You went into the military to protect your country, you had faith in the politicians you elected, you could take your vehicle to the mechanic without taking up the tailpipe, the newspapers and the reporters on TV reported the news. not their take and embellishment on it, men and women got married, people went to church on Sunday, Political correctness was a phrase you never heard, people went to work and earned their living, kids in school answered to their father if they screwed up. Where did it go wrong???

Dealey Plaza.

Yep,big changes after that............

Seems like it's been a while, huh?
Fortunately, Wifey and I live out in "the sticks" where most of it is still normal.
Politicians have always been corrupt, or at least open to corruption. Newspapers and later TV reporters have always put their slant on the news, although now it's done openly.
7mm

think it started before JFK's last ride

Do you not remember duck and cover when we were going to survive nuclear war by hiding under our school desks?

When black folks couldn’t eat in the same restaurants, could only sit in the balcony in theaters and were lynched if they got too uppity?

When girls who got into “trouble” were sent away for a year, came back much changed and sad? No one talked about what happened but everybody knew...

I am 70 years old but don’t want to live in a mythical romantic past that never existed. I want to live with my kids and grandkids in a dynamic, exciting future that will be and is amazing.

Not really. Born in '69.

I'm old enough to remember. Almost everything was closed on Sunday. In my small town, only one gas station and one pharmacy was open. The exception was motels and Dairy Queen was open on Sunday afternoon.

In 1960 50% of people attended church at least twice a week. Divorce was rare, in all races. 85% of people had health care. 5% or less were unemployed and thus didn't have health care. The rest were usually poor farm workers, or self employed who didn't buy it. We didn't have welfare. Families took care of their elderly or disabled family members, if not, churches and charities did.

Even FDR in the 1930's refused to pay welfare, he said people needed jobs, so he started the jobs programs. He said people getting checks would loose the work ethic.

I was born in '65. I don't remember any duck and cover drills, and segregation was a thing of the past as far as restaurants. I was fortunate enough to be born and raised in a pretty rural area of PA. By the time I graduated, there were 3 Black students in my district, all in jr high and from the same family.
I honestly never knew any blacks personally until I joined the military. I never had a racist thought Until our last President made race such a large part of our society!
But I have always read a good bit of American history. There's been SOBs in politics since before the revolution, and likewise with the press.
Being out here in "fly over country" definitely has it's perks. Gotta drive further for work or groceries and such, but I can burn through ammo from the back deck!
7mm

I graduated HS in 68.

God I wish I could muster up a chit.

1962-63. God was kicked out of school

Blanket has it right

Not the school I attended!














Parochial

When NEWS was turned over to the entertainment division of the big three networks.

That time is long gone. Embrace the future and learn!

Embrace the future, remember the past and teach the things we learned at a time when life was simpler for most but harder for many.

Yeah, back in the day, the news was not expected to make a profit, just draw in TV watchers. Their reporting on the Vietnam war was a big turning point. miles

It might be like asking which stick is the most important in a beaver dam.

Wasn't long after Hiroshima stopped glowing as best I can figure. That was a bit before my time. Korea set a precedent in the sense of how it was fought which was the antithesis of what we did in WW2. It's been pretty much downhill since. I do recall the period around '54-'60 as mostly pleasant, but was too young to recognize what was developing in SE Asia.

I was kinda fond of .23/gallon gas too.

I don't believe most ever had faith in politicians, unless it's faith we will get screwed by them.

History has proved repeatedly that when civilizations become immoral they crumble and collapse as it all unravels. The chaos in other country's that are one step ahead of us on the immoral chain should be a big indicator but those with there heads in the sand generally never see it that way. A wise man once said realism is often misinterpreted as pessimism. And those who misinterpret it with a positive outlook are positive....positively wrong!


Trystan

I remember when people were actually ashamed to take welfare. Now, it's an entitlement.

i recall when the farm tax could hardly be paid. politicians were used to influence local judge to keep a neighbor out of the chain-gang. nearly everybody was poor, some more than others. dirt roads with no gravel to make them travelable in the winter. in my lock-step rural Baptist community, ya did right or got shunned. and the baptist preachers and the boot-leggers weren't about to allow legal alcohol sales.

History is a good teacher. Blacks didn't give a trouble when they weren't allowed to get "uppity"....and I'm not supporting anyone getting lynched, just saying that the pendulum has swung too far to the other side now.

When girls "got in trouble", and had to have the baby, instead of running down to the abortion clinic and getting it took care of, then a valuable lesson was learned by all involved......."you pay when you play." That kept a lot of young folks back then from "playing". Now days, if they aren't "playing" by the time they're in high school, their peers think something is wrong with them.

I'm 67, and I want my grandkids to experience what I did growing up.....a world in which most people attended church, stayed married, married someone of their race and background, and didn't have half a dozen abortions by the time they were 20.

I am so getting a dinosaur when history repeats.

Prospero's vision is good enough for me.

Liberal progressivism = decay of moral values. Its become a cottage industry to be offended by anything and everything.

Well, I can remember when it was "right" for me. I could shoulder my .22 rifle, walk through town, Pop. of 3K in the U.P. of Mich. three miles to a farm and hunt woodchucks. No one ever said a thing. I also remember when each home had both Mom and Dad living in it, and Dad was the Boss. Most all Dads were WWll Vets. All Dads worked. I knew the rules and abided by them...trouble outside home was even bigger trouble when I got home.
I don`t know if it was a "right" time for my parents, as I can remember my Mom crying at the kitchen table wondering how she was going to pay the food bill for the 6 of us. When I went into the Service in 62 they still owed the store close to $600.
I also remember the values of hard work, honesty, and responsibility..seems like these arn`t "right" amymore.

Never been a time when everything was "right."
But they were certainly a lot better in many ways.
I was born in the middle of the Depression and spent my grade school years during the War.
Some things were worse.

Bow, yes.

It started when Medeline Murray O"Hare got school prayer banned. When I was in school we recited the Lord's Prayer every day, everyone stood and pledged allegiance to the flag. There was a dress code that not only included attire but also getting a hair cut (long hair was not allowed). Slowly these things went away, disipline suffered as decorum and respect fell by the wayside. The dam burst when political correctness became the order of the day, everyone protested whatever they felt offended them and nearly always got their way no matter if they were in the minority. The majority rules never happens anymore neither does going along to get along.

Things ain't changed all that much, we just know about more now with 24 hour news and the internet. Much more fake news making us think things are worse than they are. There is just as much fake news from the right as the left. Virtually every generation has been convinced things were worse than before. Every politician since the beginning has been accused of corruption. Some were, some weren't, but their critics made their point known and muddied the waters.

Girls have been getting pregnant before marriage forever and having abortions long before they were legal. As long as birth and marriage records have been accurately kept, and prior to effective contraception, almost half of girls 1st born children were born less than 9 months after marriage. Parents have been killing their own unwanted children outright, or through neglect forever. Abortions and teen pregnancy are at an all time low, because kids are now using birth control.

People have been murdering and robbing others forever. It was a lot easier to get away with it or make it look like an accident or natural death years ago so much went unreported. Drug and alcohol abuse levels are no different, and maybe lower than at many other times. There were lots of doped up veterans after the Civil War on morphine. Cocaine and many other drugs were legal and popular until the early 20th century.

I don't think world ever existed. That was a "Leave it to Beaver" TV delusion / propaganda we were supposed to buy into ... and many did. The difference in older times was that most the deviations from the image stayed behind closed doors, NOT what actually happened behind those doors. Human nature does not change. What's changed is we got jaded and started seeing what was there to see all along.

Tom

I'm going with this one..

Prayer was never banned in schools. This is one of the big lies often repeated. Anyone who wants to go into a school and pray can, and has always been able to do so. The difference is that you can no longer force others to participate if they do not want to do so. As a Christian I support this position. I can pray anytime I wish. I can get together with other Christians including students or teachers and pray at any school. But not every student in our schools are Christian. If I can force non-Christians to recite a Christian prayer, then those of other faiths will argue, and win, that they can force Christians to recite prayers from their religion. It ain't that hard to get together as Christians and say a prayer and let others do as they choose. Unlike Islam, the Christian Bible has never said that we should force others to accept our religion. We lay it out there. Others can choose to accept or reject.

Sure it was. Even then one could choose not to, albeit at your own "risk" as it were. The prayer itself was (is) not really the issue or even relevant, it was the STRUCTURE, prayer, the pledge, a dress code, discipline gave to all of us as kids.

Ignorance was bliss I suppose.

Country was never right, but we sure have our problems now.

Definitely my impression. I had an unusual perspective I guess. I grew up in a very small community with almost no kids so when I was 8-10, the people I was around were 75 to 90, many born in the later 1880s. The 1890s, when they grew up, were as real to me as the 1950s and early 1960s that I barely missed. They said the same things about "kids" that old fogeys have always said about the generation or two following them, the only difference was they did it with fewer cuss words. The rolled eyes were the same, the dismay was the same.

There were a whole lot of first babies that looked awfully healthy for being 2 months premature and, of course, conceived on wedding night. The moms could not have been pregnant, right? That wouldn't be the fantasy world of "Leave it to Beaver". 1920s .. flappers, etc ... nothing promiscuous going on there. Really, premarital and extramarital sex were invented in the 1960s. Didn't you know? Laudanum .. oh, no, nobody ever abused THAT. Much. Abuse of doctor-prescribed medicines is a brand new thing, don't you remember?

I think the people who are overly enamored with that utopian past were simply too young at the time to have been fully aware of all that was going on. You can drive back but you can never go home. It never was the thing you remember it being now.

Tom

Yup, one of those meat guzzling T-rex models.......Can you imagine the green house gases out of that one.

I'm in the same camp.

Spanish American War right?

I don’t know if the country was “right” but the 50’s and early 60’s were a good time to be white in America and an amazing time to be growing up white in America.

Maybe it depends on what right means? There was poverty, always has been, but as noted it seems to me even poor folks had pride, some had downright fierce pride about not accepting any handouts.

Maybe ignorance is bliss, there were certainly child molesters in the 50’s and 60’s, murders, prostitution and drugs but you just didn’t hear about that. Random murders really were rare (at least it seems like it – certainly not the random slaughter we see in Chicago and Detroit and elsewhere) and murderers usually got the chair or gas chamber. There were robberies in town but they were generally so rare most of them made the paper. Now you have to rob a half billion dollars and/or kill 10 people in the process for it to even be noticed.

Suburbia had just begun to eat up farms and forests. Even in a medium sized town open spaces weren't too far away, cars made it easy to get to and permissions either were easy to get or weren't even needed in many places.

Politicians were corrupt, always had been, but maybe we just overlooked that. At least we and they pretended to be honorable people, we didn’t have the total scorn for them that is so prevalent today – and which they fully earn today. The military-industrial complex was just getting started, drug money wasn’t in the billions of dollars yet and those things hadn’t spread their corruption as deeply as they have today. Corruption that widespread, from street cops to Congress, had ended in 1932 with the end of prohibition.

Overall the country was incredibly prosperous, more prosperous than it had ever been. We were a new world power – THE world power, fresh out of victory in WWII with pockets full of money and good paying, lifelong jobs available to just about anyone who wanted to work. A working man in a one income family could afford a nice house, a car and with a little planning send his kids to college without incurring crushing debt. Business was booming and confidence in America was high, we could do anything. There was a chicken in every pot and there were two cars in many if not most garages.

A good argument could be made that those two decades were the apex of the American Empire and times before and times after just aren’t going to measure up.

Whatever it was, I’m sure glad I got to live through it.

Or had parents who tried like hell to hide or shield their kids from that stuff, for better or worse. My mom grew up in SE Missouri in what would appear to be a proper, god-fearing, well bred family whose manners and decorum were impeccable almost to a fault at times. My dad grew up in Queens NY to a loud, everything-out-on-the-table family of first-generation Lithuanians. From the outside you would think my Dad's family was crazy with all kinds of drama and problems. But my mom has just as many stories of skeletons and dirty laundry as my dads family, it's just that her parents generation never talked about and tried a lot harder to keep it in the closet. As a father to two young girls I can understand the appeal of my mom's family's approach, but as I get older I lean more towards my Dad's family because I've realized that hiding problems or pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.

The world seems to have spun off its axis in 1964-65 to me. There was a lot of rot hidden but popular culture seemed much more sane then. DigDan is correct that the politics changed between WW2 and Korea and we haven't fought a war to win since WW2. That is the watershed of the rise of socialist trained govt. folks who went thru college after Wilson became Pres.
We are at the far end of 100 +/- years of Progressive destruction of the American culture. Lots of rot out there.

Worth pondering.

lot's of pain, suffering & poverty in appalachia in those days. not everybody had access to a good paying job. thus here came kennedy on his white horse, and after he got shot off of it, then johnson brought us the Great Society, guns & butter both. and the draft, and vietnam.

and beyond that there was the golden age of the pension for a fortunate some (or few). then the pension era came to a screeching halt. no more pensions for the current generations, by and large. sure, they can save for old age, like folks use to do, or depend upon family, or slowly starve from lack of food, and disease.

not all things are improving, but the back era after wwii was anything but golden for many. it was work or starve (which isn't a bad philosophy). even the Zen Buddhists accept that great truth.

where are we headed? it's been well described for us already: it's a flat, hot, crowded, competitive world that our Grands are going to inherit.

I'm a bit younger than you but we're on the same page. I've seen a lot of change in my 52 years and not much of it for the better.

Nothing to do with good, bad, or otherwise, but the vast majority of people now dress much differently than they did before. I mean folks didnt dress fancy then but they wore more than a t-shirt, flip flops, and a pair of shorts that seem to be the norm now just about everywhere.

Just my observation.

if devolution continues at the rate some are suggesting is occurring, then we should be thankful for t-shirts, & shorts. because further along the trail, we might be down to grape leaves to cover certain aspects of the body. but, thankfully we're not there yet. if we do get there, i hope there's at least some that resemble Barbie.

June 2, 1865 is when the decline really kicked in.

After the supreme court ruling organized prayer no longer existed in school. As regards being forced to pray, no one stood over you with a gun. You just did not want to do it, no different that those "taking a knee" today. The "greatest generation" certainly never had a problem with praying in school. None of them were harmed in any way by having prayed in school, nor showing our flag and National Anthem due respect. They worked and fought and did what was right for their families and their country, they didn't have time for any kind of protest and that was part of what made them great.

I didn’t know if the country was right growing up; born in 43 and lived on a farm,we moved to a small town and I could hunt,fish and trap anywhere I could walk to no question asked.Every youngster in town either bag groceries,worked at the gas station,delivered papers or bucked bales.

About 1960 a couple of new words surfaced; Haight Ashbury, a little to-do in S.E.A. And a letter from Uncle Sam changed our Country,so yes I do remember when our country was right.

There has been one "War" in my lifetime. Those who lived though it know which one we mean.

I am about 4 years older than you and we are in agreement, I lived as you described and so did everyone else I knew and most of us turned out pretty well. This 60's generation was the first one raised by the Dr. Spock methods and IMO it didn't work out well. Not only was their generation screwed up but they have passed it on to successive generations.
Most days I am glad that I am as old as I am because I don't think I will like what the future holds.

drover

"Raised by the Dr. Spock methods"

I always heard best thing to do with that book is whup the kids azz with it.

think of how much time you will need with a shovel to clean the crap out of the yard

I do not ever remember it being right, or even close to it. I was born after WWII. By the time the fifties got here we had McCarthy and near continuous nuke testing. We had Ssonic booms from training runs. We had junk cars that were designed to fall apart from the time they left the factory. The sixties brought us Viet Nam and killed a lot of the kids I went to school with. The seventies brought us a president and vice president criminal enough that they had to go and inflation that ate your pay check down to the bone. It just got worse year after year and we wonder why?

Not trying to live in the past, just reflecting on when a person was responsible for his actions, and there was consequence if you screwed up, it was the normal that you had to work for what you had, You were poor but did not know it, you would not ask anyone for assistance for anything, let alone expect it,except you could ask to hunt or fish anywhere and have no problem getting access

19 cent fuel and 21 cents for box 22 shorts!

The Hippie Era p hucked everything up!

Old black man came in shop one day and asked our cashier girl for a box of
"22 Shoats"! LOL. She turned to me with confused look and ask me, "Do we sell 22 Shoats???"

In the 1950's, a hailstorm destroyed my fathers tobacco crop, so he took a job at a hardware store to help make ends meet. While working there, he traded a Marlin 25-20 for a Winchester Model 12 20 gauge. One day a Black fellow came in the store and was looking at the 25-20. He asked a salesman there if that rifle would kill a deer. The salesman said, that gun will kill a bear. The Black man said, I'll take it, I'se always wanted me a bar gun. Of course, there weren't any bears around, but I guess it made him feel better.

Interest posts! Musta been amazing to see the transition from steam power....


When did welfare really kick in, or transition to the horschit it is now? I never heard of it as a kid or knew anyone on the doll, until I went to college and starting meeting city folks.

Although it may be arguable to some the welfare program began with the food distribution program of the 1930's - here is a good link.

https://www.fns.usda.gov/fdd/fdd-history-and-background

19 cent fuel and 21 cents for box 22 shorts!

The Hippie Era p hucked everything up!

Thanks Drover.