Why the 1920s-1940s?

[tonyb]

My aunt had a neighbor, befriended by my mom, who was known as "Depression Helen." Every time the three would meet for coffee and cake, the recounts of their impoverished childhood memories would pour forth faster than the percolated Maxwell House. Helen was always the one with the most dramatic accounts. Since my mom and aunt both grew up with their parents on relief (at times), or Granddad working for the WPA, that says a lot.

^^^^^^

A sort of reverse one-upmanship, eh? One-downwomanship, in this case.

"You think you had it rough, sister? Lemme tell you about rough."

There remains a fashion among some young people from comfortable circumstances to affect a sort of street cred their limited experience of anything other than warm beds and full bellies couldn't have possibly bestowed upon them. They were around when I was that age, and they are surely around now. These days they're given to dreadlocks and tattoos. When I was that age it was patched-up Levi's and old panel trucks.

People who experienced truly hard circumstances don't wish to ever go back to it, nor appear in any way that they are once again in such straits. My grandfather, who supported a family of six all through the Depression, always had a late-model car in his later years, and a well-maintained, "respectable" home.

 

[tonyb]

My grandfather used to talk about "Hoover Soup," the bit where you'd go into a lunchroom and get a cup of coffee and then ask for a free cup of hot water, which you'd mix with the ketchup on the counter to make a sort of ersatz soup. It was the sort of thing you expect to have been made up for a Steinbeck novel, but he swore he really did it. Up until the end of his life he also had the repulsive habit of chopping up cigarette butts and smoking them in his pipe.

I've seen numerous signs at convenience store condiment bars saying that the condiments (ersatz cheese and chili, mostly) aren't to be a meal in and off themselves. I can see how a down-and-outer who scraped together enough for one Big Bite at the 7-Eleven might want to get his buck twenty-nine's worth out of it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

^^^^^^

A sort of reverse one-upmanship, eh? One-downwomanship, in this case.

"You think you had it rough, sister? Lemme tell you about rough."

[video=youtube;VKHFZBUTA4k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k[/video]

Our neighborhood was more the sort of deal where everybody who lived there had known one another so well for so long that any kind of BSing was instantly detected. Nobody ever tried one-upping or one-downing because everybody knew full well where everyone had stood at any point in their lives.

My grandmother, meanwhile, was the compulsive saver/hoarder of the family. Not to the point of stacks of newspapers in every room, but she never, as far as I could tell, ever threw away a brown paper bag. The cabinets in her pantry were packed tight with them, and I don't remember them ever being used for anything except me making school book covers out of them. When we cleaned the house out after she died, we must have taken two carloads of paper bags to the dump.

She also saved string, which is a habit she passed directly to me. When I worked in the factory, bundles of shirts were packed with heavy white twine, and I compulsively saved scraps of this and tied them onto a ball at the end of each shift. I still have that ball of string, about the size of a bowling ball, and I don't really have any use for it. But I wouldn't dream of ever throwing it away because you never know when you'll need some good string.

 

[CONELRAD]

If one hopes to learn about a period from contemporary sources, one has to do a lot more than just look at the pretty ads...

The deeper you dig into the original source materials of the time, the more diverse the opinions you'll find -- and the more rounded a picture you'll get. When people tell me how women were forced to fit into tight little molds in the Era, I ask them to read Marjorie Hillis and Elizabeth Hawes, for starters, and then get back to me.

On Dorothy Dix's Letter Box in the newspaper I was reading, the May 23, 1925 Houston Post-Dispatch, Ralph is having trouble "making a hit with the weaker sex", even though he can "talk fluently and owns a car." Dorothy Dix tells him, "You speak of girls as belonging to the weaker sex. Perhaps therein lies the reason for your failure to win one. There is nothing that women resent so much as being patronized, and having a man pose before them as being superior just because he wears trousers instead of skirts." I have a feeling that wouldn't set all that well with some people's notions of how women were treated in that day and age.

Of course if nobody had ever opposed the apparent norms back then, they'd still be norms now!

Exactly, if no one had challenged slavery before the Civil War, it never would have been abolished, and if no one had opposed Jim Crow laws in the years they existed, they'd still exist now. These things take time to change once people have gotten it in their mind to change them. It's not as if the entire population of the United States just woke up one morning and out of the blue said, "I think that's enough Jim Crow for now!"

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Absolutely, no era is perfect, and I don't look at any era through rose-colored glasses. Not to mention you had the Korean War in there, too.

Also, I know every dirty perverted thing that goes on today, went on then, as well. The only difference is, airing all that dirty laundry was frowned upon more than it is now.

It was an eighteen year stretch where we in the US were certainly on top of the world in terms of prosperity- although I can remember at the age of four (1958) living in fear of the Soviets- at least until the next broadcast of Captain Kangaroo came on. I do remember following the Cuban Missile Crisis as an 8 year old kid- and being quite frightened that nuclear war could break out at any moment. The Berlin Wall had been erected the previous year and tensions were quite high.

Not so sure that society was all that much more "decent or moral." Organized religion certainly had a greater control over the lives of a greater percentage of the American population, and whether that is a good or bad thing is open to debate. Questioning the major premises of organized religion certainly was less fashionable in the 1950's than it was in either the 1930's or the 1960's from all that I've read.

Clearly, however, 1964 was a turning point. If any optimism remained after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the escalation of the Vietnam War destroyed it.

Obviously, we are better off as a human race since the Civil Rights movement. It's a shame as much racism exists now, as then. It's just convoluted and hit behind smoke and mirrors, where people were up front about it, then. In the time and place, I'd have marched along side Dr. King. The man was absolutely right about equality. No man or woman is more or less than any other because of their race, or anything else, for that matter.

I won't deny that for me, a white, straight, Christian male, life would have been good, even without money. I imagine my life would be a lot like my Grandfather's. He married at 21 (1951) Raised 5 kids with his wife in Suburban Milwaukee, had a job as a Union Lather, a cottage up north, and two newer cars in the driveway. Not a life that stands out on the global scale, but an admirable one, if you ask me.

As for moral standards, I'll just say I'm a Catholic from when Catholics were Catholics and I will stop there before I get myself in trouble.

We ??? .......yeah, America was great, if you were white & had a decent salary but it was even better if you were white & rich.
That's debatable but I guess it all depends on one's definition of decency & morals.

Great tunes, there.

For me Country is good from it's roots all the way 'till the last palatable songs of the genre ended top 40 airplay circa 2001
Rock and Roll from 55-66 has a lot of good to choose from
Motown went on well until the Psychedelic/Funk period came about around 1969-71
Of course, Big Band, Swing, and Polkas always have something good to listen to lol

That cool little period from about '59-half of '66ish was often quite mellow, and a bunch of it not at all hard on the ears.l

My Grandpa always told stories of "Lard Sandwiches" during the Depression. They're exactly what the name implies. He said they were the worst on a hot day when they'd just become a big nasty dough ball. They'd use them for Catfish bait lol

Dad always said Grandpa never left the Depression (neither did my Great-Grandpa, who hid money all over.) He was always very "thrifty" through his life.

Gosh, I miss that man.

My grandfather used to talk about "Hoover Soup," the bit where you'd go into a lunchroom and get a cup of coffee and then ask for a free cup of hot water, which you'd mix with the ketchup on the counter to make a sort of ersatz soup. It was the sort of thing you expect to have been made up for a Steinbeck novel, but he swore he really did it. Up until the end of his life he also had the repulsive habit of chopping up cigarette butts and smoking them in his pipe.

 

[LizzieMaine]

On Dorothy Dix's Letter Box in the newspaper I was reading, the May 23, 1925 Houston Post-Dispatch, Ralph is having trouble "making a hit with the weaker sex", even though he can "talk fluently and owns a car." Dorothy Dix tells him, "You speak of girls as belonging to the weaker sex. Perhaps therein lies the reason for your failure to win one. There is nothing that women resent so much as being patronized, and having a man pose before them as being superior just because he wears trousers instead of skirts." I have a feeling that wouldn't set all that well with some people's notions of how women were treated in that day and age.

An awful lot of latter-day Traditional Gentlemen would be shocked right down to the knife-edge creases in their pima-cotton yoke-front underpants by just how hard-boiled a lot of twenties women could be. And they only got tougher and more hard-boiled in the thirties and forties -- those snappy-talking broads in the movies weren't just made up out of whole cloth. I think quite a few people here in the Lounge, both men and women, would blanch at some of the things Elizabeth Hawes wrote in her books. "But -- but -- ladies just didn't talk like that!"

Exactly, if no one had challenged slavery before the Civil War, it never would have been abolished, and if no one had opposed Jim Crow laws in the years they existed, they'd still exist now. These things take time to change once people have gotten it in their mind to change them. It's not as if the entire population of the United States just woke up one morning and out of the blue said, "I think that's enough Jim Crow for now!"

This is one of my biggest irritations -- the type of people who think the Civil Rights Movement began the moment Rosa Parks refused to get out of her seat on that bus. Rosa Parks had been a full-scale civil rights activist for more than a decade before that incident -- the story that she was "just a tired seamstress" made for good newspaper copy, but it does a real disservice to the kind of woman she was and to the people who had fought along side her long before 1956.

That mythology also whitewashes, if you'll pardon the expression, the hard work done by organized labor, and yes, the Communist Party USA in the thirties on behalf of civil rights. Whatever else may be said about the CPUSA, it was a militant voice in favor of absolute political and social equality between blacks and whites long before the rest of the country caught up with the idea. The first African-American to appear on a Presidential ticket was the Communist candidate James Ford -- who ran for Vice President in 1932, 1936, and 1940. And when baseball finally integrated in 1947, it was only after more than a decade of loud campaigning on the subject by "Daily Worker" sportswriter Lester Rodney. Whatever else you want to say about them, on the racial issue, the Reds were absolutely on the correct side of history. And their campaigning helped push the whole rest of the country in the correct direction.

 

[tonyb]

[video=youtube;VKHFZBUTA4k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k[/video]

...

Cute.

 

[tonyb]

...

My grandmother, meanwhile, was the compulsive saver/hoarder of the family. Not to the point of stacks of newspapers in every room, but she never, as far as I could tell, ever threw away a brown paper bag. The cabinets in her pantry were packed tight with them, and I don't remember them ever being used for anything except me making school book covers out of them. When we cleaned the house out after she died, we must have taken two carloads of paper bags to the dump.

She also saved string, which is a habit she passed directly to me. When I worked in the factory, bundles of shirts were packed with heavy white twine, and I compulsively saved scraps of this and tied them onto a ball at the end of each shift. I still have that ball of string, about the size of a bowling ball, and I don't really have any use for it. But I wouldn't dream of ever throwing it away because you never know when you'll need some good string.

I'm far from a reality TV worthy hoarder, but I have at times in the past found myself with more paper grocery sacks than I would ever find a practical use for. I've been known to save not-quite-dead AA batteries because, well, ya never know. Could be a days-long power outage and you'd be darned happy to have another half hour of working flashlight.

I'm not so much like that anymore. In nearly five decades in Seattle and environs I was never once buried in volcanic ash or washed out to sea on a tsunami or surfed down the hill in my house when the subduction zone earthquake hit. Here in Colorado they got tornadoes that'll turn a whole neighborhood into a pile of sticks and hailstorms that'll crack your skull. Under such circumstances, I question if a fistful of mostly spent AAs will do me much good.

 

[sheeplady]

People who experienced truly hard circumstances don't wish to ever go back to it, nor appear in any way that they are once again in such straits.

I think this is very true. My mother's parents were both very poor in the depression. My grandfather opened up when he got older with me and told me things he had never told my mother. My grandmother told my mother what little my mother knew about her when my grandmother was angry at my great-grandmother.

My grandmother never spoke to me once about the depression and never answered any questions I asked. Ever. She would say, "you're not interested in that" and change the subject.

Neither of my grandparents talked about WWII either. My grandmother was dead 10 years before I knew she worked during the war.

My grandmother was very obsessed with not appearing poor for the rest of her life.

 

[GHT]

I still don't get were you got the idea that we were all raised by Benjamin Spock? I can assure you, non of his books were in any of the neighborhoods I lived in during the 50s-70s. Working class families had better things to spend their money on. When I first heard of Spock's writings in the 60s on TV, I remember thinking, that pointy ear guy?

So Spock was an author of progressive parenting? Not the pointy ear guy who designed The Vulcan Bomber?

 

[The Sky Ranger]

...From what I've seen, 1927-1945 or so is the most common marker points for the Golden Era around here... My question is: Why that era? ...

My answer is a picture, taken 1925, showing my grandpa and some friends. My Grandpa is the gentleman on the left, with the Homburg hat and the black coat with propably velvet collar. They are taking a cure in German spa Bad Lippspringe. My Grandpa was suffering from a lung disease. Alle these men have style.
Today men in a spa might wear jeans and a t-shirt or tracksuit. But not in the 20s. They had survived a war (my grandfather had been officer in the Imperial German Navy in WW I), they wanted to live a civil, peaceful and fancy life. And so they chose to wear fancy clothes, too. I love each of the hats I see on this picture!

 

[Stearmen]

I just realized something really depressing! The three periods of history I am most interested in is, The American Civil War, 1861-65, WWI 1914-18, and WWII 1938-45. The three bloodiest wars for Americans, and WWII the bloodiest in the history of the world! Probably, at least, 102,618,000.

 

[EmergencyIan]

And, this is all being discussed on an internet forum. The irony.

- Ian

 

[Stearmen]

And, this is all being discussed on an internet forum. The irony.

- Ian

Yes, we have all mentioned the irony of that over the years! Oh well, time to call someone on my cell phone, pop dinner in the microwave, and watch some satellite TV. :eusa_doh:

 

[EmergencyIan]

Yes, we have all mentioned the irony of that over the years! Oh well, time to call someone on my cell phone, pop dinner in the microwave, and watch some satellite TV. :eusa_doh:

What are you going to do?... We're, now, humans living in the 21st Century. Most of us will adopt and adapt to one degree or another. I suspect that for most of us here, it will be as minimal as possible. As much as we love the past or, at least, some of it, we are also are people of this time.

- Ian

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think someone who was in their thirties before they ever saw a cell phone or a computer is going to look at technology in a different light than someone who's never known a world without them. If you know it's possible to live without such things, it's much easier to think in terms of whether the advantages are outweighed by the disadvantages, rather than being carried along by the YOU NEED THIS TO SURVIVE marketing hype. If the internet were to go dark tomorrow, I might be inconvenienced at work, but otherwise life would go along just fine.

 

[Stearmen]

I do have to laugh at my self! I have had a smart phone since 2011, with all the motorcycle trips, I need it, to figure out where I am , find gas, get a room, or camp ground, when I am not going to make it as far as I thought. Last month, I used it the most I ever had, seemed like every day, between the remodeling, and looking up sights for friends at lunch. I could not believe when I got my bill, I used 30mb of data! To think, I have a 1gb plan, with 2 more gb thrown in for free. How do people use more then 3gb?

 

[Tiki Tom]

I think someone who was in their thirties before they ever saw a cell phone or a computer is going to look at technology in a different light than someone who's never known a world without them. If you know it's possible to live without such things, it's much easier to think in terms of whether the advantages are outweighed by the disadvantages, rather than being carried along by the YOU NEED THIS TO SURVIVE marketing hype. If the internet were to go dark tomorrow, I might be inconvenienced at work, but otherwise life would go along just fine.

(Raises hand.) When my daughter came home from university in America for a visit, she was in a panic "Dad, I need a smart phone!" I tossed her mine and I lived without a cell phone for a month. It bothered me not a bit. In fact, I think I secretly enjoyed it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I remember when the first commercially-marketed cell phones came on the market in the '80s, and the kind of people who carried them -- and the rest of us thought they were kind of ridiculous. And then they started to catch on in the '90s, and I just couldn't see any reason why I would need one, so I never got one. And then the smartphones hit in the '00s, and I started to feel like there was something fishy about the whole thing -- the fanatical insistence of the marketing, the cultish zeal of the converts, the way people's eyes go completely glassy and blank when they stare into their little screens.

That was where my feeling that I just don't need one became an absolute conviction that they're a vanguard attempt by the Boys From Marketing to literally get into the users' brain. I not only don't need that, I'm militantly opposed to that.

 

[Fading Fast]

Life - travel, business, fewer and fewer pay phones - basically required that I get a cell phone in '04 and I used that simple flip-top model until '11 when it died and I got a smartphone. So many things you used to be able to rely on - maps at gas stations, ubiquitous pay phones, etc. - that were geared for a pre-cell phone world are going away which, for some of us, make a smart phone close to a necessity.

That said, I really enjoy having mine. It's basically a phone, small computer and camera rolled into one. I work for myself from home - no tech department except for me - and I can stay in touch with my work almost anywhere (maybe for society writ large that's an issue, but I'm just trying to make a living and that's what my business demands - I don't have a say in it). I have several apps that keep me in touch with the things I need to do my work and I marvel at what I can accomplish with just a small flat phone.

Is big data being collected - yup. Is that a problem - yup. Can I solve it by not having a phone - nope. Would I be hurting myself more than helping myself if I gave it up - yup. No easy answers, but without a smart phone, I really couldn't do my job. But I do happily acknowledge enjoying it as it does make other parts of my life easier (but in part, because the world is now geared toward smart phones and the other resources we used to use are going away).