Sunday, July 9, 2023

Life in the 1950s

Usually our evening meal was meat and potatoes and a vegetable. Sometimes a salad. Dessert was canned fruit and two cookies. Also - we were skinny/ thin. Very few children were fat. We went outside to play and told we could stay out until the streetlights came on. (or we got too cold in the wintertime and wanted to come in to warm up.)  We were thin, but strong because of all this activity. 

We did have ONE TV, but we watched what the parents wanted to watch or what they allowed us to watch. (cartoons on Saturday mornings, of course) 

We all took a bag lunch to school in elementary school. No cafeteria for us - we ate in our classroom. No school cafeteria, no school library, no auditorium. We listened to adventure stories on the radio. And variety shows. The car didn't have a radio. When we went on a car trip, we packed lunch and/or snacks and ate while we were riding in it. (sometimes we read comic books on long trips, ignoring our parent's warnings that reading in the car would ruin our eyes. Because of the bumpiness of the ride.)

As soon as any vaccine was available, my mother made sure we got it.  I still have my smallpox vaccine scar.  We got the first polio vaccines. (for many years everyone collected dimes to donate toward that research.  Dimes because our president in the 1940s, Franklin D. Roosevelt had had polio and the scientific community was determined to eliminate it. 

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