By Leeuna Foster
I grew up in the late 1950s and early 60s. We rode in cars without seat belts, and in the backs of pick-up trucks. Our parents hit us in public and so did our teachers. We ate loads of sugar and chocolate (not candy…actual sugar and cocoa powder. We pretended it was snuff.) and we didn’t have any excuses for our bad behavior.
We had no idea that we might have ADD. We didn’t even hear about ADD except when we were told by our teacher to figure out how many apples Dick gave to Jane.
We didn’t have video games, iPods, Cell phones, or Satellite. And instead of HDTV and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, we only had shades of black and white…and two TV channels. And due to the tiny screen size we sat with our noses about three inches away from the TV. It’s no wonder some of us now need to wear glasses with 10X zoom lens.
And people have the gall to call that period in time “the good old days”?
I’ve heard a lot of talk about how the television shows back then had morals. How they portrayed the perfect family life, and taught us about honesty and responsibility. Well, kiss my American Idol. Those TV shows were nothing but a bunch of big fat lies!
Men can’t fly. You can’t just dive into a phone booth, put on a pair of tights, and leap tall buildings with a single bound. We almost broke our necks before we realized this fact. I mean, who knew? They did it on TV.
And the bad guys weren’t always the ones wearing the black hats. It came as a severe shock to learn that often the white-hatters can be really horrible bad men. And more often than not, the bad guy wins.
It was TV programs like these that was the very cause of the increase in the divorce rate for my generation.
For instance, we grew up thinking that marriage was supposed to be the way it was in the Cleaver household. June Cleaver never sweated, she dressed up to cook, and she never looked tired or haggard. Ward Cleaver was always the perfect father and husband. He never said a mean word to his wife, and he almost never threw his plate of food across the room at her. And he never one time called his children “little blood-sucking leaches that should be sent to a juvenile correctional facility.” And we thought this was normal male behavior.
Imagine the shock and disappointment, when not long after the honeymoon, we realized that we had married Archie Bunker. And instead of having a lovely little family life like Ozzie and Harriet, our family was more like Ozzy and Sharon (Osbourne).
Instead of the neat and orderly life of June and Ward Cleaver we had the Rosanne Arnold household. Is it any wonder that people got divorced?
And we always thought our children would grow up to be like Opie Taylor or the Waltons, but noo-oo. Our kids turned into clones of Bart Simpson, and Beavis and Butt-Head.
Then there was that show about a boy and his dog named Lassie. We found out the hard way that our dog won’t run home and find help when we’re in trouble, nor will it pull us out of a burning building. He’s more likely to lie down in the driveway and bite his fleas while we’re crisping up like a piece of bacon in the smoke and the flames.
And the Mayberry jail looked so appealing it made us want to walk up and slap Deputy Barney Fife so he would have a reason to haul us off to that comfortable little jail cell and feed us some of Aunt Bea’s fried chicken. The only criminal in Mayberry was poor old drunken Otis. I don’t think there was a single drug bust during the entire eight years of the show.
But if you want my opinion I think Floyd was smoking something. And furthermore, I think Barney was on crack. Nobody can be that nervous just from drinking coffee.
Do you remember the Elvis movie, “Jail House Rock”? Didn’t it just make you want to be there?
Things sure have changed a lot since then, and I agree that television has gone to the dogs, but one thing I will say for it. When you’re feeling really bad about your family life, you can now watch TV and realize that, based on what you’re being shown, your life is really sort of normal.
Maybe that’s what they mean by reality TV.
I still haven’t figured out why they call the 50s “the good old days.”