
I have a friend who likes to send out emails of the forwarded-forwarded-forwarded variety. Most of them are sappy…but this one takes the cake. “No idea who put this together,” sez he, “but it is Fantastic!” It really set me off, I’m afraid:
1950’s version of an E-Mail
Long ago and far away, in a land that time forgot,
Before the days of Dylan , or the dawn of Camelot.
There lived a race of innocents, and they were you and me,
For Ike was in the White House in that land where we were born,
Where navels were for oranges, and Peyton Place was porn.
We longed for love and romance, and waited for our Prince,
Eddie Fisher married Liz, and no one’s seen him since.
We danced to ‘Little Darlin,’ and sang to ‘Stagger Lee’
And cried for Buddy Holly in the Land That Made Me, Me.
Only girls wore earrings then, and 3 was one too many,
And only boys wore flat-top cuts, except for Jean McKinney.
And Oprah couldn’t talk yet, in the Land That Made Me, Me.
We had our share of heroes, we never thought they’d go,
At least not Bobby Darin, or Marilyn Monroe.
For youth was still eternal, and life was yet to be,
And Elvis was forever in the Land That Made Me, Me.
We’d never seen the rock band that was Grateful to be Dead,
And Airplanes weren’t named Jefferson , and Zeppelins were not Led.
And Beatles lived in gardens then, and Monkees lived in trees,
Madonna was Mary in the Land That Made Me, Me.
We’d never heard of microwaves, or telephones in cars,
And babies might be bottle-fed, but they were not grown in jars.
And pumping iron got wrinkles out, and ‘gay’ meant fancy-free,
And dorms were never co-Ed in the Land That Made Me, Me.
We hadn’t seen enough of jets to talk about the lag,
And microchips were what was left at the bottom of the bag.
And hardware was a box of nails, and bytes came from a flea,
And rocket ships were fiction in the Land That Made Me, Me.
T-Birds came with portholes, and side shows came with freaks,
And bathing suits came big enough to cover both your cheeks.
And Coke came just in bottles, and skirts below the knee,
And Castro came to power near the Land That Made Me, Me.
We had no Crest with Fluoride, we had no Hill Street Blues,
We had no patterned pantyhose or Lipton herbal tea
Or prime-time ads for those dysfunctions in the Land That Made Me, Me.
There were no golden arches, no Perrier to chill,
And fish were not called Wanda, and cats were not called Bill
And middle-aged was 35 and old was forty-three,
And ancient were our parents in the Land That Made Me, Me.
But all things have a season, or so we’ve heard them say,
And now instead of Maybelline we swear by Retin-A.
They send us invitations to join AARP,
We’ve come a long way, baby, from the Land That Made Me, Me.
So now we face a brave new world in slightly larger jeans,
And wonder why they’re using smaller print in magazines.
And we tell our children’s children of the way it used to be,
Long ago and far away in the Land That Made Me, Me.
If you didn’t grow up in the fifties,
You missed the greatest time in history,
Hope you enjoyed this read as much as I did.
If So, PLEASE FORWARD this note to
someone who will appreciate these memories…
Hm. Actually the 1950s were pretty dreadful, as I recall.
- Constant threat of nuclear warfare; weekly air-raid drills, school evacuation plans based on the likelihood that we would never see our parents again — whee! what fun!
- Hatred of anyone whose skin was a different color from yours or who spoke a different language from yours.
- Mediocrity: celebrated as the norm.
- No real job opportunities for women. College women couldn’t major in the sciences or business management; if they contrived to weasel into a program, they couldn’t get a job with their degree. All girls were forced to take a year of home ec in K-12, and nevvermind if you needed geometry, algebra 2,, or trig to get into a decent university. Why would anyone want to spend money sending a girl to university anyway, since all she was going to do is spawn and raise children?
- Ohhh what fun it was. Mediocrity celebrated. Air raid shelters well stocked. A big, bloated car that was unsafe at any speed. Smog so thick you couldn’t see across your high-school campus. My father kept a crate of canned water in the back of the car, just in case we managed to escape down the Peninsula and get outside the blast zone before the bombs fell.
If anything had happened to him, my mother and I would have gone hungry until she could land another man — as a female, she couldn’t get a job that would support us and put food on our table.
Uh huh. Them’s were the good ole days…
It had to be a man that wrote this, a white man actually.
I told my grandson that, even today, he has two privileges going for him-he is white and male.
I loved Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus which had lot about the trouble women had getting ahead and male privilege, I think in the sixties.
After I read it, I wanted to give every woman a #2 pencil, very sharp.
LOL! Welp, SDXB is a white man, and one somewhat to the right of Richard Nixon et al. Doubt if he wrote it, but he does like stuff like this. 😀
Maleness-and-Paleness no longer is the best of all combinations. I’ve been on job search committees where highly qualified candidates were passed over and, eventually, the search actually closed down because no one with the desired degree of duskiness and gender applied.
So, based on observation: IMHO it’s possible to go too far in the other direction. And, to coin another cliché, two (or three, or four, or myriad) wrongs don’t make a right.
Still…imho the Good Ole Days are not necessarily anything to be sentimentally yearning after. 😉