012 compared to 1912 and I think that, albeit slowly, we are, as a global society becoming gradually more open about these issues, and if not then it's our duty to make it so.

Oh, and while I'm here I'd just like to offer up a defence for the youth of today. We're not all selfish layabouts with no ambition and no respect; there are still some of us here with some class

I know that living in the 1930s, or 40s, or 50s had many advantages compared to today. Life was undoubtedly simpler. I find that a lot of technology today exists whose sole purpose is to almost solve all the problems that stem from owning it in the first place . You could argue that there was more politesse, more chivalrous behaviour; certainly more style and class (in my opinion anyway). But my point is that these things are not entirely lost today, and we need to be hopeful and joyous about the future, not condemning it before it's even here.

Anyway, sorry for the philosophical treatise. I know my age (17) and that I've not had much experience of the world yet, but if us young 'uns can't be hopeful (even if slightly naive) about the future, then who can?

 

[Edward]

Wow, that makes this child's play look harmless.......

I just remember the newspaper headline that went with this photo - I think in the Daily Mirror. It was:

"TOT DANGLING MADNESS!"

Still makes me laugh.