Lost in the Fifties - Again

Last night we went to see the Easy Street Production of Forever Plaid. It was an encore performance from a few years ago. I saw it then and it worth going to see again.  Unfortunately, with Tim McGraw at the Covelli Center, Canfield High School's Senior Class Play, and the Boardman High School's  spectacular fundraiser featuring scenes from past Senior plays with the people who originally played the roles in high school….the Ford Recital Hall was only ½ full.  If you haven’t seen Forever Plaid, it runs for one more weekend.  GO AND SEE IT.  As always, you will see no better version anywhere as you will with Todd Hancock and company.

The story deals with a vocal quartet called the Plaids killed on the way to a gig at the airport lounge by a school bus filled with parochial virgins in the early 1960’s. But the Plaids are given one more chance to give the performance of a lifetime before gaining permanent entrance to the afterlife, realizing that the style of music they love is over. What ensues is an evening filled with music like Shangri-la, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Three Coins in a Fountain…you get the picture.  And lots and lots of laughs.

I was born in 1950 which made me age 0 – 10 during that idyllic decade. America was trying to get back to normal after the World War II. It was a beautiful decade. America ruled supreme in a world rebuilding after being destroyed. We were the only game in town, so to speak.

My parents raised me like we lived in a movie. Everything needed to be perfect. We were solidly upper middle class, and never wanted for anything. My mother had beautiful clothes, and a cleaning lady to clean the house, and a lady to help with the laundry…even though we lived in a one floor two bedroom duplex!!! It was a different time.

We listened to radio. We didn’t get a television set until 1954. I remember the day we got it.  My Dad drove a two toned Pontiac Bonneville…tan and cream. It was a hell of a car. Then my mother wanted to drive the Pontiac…so we actually got a second a car. It was a stripped down blue Plymouth. It had a heater, and that was about it. No back seat. No radio. My uncle eventually bought it from my father, and drove it almost to the late 1970’s. It was literally held together by coat hangers.

Women wore gloves and hats. Men wore suits to baseball games and hats to work. It was the golden age of senior proms, malt shops, greasers, hot rods, drive in movies, guys wearing white socks...and conformity. Rebellious teenagers looked positively Mary Poppins-ish with jazz and coffee shops and poetry readings…beatniks!!! Drugs were around, but certainly not the problem they are today. 

If a girl got pregnant, she went to visit her aunt in Pennsylvania until the blessed event was over and the baby put up for adoption unless there was quickie wedding. I had at least one relative in the latter category. No birth control. No abortions. In fact, my physician next door neighbor went to jail for doing abortions.

Most of my cousins were older than me. The guys had flat tops with rolled up sleeves on white tee shirts with cigarettes tucked in. My cousins really wore poodle skirts and bobby socks. They did things like “hitting the Cove” on the weekend (at Idora Park) or driving up to Geneva on the Lake. For vacations, their families would go caravan style to Wildwood, New Jersey and enter some Shag contests. Not mine...to bourgeois for them.  I think I missed out on some really good times.  

Those with some bucks flew to Miami sometime in the winter or early spring. The women wore their mink stoles on the plane and dragged on the tarmac behind them when they got off of the plane. You would stay at the Fountainbleu; and hit the clubs with big name entertainment like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin…unless you caught them at the Sands or Desert Inn in Las Vegas. But I was too young to appreciate all of that.

What I remember was the glorious music. In the early 1950’s my mother LOVED Mario Lanza. WBBW aired a radio program called Candlelight and Silver in the very early 1950’s at 5:45 in the afternoon and played that type of music. As time went on, there was Perry Como, Patti Page, Connie Francis, Peggy Lee, the Four Aces, the Four Lads, and at the very end of the decade, the Lettermen. Those are just a few.  Of course, there were the rockers of the period.  But even they wore suits.  Look at Buddy Holly and the Crickets.  I couldn't look that geeky if I tried, even at my age!

I am now sixty one and was the among the youngest of my cousins. Most of my cousins who I watched and envied through the 1950’s are seventy or older. Some of them sadly have died.  A lot of years have gone by.

It was fun taking a sentimental journey back to that wonderful period in American history at the show last weekend. It was a Leave it Beaver, Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy, and Donna Reed world. We know in retrospect that it really wasn’t. But in my mind, I always be eight years old watching my cousins go out to “hit the Cove”.