[eweissenbach]

Originally Posted by Halibut

I was watching the recent episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee by Jerry Seinfeld, and he was describing a 1956 Corvette convertible:

"It is absolutely the essence of American futuristic positivism of the post-war society at that time. In the 1950s, people just didn't see anything that was bad. Everything, from the American perspective, looked like this car. Colorful, energetic, happy -- 'We've perfected life!'

It struck me as I was watching, because that seems to be the sociological consensus about the 50's, but is it true? I mean, we were kids. While it might have seemed pretty idyllic to us then, or even now in hazy retrospect, I wonder if our parents felt the same. I know mine certainly weren't anything like Ward and June, beginning with getting divorced.

It was true for me from 4 to 14 in a small Midwestern town in the fifties. Probably not so much for a black kid of the same age growing up in Mississippi or Alabama.