Fifty years ago I was nine years old. I lived in a tiny
town on the west bank of the Colorado River, across from Yuma, Arizona.
You wouldn't believe how hot the summers were. Imagine a whole town
under an electric blanket set on 10. If you went outside on a summer
afternoon, you were the ONLY person outside! I got one new pair of
shoes every September. I wore them five days a week, school days,
and went barefoot the rest of the time, or wore some old sneakers
abandoned by an older brother. If I got new clothes, they were Christmas
presents. Sometimes my mother would take me to a fabric store to pick
out material and she would make a shirt for me.
The sky was blue. Incredibly blue. No contrails. None.
At night I could see the stars. ALL the stars. No clouds, no street
lights, nobody driving around at night, NO LIGHTS! Just stars. Houses
were different. They looked like they had been built by people who
had heard of houses but never seen one. Insulation was an option,
and a very expensive one. Ice boxes were still common, but people
were rapidly switching to the new refrigerators. Chicken coops were
not common, but they were still an acceptable feature in any back
yard. A Mexican woman came around occasionally, selling tamales from
a bucket. When I was older I would get canteloupe culls from the packing
shed, pack them in my wagon with wet burlap bags, and sell them.
Cars were incredibly popular. Anybody could afford one,
but nobody could afford a new one. Everybody kept fixing the one they
had. High school students who had money built cars from the ground
up, buying parts from junk yards or each other or wherever they could
find them. Almost every car had "curb feelers". Those were
chrome plated wires that clamped to the fenders on the right side.
When you parked the car you could hear them scrape the curb, and that
told you the car was close enough. Some cars had fender skirts, and
that meant a terrific job if you ever had to change a tire. People
liked fender skirts, but those who didn't have them didn't go looking
for them.
Every car driving into our out of our town had a canvas
water bag slung on the front bumper. The water soaked the canvas,
the wind cooled it, and you could have a cool drink half way across
the desert. And you just might need that water to put in the radiator,
too. Some people got caught in the sand dunes during a wind storm
and half their car would be sand blasted right down to bare metal.
Empty roads. We lived on a major US highway. So major
that the bridge was called "The Bridge Between East And West".
But there might be no cars visible in either direction for hours at
a time. It was normal to use high beams at night, and it was normal
to complete an entire trip without having to dim them. And that remained
true well into the 70s. Bear in mind that the US population was close
to half what it is now. A "wreck" almost always meant that
a car had hit a tree, or a light pole, or had left the road and turned
over. For one car to collide with another was very rare.
Drive-in restaurants. There were at least two even in
the smallest towns. Any restaurant not trying to be high class advertised
"curb service", meaning you could honk your horn and a waitress
would come out to the sidewalk to take your order. Trash. I mean TRASH!
Try to imagine every bush and every fence clogged with paper, boxes,
pop bottles (glass), broken toys (wood or metal, not plastic), newspapers,
rags, waxed paper. Everything sold at drive-in restaurants was wrapped
in paper, put in paper bags, or in paper cups. The only way you got
something other than paper was if you ordered ice cream; then you
got a flat piece of wood shaped like a spoon. If you bought a pop
someplace, you payed a nickel for the pop and 2 cents for the deposit
on the bottle. Picking up pop bottles was the sole source of income
for most boys too young to get jobs. All this stuff went out the window
of the car as soon as it had served its usefulness. There was NO concern
about "environment". That stuff didn't start until the 70s.
Nowadays it makes the papers if someone picks up three tons of trash
along a mile of freeway. Har Har! In the fifties we had twice that
much along each side of every block!
Hoboes. If you were within a mile or so of a railroad
track, you were on the main hobo highway. But people weren't threatened
by hoboes then. A lot of housewives made it a point to never refuse
a hobo's request for food. I remember the first indication of a change
in the traditions. A hobo politely asked my mother for some vanilla.
She handed him the bottle and reached for a spoon. He had drunk the
entire bottle before she could turn around with the spoon. Vanilla
has as much alcohol as wine, you know. The bum just wanted a shot
of booze. Mom was not so receptive to hoboes after that. Mostly the
hoboes would camp in the bushes, gathering scraps of paper to make
beds. And mostly they just kept moving.
Radio programs. Radio was not considered entertainment
in those days, it was considered contact with the outside world. Each
morning we washed the breakfast dishes and put them away quickly,
so we could sit down in time to listen to "The Breakfast Club".
It was a talk show from some well known hotel someplace, with a live
band and jokes and casual conversation between some excellent conversationalists.
I have never heard good conversationalists since then. Cary Grant
had some nice conversations in a few movies, but even those were not
great examples of conversation. And outside of that I have not heard
another conversation that lasted longer than one sentence. At night
we would carefully tune the radio, trying to pick up one of the big
stations. We could almost always pick up "KCBS, the star's address"
in Los Angeles, or a rollicking fun station in Compton. The show was
called "Compton Town Hall", and since there was so little
"Town" business, they usually had some wonderful C&W
musicians performing instead. After a few years the "Town"
business crowded out the music and we stopped listening. We often
got The Bob And Ray show from San Francisco, almost 800 miles away,
and I couldn't even imagine what life might have been like there.
KSL Salt Lake City was another station that came in sometimes. All
of this was magic. The signals might as well have been coming from
other planets. Listening to the radio while driving was a powerful
reminder that you weren't in town any more.AM was the only kind of
radio there was, and as you got more than 20 or so miles from the
station, the radio began to fade. Farther out and it would hiss and
crackle. And you knew in your heart that if the car broke down it
was a long walk to get help. Yes, there was a very big difference
between in town and outside of town in those days.
TV. Well, I had heard of it, but only in LA. They had
everything in LA! Once when we went there I counted the tv antennas.
There were 114 of them. Back home there was just one family that had
a tv, and their antenna was on a 50 foot tower, because the only station
was in San Diego, 150 miles away. I wondered what it was like, but
I was too proud to ask if I could come in and watch. The first time
I got to watch tv was on a visit to relatives in Salt Lake City. I
fell in love with Mary Hartline, a teenager in a cute dress with a
big heart on the front. She ran Winky Dink cartoons, where you put
a sheet of plastic on the screen and traced things with a crayon to
follow the story. But I spent most of the time at the park near my
aunt's house. I just wasn't used to grass and trees!
Socials, dances, and talent nights. People entertained
themselves in those days. Nobody, but nobody, stayed home all the
time. You might have to walk a mile or two to see a movie, but that
was better than sitting at home. The schools did plays and stuff.
There would be a halloween carnival with a movie (25 cents admission),
little kids would do some sort of music with sticks and bells (can't
expect too much from little kids, you know), then there would be Christmas
plays for the 5th and 6th grade classes, and glee club for the older
kids. These things were never intended to be actual entertainment,
they were just to get the parents out of the house and run the kids
around a bit. And they were well attended, because there wasn't anyplace
else to go. All the stores were on Main Street. They all closed at
5 or 6 pm, leaving only the bars and movie theaters still open. People
wandered up and down Main Street, chatting, watching, looking at window
displays, whatever. Since most residences didn't have air conditioning,
there was no point in going home before the place cooled off enough
to sleep. Some people dragged their beds into the yard to get cool
enough to sleep. Houses had yards then, and apartment houses were
unknown.
Air conditioning meant a huge tower out back. Tons of
water fell through the coils to cool the system. Cooling a house required
a tower about four feet square and ten feet tall. Cooling a department
store or a theater required a tower as big as a house and four stories
tall. Mostly, only department stores, theaters, big hotels, and ritzy
residences were cooled.
©2003 Vern Wall All Rights Reserved
