The Nifty Fifties

In August of 1945, the gut-wrenching calamity known as World War II was over. Victory was ours. The Axis powers had been utterly defeated. Germany, Japan and much of Italy lay in ruins.

By November of 1945, hundreds of thousands of GIs began the long-awaited trip back home to loved ones with high hopes that they could return to the life they once knew. But settling back into any semblance of normalcy was an unexpectedly difficult task.

It would take several years of readjustment to return to a peace-time mode after four years of frantic wartime production of planes, tanks and guns.

By the start of the decade of the 1950s, consumers were starving for manufactured goods of all kinds. Refrigerators, cars and all manner of household items poured from factories in a never-ending torrent.

However, our society itself had changed. During the critical war years, thousands of women were employed in the defense industry. Many of them held jobs that previously had been held only by men. As the tens of thousands of GIs returned home and resumed their former occupations, many of the women were forced out of the jobs they had held during the war. The working woman had gained confidence while replacing the men who had gone off to war. They had experienced a new freedom from traditional feminine roles; many refused to give that up. It was during this era that two-income families became common.

In many areas, housing for the returning veterans and their new families was a great problem. Families began flocking to the suburbs and thousands of homes were built production style. Whole suburbs seemed to be built over night. Here in Sheboygan, there was a critical housing shortage for young families. To ease this shortage of dwelling space, a fairly large tract of land was acquired at Union Avenue and South 24th Street. Long barrack-like buildings were erected for the returning GIs and their families, most of which had very small children, many still in diapers. It must be remembered that this was the pre-disposable diaper era. The only time someone threw a diaper away was after it had been washed hundreds of times, was nearly worn out, and had served time as a cleaning rag. Everywhere one looked in this temporary housing division, one saw long washlines of snowy white diapers fluttering in the breeze. It didn’t take long before someone dubbed this area Diaperville. Today we know it as Veterans Park.

Across the country, neighborhoods that hadn’t changed in 50 years were altered quickly and drastically. The small mom-and-pop grocery stores along with the neighborhood butcher shops went out of business. They were replaced by a new way of shopping – the supermarkets and the shopping mall. Sheboygan was no exception.

Before the war, for the common man, a car was a luxury; after the war it was a necessity. We had become a mobile society. Just about everything else you could imagine could was accessible by simply driving up to a window, a service that was unheard of years before. There were drive-up restaurants, drugstores, and, yes, drive-in theaters.

Who could forget “buck night” at the drive-in theater when for just $1 parents could load all the kids in the car and enjoy a movie? In my case, we would dress the kids in pajamas, make a big bag of popcorn, fill a jug with Kool-Aid and enjoy a warm summer evening at the drive-in theater.

But we never parked in the back rows, which were reserved for the teenagers who commonly referred to this area as the “passion pit.”

Believe it or not several hundred drive-in theaters are still in business throughout the country.

In 1950, radio was still popular, but it was about to be changed by a small, expensive, flickering little box, known as television. Television completely changed the way Americans received news and were entertained. Almost overnight an industry grew up around TV. The sales of snack foods and soft drinks went through the roof. And then came a new innovation in the way we ate our meals … the TV dinner!

As marvelous as the new TVs seemed to us, they had their shortcomings. With their myriad of glowing tubes and their mysterious insides, they failed frequently. TV repair became a big business, repair shops sprang up around the city. When your TV set failed, if you were brave enough, you could pull out all the tubes and take them to a store that offered a tube tester. After testing all the tubes and spending nearly half a month’s wages on tubes that seemed to be defective, you took them all home, plugged them back into the TV set and discovered that the blankety blank thing still didn’t work … then you called a repair man!

Automatic clothes washers, dishwashers and all kinds of other labor-saving devices increased the amount of leisure time we enjoyed. The sale of lawn furniture and bar-be-que equipment rose to record heights. The backyard cook-out became a standard feature of summer. Vinyl pools for youngsters could be found in every backyard and who could ever forget the “hula-hoop”?

No 1950s front yard would have been complete without what was described as the ‘50s icon of bad taste, a plastic pink flamingo. I think I still have one somewhere. Maybe I’ll get it out this summer!

Besides plastic flamingos there were poodle skirts, crinoline, lave lamps, American Bandstand, and ‘coonskin caps.

By the mid50s, living rooms across America resounded to the thunder of hoof beats and the roar of gunfire as the Westerns took over our TV sets. Who can ever forget Colt 45, Man Without A Gun, Tombstone Territory, Wyatt Earp and the forgettable Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. I guess not all Westerns were a Bonanza!

Here in Sheboygan, we were fortunate in being just halfway between two major telecasting areas, Green Bay and Milwaukee. Besides the horse operas, a new form of entertainment known as the “sit-com” appeared on our TVs. Do you remember I Love Lucy, Make Room for Daddy, Father Knows Best and a spoof of law enforcement: Car 54 Where Are You?

Then came the variety shows. Sunday night was known as prime time and the King of Sunday night was the stone-faced Ed Sullivan who introduced to us such unknowns as a young man from Tupelo, Mississippi with the odd first name of “Elvis”; but only from the waist up! Then there was a long haired group from England named “The Beatles.” I think they were pretty good but it was awful hard to tell with thousands of young girls screaming at the top of their lungs; some of them fainting in the aisles. During any one show you might see a dog act, an acrobat, a ventriloquist and maybe a country western singer. As you can see, on the Ed Sullivan Show variety was the key word.

Goofy fads seemed to be part and parcel of the ‘50s. Do you remember chlorophyll? That’s the stuff in nature that will make leaves and grass green. Somehow someone got the idea that chlorophyll was a super deodorant and that if you added it to ‘most anything you could imagine – Americans who were paranoid about smelling bad – would smell a lot better. Chlorophyll was added to dog food, gum and shoe liners to make your feet smell better … I guess. At the height of all this chlorophyll foolishness, the American Medical Association pointed out that grazing goats live almost entirely on vegetation that has a heavy chlorophyll content and almost nothing smells worse than a goat! After that chlorophyll was on its way out!

And then there was music. It was all around us, juke boxes were everywhere. Remember those silver boxes mounted to the wall in a booth in your favorite restaurant? Flip through the cards, push in few buttons, drop in a quarter and sit back and listen to five of your favorite songs while you sipped a coke. In the early ‘50s there was Patti Page, Perry Como, Nat “King” Cole – just to name a few. But don’t forget the groups: the Ames Brothers, Mills Brothers and, oh yes, I almost forgot … a bit later there was a quartet of young women from a small town called Sheboygan … they were, of course, The Chordettes and were destined for stardom. Their smash hit “Mr. Sandman” is still played frequently today. In fact, just the other day I heard it played as background music for a car commercial.

And then came Rock ‘n’ Roll. It would revolutionize the music industry. Names such as Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and of course Elvis, set the trend for decades to come and it continues today.

Would I like to go back to the ‘50s? Noooooo, if I did I wouldn’t have a computer so that my wife could type this story for me, and without a spell checker neither one of us could write!

Today’s Snippet: On Sept. 7, 1957 the popular American Bandstand, hosted by the “perpetual teenager” Dick Clark, aired for the first time. The first song he played was Whole Lotta Shaking Going On. His first guests were Billy Williams and the Chordettes of Sheboygan.