A Different World

It's so hard to convey what life was like in the Fifties because the world has changed so much since then. If you were born after 1970, you have seen advances in technology that we never dreamed of. The developments in space exploration, medicine, communications, computers, transportation, even household appliances have been mind boggling. Picture an existence without the Internet, personal computers, microwaves, cellphones, spaceships, lasers, video games, and a host of other developments. Television was in its infancy, yet those wavy images in black and white mesmerized us when we first saw them, probably in a neighborhood store window.

Technology was not the only thing that was different...social customs were a world away. Women were still rare in the workplace; those who had jobs were eyed suspiciously because they weren't housewives doing for their families. They were considered the fairer (but weaker) sex, not fit for the work done by men. Women who went to college were also a rarity. High school girls were taught home economics to prepare them for the life they were expected to lead; housewives. Girls who were unmarried by age 25 set tongues wagging. Couples married young, had a few kids, and the cycle repeated, as it had done for a hundred years.

If you can believe it, race relations were even worse than then they are now. People tended to live in neighborhoods with those of their own race, and even more specifically, those of their own ethnic ancestry. You could almost identify the groups who lived in an area by the kind of stores on the main streets. Italian neighborhoods featured food stores of all kinds, German areas were full of bakeries, black sections by barber shops, fried chicken joints, and storefront churches. Please don't be offended by any perceived negative stereotypical references in this statement; it's just simple fact. Men's social clubs abounded in all neighborhoods where working class stiffs sat around in their undershirts playing cards.

Before television found its voice, people listened to the radio and went to the movies for entertainment. Radio was very different than today. Regular radio programs came on every week with sponsors who understood the power of this medium. Comedy shows, quiz shows, soap operas, sports, adventure and cowboy shows...radio offered the whole gamut. Families would gather around the big console radio in the living room to listen together to their favorite programs. As a boy I would retreat to my room to listen to my personal heroes on the radio...The Lone Ranger, Superman, The Shadow, The Green Lantern and Gene Autry. For a half-hour at a time I was lifted out of my Brooklyn world to join the adventures of these wonderful characters.

Movies too were a much different proposition. Each neighborhood had its theater, the Colonial in my case, where for a quarter you could see two full-length features. The Saturday afternoon special, for the princely sum of fourteen cents, bought you not only two features, but 21 color cartoons and a chapter in one of the ongoing serials like The Thunder Riders or Flash Gordon Goes to Mars. Then there was "dish night" on Mondays, traditionally a slow day for ticket sales. Theaters would give for free to all ticket buyers a piece of china like a dish or cup. Over a period of months, if you went every Monday, you could collect a whole service for eight. Sounds pretty lame now, but those dishes found their way onto many a poor family's table.

For those who didn't live it, our existence might sound a bit threadbare, but I can assure you it was not. We were happy in our circumstances because all around us shared them. There was more interaction among people at all levels before the electronic distractions of today substituted texts and tweets for conversations. At the rate we're going, people of the future will sit in one air-conditioned place, a food tube hooked up to keep them alive, and never take their eyes off that smart tablet for a moment. They will assume Jabba the Hutt-like proportions, never setting foot in the fresh air to go for a walk or swim in the ocean. If you want to talk about a threadbare existence, that sounds like one to me. 

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You Ate What!!

The food police are driving me crazy. Every day there's a new rule I'm supposed to follow. No red meat, don't eat white flour, can't eat fruit with a meal, don't eat after 8 pm, avoid fast food, wine is bad, wine is good...enough already. There are more special diets than you can shake a pork chop at: Atkins, Miami Beach, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Slim-Fast, and all will ultimately fail. Our bodies need all kinds of foods for nutrition, and to fool your body into losing weight by eating grapefruit three times a day is ridiculous. Then there are the supplements being peddled. The great and powerful Dr. Oz tells people to drink dandelion juice while walking backwards clockwise in circles, and the idiots can't order it fast enough...sometimes from Dr. Oz's own website...no conflict of interest there.

When I was growing up, we ate well in spite of not having acre-sized supermarkets and owning refrigerators the size of Buicks. There were no microwave ovens, no lean cuisines, no fast food joints and no Costco warehouses where you could buy 80 frozen burgers at a clip. Our mothers shopped at local stores for meat, fish, bread, eggs, fruit and vegetables. We didn't have a pantry full of snack chips in bags the size of pillows. There were no gallon-sized ice cream containers in our freezers because they would never fit with the six inches of ice built up around the ice cube trays...the only things in the freezer!

We bought what we needed for a few days and used it all; nothing went to waste. Bones, bits and scraps went into soups, omelettes, even pies. (If you never tasted escarole pie or spaghetti pie, your life is sadly incomplete.) I get a kick out of parents who fret when little Madison refuses to eat his or her dinner and demands something else. Our alternatives were peanut butter or go hungry. We ate what was put in front of us, period. There were times when, maybe on days close to Dad's next paycheck, we couldn't afford to buy meat. Not a problem; Mom had a dozen meatless dishes that could give a good steak a run for its money. Pasta with lentils, peas, potatoes, broccoli, eggplant or chick peas. Eggs with peppers, potatoes, spinach, or cheese. They were cheap to prepare, but delicious, nutritious and satisfying.

I hear people ordering meals in restaurants that come with a page and a half of verbal instructions. Can you please ask the chef to make that with no gluten,no wheat, no salt, no peanuts, no dairy and no MSG. Also, can that be baked instead of fried, and instead of the french fries can I have cabbage roots. Can you tell me if these dishes were washed in organic soap? On a recent trip to Italy we had a woman on our tour who carried her own little food packets with her and drove the waiters crazy because she was a vegan. I remember thinking, here we are in one of the world's best places to get great food and this ditz is sprinkling pistachio nuts on her pasta instead of the great sauce that normally accompanied it. 

I'm not chastising people who have legitimate, medically confirmed food allergies and have to watch what they eat, I'm talking about the crowd who has to follow Dr. Oz's latest food commandment just to be trendy. They move from diet to diet and fad to fad hoping to get healthier or lose weight, but they are badly misguided. What it all comes down to is "pie-hole control" ... calories in minus calories burned off exercising equals equals what's left of you. Back in the Fifties, we walked everywhere. Restaurant portions did not feed four. You could not pick up the phone and have bags of food dropped off at your door. You ate real food, fresh-cooked and in moderation. Write that down...it's the secret to good health and a trimmer waistline.

I always got a big kick out of the scene in Woody Allen's movie, "Sleeper" where doctors from the future were discussing how wrong we were in the past to avoid certain foods like hot fudge sundaes which, as they now knew, were actually good for you. "Sleeper" clip

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ALSO, READ MY OTHER BLOG, BRAINDROPS:  http://jpantaleno.blogspot.com/

LOOKING FOR A WORTHY CHARITY? TRY THESE FOLKS: 

Children's Craniofacial Association   http://www.ccakids.com/