Reply to "How old is Grandpa?"

The author of this aging angst is much older than 59, or much younger with a skewed view of history, or their memory is very bad.

A 59 year old was born in 1951.
Polio shots ... weren't around when he was born, but he received one as a kid, just like me.
McDonald's was around .. and was a fast growing chain when he was a child, we had one in my neighborhood when I was about 7 years old.
Penicillin was given to wounded soldiers in WWII and was in general use by 1950, which is before even I was born.
Making out? Yes teen-agers of the fifties made-out.
Rock'n'Roll has been around since 1953.
A Chevy for $600? .... I think Model T's sold for more than that.
Gas for 11 cents per gallon .... not in my neighborhood, not even when there was a "gas war".
Every family had a father and a mother? The divorce rate wasn't zero back then! Two of my friends had no fathers around.
FM broadcasting has been around in the states since 1939 and in the UK since 1955. Jazz and classical music were the first formats. I guess grampa only listened to Tommy Dorsey.
Families gathered around the radio in the evening was a thing of the forties, by the fifties every home had a television.
One letter and two post cards for a nickel? The earliest postage I can remember is 6 cents for a first class letter. Phone calls were a dime.

The US had begun sending "military advisers" to Viet Nam by the late fifties, my brother was one of them. Military adviser was a euphemism. They were gun carrying soldiers.

Remember that idealistic president named Kennedy? He went after the mafia, introduced the civil rights act, and spoke of pulling the US out of Viet Nam. The establishment killed him openly, made an example of him. The US hasn't had a president worth a shit since then.

The government got away with a lot of "dirt" that never got reported in the fifties, the press was afraid of the government. The guys who broke the Water Gate story (Woodward and Bernstein) in the 1970s were ground breakers, they pioneered a new era where the press kept an eye on the government.

I didn't like the fifties, people were very intolerant, institutions wanted to control the way people lived their lives. All of those TV programs people think were so sweet ... Father Knows Best, Ozzie & Harriet, Donna Reed, Leave It To Beaver, were overt means of social engineering. No families I knew lived idyllic lives like that. Joe McCarthy ruined people's lives because he accused them of having the wrong ideology (pro-communism). The intolerance of society was one of the things young people rebelled against in the fifties and sixties. Something as innocent as a new form of music, i.e. rock and roll, was written about and spoken of as if it were a pervasive evil that would ruin society, preachers and politicians crusaded against it.

The world today is not perfect, but it is a better place in some important ways than the world of 1950s. I'm with Robert. I wouldn't go back, even if it were possible.

-G