Back in the Day

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Listening to music in art class Photo by Francis Miller 1957.

 

Thirties beach fashion with pretty Mary Carlisle

 

keep 'em comin' Dax!

 

Beatles advert for jeans. Look like a group of nerds!!

 

Rolling Stone October 5,

 

The Rolling Stones performing at Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street, London, April 14, 1963.

 

The Beatles lining up for the famous “Abbey Road” crosswalk picture, 1969

 

Awesome actor!

 

Amy Winehouse.

 

Anjelica Huston.

 

Helen Mirren.

 

I attended a one room rural school in Wisconsin in the 50s and both art and music were a broadcast on public radio at a specific time. In my case I can’t see a lot of evidence of much success in that approach.

 

We are part of a band of groupies following a local band plying Creedence and all the old goodies. Course we are all oldies too. Followed the band to Lodi, CA, Phoenix, Winslow, Laughlin, Coos Bay, Astoria, Skagit, Spokane. Many Indian casino gigs.

 

i remember those kinds of buses and cars from back in the 50s (and there were still older ones being driven)
but the city was some place i only visited on rare occasions, and when i did, there were a lot more trolleys,
and no one drove further then the next town or two over. anyone going on a longer trip then that rode a train or a bus.
planes existed, but only rich people could really afford to fly in them. none of them were jets yet either.
only fighter planes had jets. even military transports had propellers. well there was one jet bomber, that was the b-52.

there were towns where there was only one train a day with a passenger car on the end of them, that that was the only way you could get to or from there.
there just weren't that many places that you had to have a car or a horse or a bike or something, a multi-day walk, to get to.
everything was "off grid" that you couldn't get to on a train or a bus. almost everybody had lights and a land line phone and a refrigerator,
but root cellars and canning was till very much common. in the stores things came in packages that were simple cans or cardboard boxes,
with colorful printed labels only glued to one side of them. some things life fruit and veg, were never packaged at all.
meat was cut to order and wrapped in white butcher paper and tied with brown tape. weighed on a scale and sold by weight.

what was available frozen came in small cardboard boxes too. and there wasn't very much that did.
dairy products were sold in glass bottles and jars. waxed cardboard cartons weren't common yet,
plastic coated cartons not even thought of yet. radios and record players and televisions were all vacuum tubes.
transistors hadn't yet made their way into consumer products, intigrated circuits were still science fiction but considered a far future possibility.
launching anything into space, the furthest up anyone had ever yet been was in a pressurized cabin suspended from a balloon.

then came sputnik, which was just a tin ball with a locator beacon transmitter. but still, until kennidy said we'd do it, no one took seriosly the idea of landing on the moon.
the planets were all so unreachably distant you could tell any kind of a story you wanted about what they were like,
no one would actually believe it, but believe it no more nor less likely then any other.

now i won't say that was a better world then this one, too many things way too wrong with how people thought about and treated each other,
just some things were good, just as other things are good now, and all things change as time goes by.

we didn't have people in government calling it conservative to try and over throw it though.
government was those free pamphlets from the printing office, and the post office and the school and the library.