Well, I was born in 1941 so a lot of my growing up was in the 50’s. For the most part it was a good time to grow up. But the good things all had a bad side as well.

Nearly every friend I had lived in a two parent home. I can only think of a few who were raised by a single parent. Most all of the moms were stay at home moms which is also good in many ways. I do think that gave a better sense of family and that side was good. However opportunities for women were very limited so if a woman was in a bad marriage she was pretty stuck. Women could be teachers, waitresses, clerks or secretaries and the pay wasn’t usually all that good. At the time, in my state, divorces were much more difficult. No fault divorces didn’t come along until the 60’s here.

People were much friendlier then. We knew all our neighbors and would visit them and our relatives quite frequently. That was probably because life was more boring and in the early days of TV we only had one channel. Later that went to three channels. The nice thing about one channel was that you didn’t have to decide what to watch. The decision was to watch TV or not.

The world was much safer. There were no mass shootings. We often slept out on the front porch on hot summer nights and in a pup tent in the back yard as well. We typically didn’t lock our front door or our car. My little town of 12,500 had one murder in it’s 70 year history.

Doctors were cheap. You only went when you were sick. Now you only go to the doctor if you are not sick. If you are sick you go to insty care. Of course if you are really sick the doctors made house calls. I can always remember our doctor pulling in front of our house with his white 59 caddy with the tall tail fins and bringing his little black doctor bag in.

Cars were not all that reliable but easy and cheap to fix. When they would not start they all had bumpers and bumper guards and someone would pull their car behind you and push you. Then you would pop the clutch and the car would start. Oil changes were at 2000 miles, spark plugs and points every 10–12,000 miles, brakes needed to be adjusted with a break spoon. It was common to lose your brakes. Flat tires were common.

Sundays were pretty boring. The blue laws were in effect so stores and bars could not open on a Sunday. Sunday was a time for going to church and spending time with family.

I don’t think it was a good time to be a minority but we had few in my little town. We had 13 black families and they all lived on one street, if you could call it a street, it was more like an ally. The only Asians ran the Chinese laundry and we never saw them on the street. We had no open segregation since we had so few blacks it wasn’t practical. I recall being rather shocked when as a teen we took a vacation to Virginia and a restaurant we stopped at had separate water fountains and rest rooms for blacks and whites. I had never seen that and it seemed odd.

To me, it was a good time to grow up. In school you either learned or were held back. We didn’t sit with a play station we went out and played baseball, street games or board games. I knew tons of people. We worked for what we had. We all had families and did things as a family. Drugs were unknown. Few people had guns and few felt any need for them. Guns were for hunting. I would rather have grown up then as primitive as it was than to grow up today.