The 1950’s. The quest to satisfy supremely the prevailing hunger for all that was cozy, familiar, and safe. The myth that this was a special time, when the individual’s joys were allegedly unsullied, our problems of the most superficial variety, and when trust and tranquillity permeated all aspects of public and private life, are simply recreations which allow mass media, the entertainment industry, to do our remembering for us with rosy recollections in which nostalgia and the most kitschy and maudlin sentimentality is a public virtue. The lesson today is that historical myths can be fabricated before the very eyes of eyewitnesses, before the ink is even dry, so to speak…
—Milton Berle and Ethel Merman on Texaco Star Theater
Performance on the Texaco Star Theater, which was later renamed to The Milton Berle Show.—Milton Berle emptied the nation’s movie theatres every Tuesday night in the early fifties with a show that was a melange of aged vaudeville stunts, hoary jokes and pratfalls. perhaps after the Great Depression and WWII, this was about all many wanted to absorb… click photo for image source…
…And so, should anyone really prefer to be living back in the 1950’s instead of our fragmented and much maligned new millennium? I hardly doubt it, for if nothing else, we’ve at least so far survived the heritage left to us by the fifties, although it remains clinging like a ship wrecked sailor on a raft in the open sea. There is always the possibility to find some old house in the backwoods, to do the Walden Pond story and retreat into the mists of time, at least to some extent; but it is difficult to disengage concerns about those of the present and the future.
—In August 1957, American Bandstand, a new television show broadcast out of Philadelphia, PA, featured local teenagers dancing to the new rock ‘n roll music. The show had just “gone national” on the ABC television network on August 5th. With its new young host, Dick Clark, the show aired every day at 3 p.m. for an hour-and-a-half. Within six months of its national debut, American Bandstand was picked up by 101 stations. Soon there were about 20 million viewers tuning in, half of whom were adult. Fan letters poured in by the tens of thousands. Teenagers came to Philadelphia from wide and far for a chance to dance on the show. —Read More:http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=american-bandstand-history
Ultimately, with the 1950’s one could agree with Fred J. Cook who termed it a “nightmare decade,” and a period not really worthy enough to dwell on with all its absurd folk culture that seemed spawned in the full flowering of the industrial age, the peace dividend after WWII and the first stirrings of the onset of an age of disaffection and alienation as cultural aesthetic. Perhaps its better to finally bury, definitely, without any honors whatsoever the likes and legacy of Dick Clark, Sandra Dee, Buffalo Bob, President Eisenhower, and “Teen Angel.” Good-bye. You will not be missed.
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