I was born a boy, allowed to stay that way and was never chained to a pole in the basement. My life in the 1950s was generally pretty good, kind and more or less normal. Growing up was effortless. It just happened. Day upon day rolled by with little that was eventful but much now is memorable in a good way. Our futures looked unlimited. Americans were safe, happy and well fed — as the 1950s opened up, the average American ate 50% more food than the average European.

My 1950s were in turns fearful, thrilling, curious, troubled, untroubled, confusing, and, as the decade wound down, eye-poppingly lustful and unnerving. Most of us 1950s kids have stifled our memories of multi megaton atmospheric tests of the thermonuclear bombs of Armageddon. Notably the Soviets topped out the boom-doom scale in 1961 with one that was more than 3000 times the power of the one we dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The reason for this memory loss — at least among America’s boys — was our rising consciousness of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and the various blond-haired starlets and bombshells of movie and TV fame.

Standard disclosure: everything you read here is true and happened, more or less. I submit as evidence for the record:

· the online versions of the six-year subscription to Boys’ Life magazine that my maternal grandmother gifted me to correct my errant ways and
· the cool 1950s words of import and scents that only we who lived those years now remember: mimeograph, rotisserie, panty raid, dime store, beatnik, and daddy-o.

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As a side note: early childhood years have a certain sense of lost glory in them. Over time we become deeply invested in them, recalling them with affection and respect for their seeming orderliness and simplicity. I have yet to figure out how to use the following memories in a narrative, so here they are in all their disconnected glory:

My attention often drifted, waned and frequently disappeared during my elementary school years up through puberty as the 1950s wound down. That was when I became chemically disabled by high T, black patent leather school girl shoes and the 1963 movie Tom Jones. American culture of that era did not treat well people like most of us young boomers who bucked norms along their way to death’s doorstep. Consequently, the results included bangs and whimpers along with a lot of chuckles.

We all wore hand-me-downs — nothing was ever thrown away. To enforce conformity, parochial school male students wore white shirts, ties, dress pants (no jeans) and leather shoes (no sneakers) to school. Girls wore hot and itchy woolen uniform jumpers and white blouses. Out of necessity to take care of our school clothes, we wore unlogo’d, nonbranded blue jeans and t-shirts for after school play. What made you cool came from the inside not outside.

The mid-20thcentury Catholic school system in America was a vast parallel universe. We students attended schools that belonged not to public school districts, but to parish churches identified after oddly named saints of antiquity or religious articles of faith like the ImmaculateConception. Each morning we would preface our classroom Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag with a prayer for our Mother Church.

Before these pledges we attended a daily Mass — not just a brief service — in the parish church. These worship services were in Latin — a dead tongue — whose words and goofy grammar Jesus never spoke. Some of us more irreligious ones wondered if Jesus spoke pig Latin but then we remembered he was Jewish and a serious man not given to screwing around, so the answer was no. Prayers outside of the rote Vatican approved ones for the rosary during these services were directed to be said in silence. Unspoken prayers, really? Sorta like an unwritten letter to Santa that was never delivered to the big guy.

In my big midwestern hometown city where folks beyond several blocks from each other seldom met or talked, my elementary school was the only institution that drew students from all sides of the various economic, ethnic and civic divides. They came from blue-collar neighborhoods as well as wealthy suburbs and included migrants from small ethnic parishes named after saints whom I never heard of. We were all Catholics, and we were all white, but we were far more diverse than the student bodies of any public elementary school in town. No one talked of money and those who had it dared not flaunt it.

Strangely, we saw nothing unusual in weekday Mass services in a church bathed in the flickering blood-red light of vigil candles fluttering each morning in the parish church’s side alcoves under statues of saints. Is it any wonder that most of the great horror movies and novels were written by PTSD addled Catholic school kids?

During the many weeks of Advent and Lent, Catholic school students also attended church after school for hour long ceremonies with incense floating heavily about the pews as we intoned seasonal Latin liturgies and rituals. But most memorable of all was when we would kneel upon the altar rail’s cold stone step at daily Mass, boys bareheaded but the girls required to wear head scarves, with mouths pinched dry from fasting, so we clean of soul (and faintingly empty of gut) could be rewarded with the taste of God on our tongues. This mystery of the Church was doughy and difficult to swallow. “Don’t chew the Baby Jesus,” intoned the nuns. If they caught us miscreants doing so, there was hell to pay. In retrospect, Catholic school boy life had startling parallels to Mafia family membership with the added benefit of a daily secret initiation ceremony.

While we spoke little of these things outside of the presence of our school mates and siblings, the Church had a public institutional persona that forced us to look towards each other and not to non-Catholic churched neighborhood kids. Our bishops had lists of movies published in the papers that could and could not be seen. To be spied entering a theater showing a forbidden movie was at best unwise. Then there were the regular anti-communism lectures, not really homilies, from the pulpit.

Once a year, the bishop would visit our parish to rub 4thgrader foreheads with his oiled anointing thumb, so we Catholic children could become “soldiers of Jesus Christ.” Yup, unarmed, draftee cannon fodder before reaching puberty. It figured once I read about the absence of child labor laws during the Crusades. At least we all, boys and girls, were drafted into a vast coed yet chaste army.

Our concentric circles of Catholic school days belonging were reinforced by the sins that only Catholics could commit, like eating meat on Friday, missing Sunday Mass, and birth control — hence, our baseball team roster sized families. But, Catholic school life in the 1950s came with this unique bonus — saying “Sister says” was a sure way to win points in any household argument.

Here are a few choir boy tales of Christmas midnight Mass and funeral Mass. Rumors of my well pronounced and nuanced use of Yiddish led the parish’s organist and choir director to press the brown and black robed penguins to allow me to sing in third grade.

This eventually led me to massive swilling of sacramental wine aka rotgutwith my brother Mass servers in crime. What these valued positions provided to us morons was an actual understanding of the Latin words in the songs, prayers and liturgy. In order to assist the priest at Mass, his back to the congregation, servers were taught the Latin responses to the priest’s prayers. Up in the loft we choirboys would sing these responses at certain important Masses as well as all the hymns the parish priest and organist dictated for the occasion. Choir membership permitted me to stay up for the first time past 10 PM, when I sang at Christmas midnight Mass. We got to wear cool and freaking scary looking red gowns and white surplices. It was a blast.

I have deeply warm memories of singing Panis Angelicus, the Dies Iraeand the Pange Linguaat Mass. My abilities in Gregorian chant with the funeral Mass songs, responses and prayers allowed me to be pulled from school classes for high holy Mass duty for VIP Catholics who wanted the whole magillahfor their departed family member. After these masses, soloists were often thanked by the bereaved families and not infrequently tipped by the swells. Well, that lasted until the Monsignor spied one such family slipping me a fiver. After that I got to keep $1. Are we now seeing the Mafia thing more clearly now?

We never cussed (well, not so we could be heard by adults), used drugs, or took the Lord’s name in vain or worked hard in school to excel. We believed that our primary life job was to play and hang out. We all had nicknames that are now considered quaint, if not corny — Red, Dog, Buffalo Butt, Doofus Dave, Rusty, Buster, Crazy Delores, Spacy Stacy, Bunny, Kitty, Sweet Melissa (yes, she was a real person — not the girl in the song), Duck, Flathead, and Frog. We named our pets with a similar vocabulary — Moe, Elvis, Charlie, Blue, Flipper, Misty, Perry, Fraulein, Max, Harley, Blackie and Pluto (it was still a planet in good standing back then).

We were all daredevils to one degree or another. Most of us survived without serious injury the aftermath of saying “Watch this” to our friends. Some of us, however, did not get those good results later, when they served as draftees in Vietnam, started drinking alcohol, doing drugs, smoking cigarettes, participating in orgies, or eating lots of animal fat. A few of the survivors of these young adult foolishnesses became petty criminals, prostitutes and politicians – oops, sorry for repeating myself. And, yes, some became . . . wait for it . . . lawyers. We never forgave them unless they were our defense counsel.

One summer, my pals and I spent many afternoons of “watch this” daredevil racing side to side, back and forth across the Glen Echo bridge’s steeply inclined, poured concrete arch support. It was too narrow to climb under the two top parts, forcing us to scale the narrow 3-inch ledges outside the concrete columns.

We never smoked in the boy’s bathroom but did so surreptitiously along the shadowy edges of Immaculate Conception Elementary School’s playground, when the nuns weren’t out there. We were all loved by our families, intensely loyal to one another, good looking (except for a few Goofy looking ones who later got braces and straight teeth), healthy for the most part despite all suffering from mumps, measles, German measles, chicken pox, multiple bouts of the flu and mono. Some of us had TB, scarlet fever, polio or asthma, but no one moaned about it. We had it easy. If we forgot that fact, our WW II era parents or WW I era grandparents reminded us. These good souls should have had their lives celebrated in the obit pages of the NY Times, given what they put up with from us.

We lived life at room temperature despite those Cold War times being much hotter. Some of us were baptized in churches which later burned to the ground and attended various schools which were later torn down or became apartment buildings or offices. How those obvious persons of interest escaped investigation, prosecution or prison sentence is beyond me.

We loved practical jokes, the more elaborate the better.

We wrist, arm and Indian wrestled a lot. We believed professional wrassin’ was real.

When taking ill we began by feeling funny. If we were not at home, that would lead to wanting a dark, awkward place to feel funny in — like the school nurse’s office. Depending on the gravity of that illness, this office stay could be like a mini-vacation.

Our lives were full of incident but no accomplishment. We lacked opinions but not points of view or values. We began with small circles of friends that grew ever larger until high school segregated us back into much smaller clans and tribes — nerds, athletes, goofies, popular, plain types and the invisibles. During our elementary school times, we lived off-the-leash lives, since we were allowed to freely roam the village, town and big city beyond our leafy tree lined streets.

Some of us had deficits we used to call handicaps. This graced these invalids with a stoical nature. The unafflicted had deep respect for these classmates and forgave their occasional rancor at their plight. Some developed a cheerfulness and playfulness that was magnetic, as though to deny that they had a handicap or cause for bitterness. Full recognition of this deep human complexity in the face of hurdles only surfaced inside us luckier ones many decades later.

Some of us were pinched by the local beat cops like Patrolman Pete, but never fully arrested or jailed, nor most thankfully, walked or driven back to our homes and parents. We wised up and either reformed our behavior or developed stealthier tradecraft. Only one of us turned to a life of crime during adulthood. That case was due to mental illness, since he became a multi-decade long, twice convicted and imprisoned, stalker of Gwyneth Paltrow. No, I am not kidding. Oh, and one became a Deadhead who traipsed about the US following the band until the late 1980s.

We were like our pet dogs and cats — endlessly ambling about, sniffing life and enjoying it. Life back then was a daily, endless music jam session — individuals with different styles of instrument playing in an unending free-form improv that at times led to beautiful harmonies or raucous anarchy. We survived the unhinged moments and danced the crazy dance when times were full of good vibes. We innocents kept on truckin’ long before the song said to do so.

We spent an entire summer week perfecting our yodeling skills until neighbors took up a collection to pay us off to stop. We were too naïve to recognize how our unwitting extortion racket could have led us to a life on easy street.

Lord, oh Lord, did we watch the movies and idolize the stars — Cooper, Stewart, Grant, Peck, Heston, Davis, Taylor, Monroe to name a few. Great acting, engaging stories but surprisingly few special effects.

A few observations and memories on the concept of “messing with:”

No one messed with the midgets and dwarfs in our school. No one.

We boys were absolutely ambushed when we found ourselves distracted by the many beautiful women who had been heretofore invisible to us since they were friends’ sisters and such. They were also not messed with. Ever.

Then as now, we did not understand how the US government messed with all of the Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker cartoons trying to censor violence. We should have probably hired our school classmate attorneys to figure this out and right this wrong.

Most of us read the funny papers daily. Later we added the sports pages to our reading routines. Perhaps due to their grandparents, several became avid readers of the obituaries section and would share the odder eccentric ones with their pals by reading them aloud to us to see if it was possible to make someone die from laughter. No one succumbed from these early unsanctioned medical experiments.

We never peed in a shower, bathtub or public pool . . . on purpose. We turned on street fire hydrants to cool off before the Olympic Swim Club pools were opened to the public for the summer.

Clintonville’s Olympic Swim Club had 5 & 10 meter tower platforms for us
foolhardy ones; on a dare, I performed a kamikaze dive off the tall platform . . . once.

We never messed with electricity. Well, I did one afternoon with a bobby pin inserted into a downtown Lazarus Department store dressing room electrical outlet, whose amperage launched me backwards ass over teacup into the opposite wall’s mirror whose shards came crashing down on me, only for me to next see the red hot pin drop out of the outlet igniting the carpet which I dutifully put out with my hand. This was followed by two weeks of nightly sessions of redressing my burn wounds bandages by my father who taught me multiple ways of calling someone a dumb ass without my mother once objecting.

We loved hearing and telling jokes, especially short ones due to our limited attention spans.

We all dreamed of being invited to Mouseketeers’ birthday parties and playing baseball with Mickey, Willie and the Duke. By the way, certain “IC” nuns loved baseball and would share end of inning scores with us during fall afternoon World Series games. They must have had transistor radios secreted under their brown and black capes.

In addition to farts, we laughed at the noises that one spring hailstorm made as its ice shards pinged off our high and tight shaved heads.

We stayed out all day after breakfast only appearing on time for evening supper during the summer or during school holidays. No one launched search parties for us. Our faces never graced the side of milk cartons or were plastered on telephone pole flyers. Bad people didn’t dare mess with us, since our WW II parents were military trained and took Old Testament street justice as a right.

And at the end of those days, we all felt that we came for some universal place, but we slowly discovered that we were mistaken as our adult lives unfolded. Regardless, we were lucky to have lived in such a great time and place for growing up, standing up, falling down, getting back up and then moving forward bit by bit. I remain connected to those times, places and people sixty plus years later. They still whisper to me.

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