<em> I entered 1st grade at PS 68, the Bronx 1949, graduated 8th in 1957 and graduated HS 1961, so the 1950's are basically the memories of my school years.
I remember 1st gr air-raid drills either under our desks or classes lined up in the interior school hall ways.
It was the era of the atomic bomb and as children in NYC, authorities expected us to be bombed by Russia.
As a 6 year old I and all my friends wore dog tags around our necks.
Sounds incredible now, but slipping that metal chain with 2 ID tags over my young neck was a daily part of getting dressed for school.
Maybe that early childhood trauma is what turned so many of us war babies into being leaders of the the 60's anti war protest groups. Who knows.
Our family, like most, had one car and my father did the driving.
Friday was payday and a trip to do the weekly grocery shopping. This was the one night we would eat out. After shopping at Safeway, we'd climb the stairs to the 2nd fl Chinese restaurant and ordered egg foo yung, pepper steak and chow mien; every week was the same.
We never varied our order. There was a neon restaurant sign outside the window that would cast strange colors on our dinners - that no chef ever intended.
The restaurant had a huge juke box with bubbles and red plastic.
My parents always said it cost too much money to play, so I just looked at it.
Safeway had wooden floors with saw dust, and by the early 50's the sugar shelves were once again full.
The rationing of the 40's was over. Wonderbread made small child sized loaves with the same wrapping as the adult size. I was always allowed my own loaf to bring home. Between weekly shopping, the mothers managed by sending the children to the corner store - usually with a couple quarters wrapped and tied in a hankercheif.
As a treat, we were allowed to buy a kosher dill pickle from the open barrel and a 5 cent bag of Wise potato chips.
By the mid and late 50's, my girlfriends and I would look at the candidates for that year's Miss Rheingold Beer and vote for who we thought was prettiest.
We bought milk by the qt not the gal. Home delivery was big. Dugan brought fresh baked goods. the milkman delivered our milk, eggs, cream and butter. A vegetable man and scissor sharpener came around in a horse drawn cart in the late 40's early 50's.
The Good Humor man was a daily source for icecream. We could hear that bell blocks away - no matter what game we were playing - in time to beg a nickle or dime from our mothers.
None of the households I grew up with kept icecream in their freezer section; there were no freezer sections - just a spot large enough to hold an aluminum tray for freezing ice cubes.
We had a Good Will bag in our entry hall next to the seltzer trays. Good Will and the Seltzer man would pick up regularly and drop off new bags and sodas.
In the early 50's when I was hiding from an atom bomb under my school desk, my older sister volunteered for civil air patrol, watching the skies with German binoculars.
My mother made aluminum etched trays at ladies Home Bureau, volunteered for church commitees and played weekly canasta in our home. Mostly we walked places or took the bus or subway.
We kids never played inside the house. Even on snowy days. We changed into our play clothes after school (our old school clothes that were torn or outgrown), and went outside until called for dinner.
Our Sunday clothes became school clothes and our school clothes got one more go at life by being play clothes.
There were very few over weight kids. We played stick ball at "the point" - the intersection of 2 neighborhood streets, or fairy tale characters under the huge pine trees in my girlfriend's front yard.
By mid 50's I was old enough to spend Summer days with friends at Wilson's Woods Pool, a WPA built Tudor style public pool. There was never a concern about safety.
Every Summer week end meant a family picnic/beach trip - either to Sherwood Island in Conn. or Orchard Beach in the Bronx.
We'd leave at the crack of dawn to stake out a good picnic table and be the last family to leave when the sun set. No one was anxious to return to those un-airconditioned apartments.
The women made the summer staples of macaroni and potato salads and packed the huge coolers. The men lugged then to what we always hoped would be the ultimate picnic spot.
Oh yes - no sun screen either for the children in those days. Every summer meant at least one giant skin peel and sleepless painful night for me and my fair skinned friends.
Winter meant sled rides down 'dead man's hill' in scratchy wet wool snow suits. Nobody knew who had died there, but we were all sure it had happened.
Of course, in addition to neighborhood legends, every neighborhood seemed to have that one wacky character.
Ours was Old Mr. D who sent away to the old country for an old fashioned mail order bride.
The year before her arrival, he built a 3 story cottage with no windows or door on the first floor. He had a wood ladder to enter the 2nd fl. She arrived, was more modern than he anticipated, and took the next ship home.
Mr. D never married after that.
The blizzard of the early 50's cut us off from City services. The neighborhood men all took their coal shovels and shoveled out our street.
Houses were heated with coal or oil. The coal trucks would dump their shinny black loads down shuttes into the basements. Our basement had a coal bin and when it got cold, my father would go down with his shovel. Our apt was heated by radiators that would bang until they were emptied of the condensation.
Fall meant burning piles of raked leaves in the yards and baking potatoes in tin foil in the ashes. There were no burning bans - even in the Bronx - or if there were, nobody enforced them.
In the early 50's we got the first TV on the block and all the neighbors crammed in to watch Queen Eliz II coronation.
My dad spent hrs adjusting the roof antennae to face the signals coming from the Empire State Building to the south of our home. My mother's job was to monitor the fuzziness on the screen and call directions out the open window to my Dad. Some other time perhaps you'll permit me to talk about being a young teen and entering HS in the doo wop era of the late 50's - parties in finished basements, parents popping downstairs to check on the refreshments and us, Friday night Confraternity dances at our local Catholic school hall, the Sisters in their habits telling us and our dance partners to 'leave room for the Holy Ghost', our local pizza parlor where the dough was hand made, the cheese was from Italy, and the large pizza filled most of the table. It was a great time and place to grow up. Thanks for the web site.
Memory Posted By: christine M
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