A 1950s Upbringing in the 1980s

By Greg Evans

When I was growing up in the 1980s, my mother would remind my two sisters and I, at least once a week, “You kids are lucky. You have a 1950s upbringing.”

At nine years old, I didn’t really know what that meant. But I assumed it had something to do with going to church on Sundays, having impeccable manners like sitting still for a true bowl cut (bowl actually placed on head), and eating meatloaf with chili sauce, and the rich one-liners my parents had on layaway for those teaching moments. “Only floss the teeth you want to keep,” or “Eighty percent of the world is dead above the ass.”

At dinner time, we all sat around the table. Grace was said first. “God is good, God is great, let us thank him for our food. By his hand we all are fed, give us Lord our daily bread. Amen.”

It barely rhymes, but instilled enough piety in me not to go out and beat up the climate freaks, that I have held onto into adulthood.

“Sit up straight, kids. No slouching. Elbows off the table. No chewing with your mouth open.” If you wanted to get up from the dinner table, you had to ask to be excused.

“Can I be excused?”

“No, finish your scrod.”

After dinner, we had to sit at the dining room table and do our school work. The world was invariably structured. “Boy, the 1950s was a strict time,” my sisters and I would whisper to each other.

“No talking!”

It wouldn’t be until later in life, long after the 1950s was a memory, that I would see the true value of therapy. Just kidding.

At the same time, the 1950s wasn’t wholly about being strict and practicing good manners. When it was playtime, we had true freedom. As children, we could come and go as we pleased, with very little supervision outside of breakfast, school, Church, dinner, and homework time. Not all the kids in the neighborhood had that.

Flying down hills on bikes without helmets. Skateboarding in glass-strewn parking lots with a mouth full of hard candies. “Reading” Playboy magazines in the woods. Subsisting on a diet of Coca Cola, O’Boisies, and Three Musketeer candy bars that we pillaged from a friend’s older brother’s stash, along with his Hustlers.

As long as we were home by dinner, the world was our oyster. The 1950s wasn’t such a bad time.

My grandmother had her own room in our house beside the living room, because that is how it was back then, and some nights I would sneak away from the homework table, or after brushing my teeth, and sit on the floor next to her bed and watch shows with her like, “Dallas,” Who Shot J.R.?; “Dynasty”, and “The Golden Girls.”

If there was static she’d say, “Greg, puedes arreglar la pantalla. Esta borrosa.”

“You want some rabbit?” I’d say with a chortle.

“Mi hijo,” she’d sigh. “The antenna. The screen is fuzzy.”

I’d get up and rearrange the rabbit ears. And sometimes when she fell asleep, I’d take her glasses off her head and place them on the side table.

“Oh, there are my glasses,” she would say. I was wondering what show we were watching.

For day-to-day entertainment, we had thirteen channels on the TV, three that weren’t white noise, but we mostly played outside, putting tacks in the road point up, sticking a coonskin hat in the neighbor’s mailbox, and making growling noises outside Christine Vines’s bedroom window while she play King’s Quest, because “That is what life was like in the 50s,” mother would say. “Someday you will thank us.”

We went to the swimming hole (the shallow Croton River) and jumped off the 50-foot high jagged rocky cliff, had cookouts trying to see how much lighter fluid was needed to singe the tree branches, no fear back then of arson charges, cooking fatty hamburgers and hot dogs, white bread buns, ketchup sweet as maple syrup, ice-cold soda, neon-orange Doritos, Quavers, and the chewy Freihofer’s chocolate chips cookies; seeing who could eat the most without retching, washed down with stolen beer from our parent’s stash.

Life was good then. It still is good, just different. The 1950s wasn’t such a bad time. Some day, my daughter will tell her kids, “I was born in the 2000s but raised in the 1980s.”

There is just something nice about looking back to the 1950s with rose-colored glasses, even if you weren’t alive yet.