Chapter One: The Culture

The most important background to our high school years was something that we probably did not think about at all, that we were living in unusually prosperous years following World War II, years that would not last forever. Economically, the fifties were a time of economic growth and rising social mobility for all levels of society.  If you were born in 1940 in America, 92% of you were likely to exceed your parents’ income (I was in the other 8%). That percentage has been declining ever since and is now reversed.  

This is an important point because I am willing to generalize that very few of us at Hyde Park High in 1956—unlike youth of today– were fearful for our economic future. Optimistic we were, but not necessarily happy.  Certainly we were part of the burgeoning consumerism that developed in the 1950’s and some of us participated in what The New Yorker volume on the 1950’s labeled technological utopianism.  Our high school years witnessed the widespread introduction of television into American homes.   We bought 45rpms and hi-fi’s, watched wide screen movies, witnessed the decline of passenger trains and the dominance of airplanes for travel.  Did all of this make us deliriously happy?

Robert J. Samuelson argues that we felt “entitled” to the good life (see The Good Life and Its Discontents, The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945-1995, New York, Random House, 1995), but I do not remember myself or my fellow students feeling this way.  

Automobiles changed from the privilege of a few to a mass consumer item.  The word “smog” was coined.  The first freeway was built in Chicago, later called the “Eisenhower.” Automobiles were important in Chicago but not as dominant as in the suburbs where teen-agers cruised on Saturday night, went to drive-ins, had hot rods and drag races.  It would be interesting to know how many of us in high school either owned our own cars or had access to one.  In the autumn of 1955 my mother bought a new Ford and gave me her old 1949 Ford. It seemed silly to drive it to school although I did use it to drive my friends to football and basketball games. During our high school years the first “Drive-Ins” appeared on the south side. One was on south Stony Island Avenue, the “Char House” and another served soft ice cream at 67th street, one block from the lake.

All of us in high school used public transportation to take us around Chicago. Our neighborhoods contained many movie theaters (click “Map” and unclick every box but “Theaters” and if you click on individual icons the name of the theater will appear)

Sometimes movies were sappy and romantic (Singing in the Rain (1952), Magnificent Obsession (1954)) and sometimes not: On the Waterfront (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

The music we listened to was as contradictory as the movies we watched: Patti Page and Doris Day vs. Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and the Clovers. I listened to swing and jazz and I spent hours in a record store on 55th street where two alcoholic sisters allowed you to sit in a booth and listen to Charlie Parker as long as you wanted.

In the 1950’s the United States was a religious country.  In 1955  “Under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance and since I had memorized the Pledge in grade school to this day I cannot remember to say it correctly.  There were many Churches and Temples in our neighborhoods and I am sure that my map does not include them all (Click on churches/temples and then click individual icons). My parents rarely went to church yet insisted that my brother and I attend every Sunday because a religious education was part of growing up in America. I do not remember much religious fervor (I would appreciate comments on this) and not much sectarian hatred.   Spirituality often blended into a belief in universal humanistic ideals and in the progress of all human beings.

Smoking was prevalent in the society, not so much among us in school, but I have no firm evidence on this. I didn’t smoke—did you? The boys in high school wore dress shirts and “wash pants” and even neckties on some occasions. The girls wore bobby socks, long skirts and sweaters, the most desirable being cashmere. Underneath were bras that made breasts look like the front bumpers of the 1950’s Cadillac’s, and on important dates, girdles. Breast fetish was symbolized by the appearance of Playboy magazine in 1952, published by Hugh Hefner who at that time lived in Woodlawn.

The nineteen-fifties were a time when our commercial streets–43rd, 47th, 55th, 57th, 63rd, 71st—were crowded with restaurants, taverns, drugstores, groceries, clothing stores, jewelry stores, beauty shops, and bookstores. Along 55th Street between Cottage Grove and Lake Park there were thirty-five liquor licenses. I remember during my senior year sitting in the Cadillac Lounge at 55th and Harper on late afternoons, sipping beer and listening to jazz and blues on the jukebox and being aware of the corruption in Chicago that allowed a sixteen-year old skinny White kid to sit in a Black bar.

Boys were encouraged to play the role of decisive and self-sufficient males but I wonder how many of us were comfortable or successful in that endeavor. I know that I wasn’t. The stereotypical girls of the 1950’s focused on becoming “happy homemakers” and female servants to men but again I wonder if this stereotype characterized the female students at Hyde Park High. Because my mother was a doctor, I just assumed that women could be professionals. Among boys and girls there was an emphasis on “going steady” and “petting parties,” but my impression (you can contradict me here) is that we were pretty chaste compared to later generations.

Homosexuality and lesbianism were taboo subjects and in the larger society objects of hatred and derision. I knew two homosexual students at Hyde Park High who were my friends, and we whispered about Jerry Ramsfield. During my high school years my attitudes toward homosexuality changed from the typical cultural reaction to one of tolerance (I would welcome comments on this also).

During our high school years much of America practiced segregation. Chicago was mostly segregated and racist, especially for Blacks and Asians and to a lesser extent for Jewish families. In the 1940’s, when Lorraine Hansberry’s family moved into Woodlawn, there were White Christian race riots; when we were in eighth grade, White Christian racists attacked Blacks in Cicero and in 1953-4 there were White Christian race riots in Trumbull Park on the far south side. The race riots in Cicero were the first to be televised and I was dimly aware of them, although Cicero seemed far away from my neighborhood.

In 1955 Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi and then his mutilated body was brought back to Chicago for an open-casket funeral.

This greatly influenced the Black community but again I was only dimly aware of it. The only Black advertising in Chicago was in The Chicago Defender, Ebony or Jet, and I can remember seeing copies of Jet at high school. There were no television shows directed at Black Americans. There were many White Christian and Jewish movie actors and producers, but Blacks and Asians were severely underrepresented, although the Jamaican Sidney Poitier was a success in Blackboard Jungle (1955). Sometimes the influence went in the other direction: many of us listened to Black radio stations, especially to the disc jockey Al Bensen who played rhythm and blues.

In the summer of 1952, just before we entered Hyde Park High, both the Republicans and the Democrats held their conventions in Chicago and I went to the Hilton Hotel where they had headquartered to collect buttons. Eisenhower beat Stevenson in the election of November 1952 and his first term coincided with our high school years. Those years saw McCarthyism and the Korean War Armistice in 1952, the East German revolt and the execution of the Rosenberg’s in 1953, above ground nuclear tests and Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 and the drifting of radioactive dust over Chicago and Rosa Parks in 1955. For more world events of 1956, almost none of which I was aware, see Simon Hall, 1956: The World In Revolt (New York, Pegasus, 2015)

Historians like to call the 1950’s the “Age of Anxiety” because of the fear of nuclear war. Although we were the children who were instructed to go the basement of our elementary schools to duck and cover, I do not remember, and I do not find in the comments of other fellow students, much anxiety over a possible nuclear war.

Most of us came from middle class or working class families, although I did not: my parents were both doctors and we lived in a large apartment. At Hyde Park High we seldom rubbed elbows with the very wealthy; their parents sent their children to Harvard School for Boys or Faulkner School for Girls on 47th Street, or to the University of Chicago Laboratory School on 59th Street. My best friend at Bret Harte Elementary–who also lived in my apartment building–went to Harvard School for Boys for high school. My parents wanted to send me to the Laboratory School but I refused.

Although in some ways the University of Chicago was important in my life—I used the Harper Library when in high school and I hung out for a while with a group of U of C socialists who protested the Rosenberg death penalty—I thought that the students who went there were not “cool.”

(On the word “cool,” see Joel Dinerstein, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2017). We all though we were being “cool” by being “cool” but we were part of an American cultural trend. Dinerstein claims that the word began as a “stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change.” You could have fooled me. It just goes to show that kids pick up on cultural trends without really understanding the deeper context, or perhaps that there is an unconscious understanding that cannot be articulated.)

For more world events of 1956, almost none of which I was aware, see Simon Hall, 1956: The World In Revolt (New York, Pegasus, 2015).No doubt all of us participated in the culture of the 1950’s and some of us were more aware than others of politics, racism, anti-Semitism, internment camps for the Japanese, and the Holocaust. I had already fiercely argued with my father when in grade school over his anti-Semitic remarks. I was pretty clueless about how my Black fellow students lived until my senior year when my mother asked me to drive our Black laundress to her home in Bronzeville. She was a Black Muslim and on that ride she gave me an earful about the condition of Blacks on the South Side. That conversation has remained in my memory to this day.