IN MY BEGINNING

Let’s start this little jaunt through family history from the beginning; my beginning.  I will go into some “pre-history” later on, but, for now, let’s concentrate on the world I was born into, the world of 1957. 

Mom used to say that the doctor had to cancel a fishing trip to facilitate my birth, but all I  really know was it was early in the morning of May 12, 1957 – Mother’s Day that year.  Of course, I was born a blank slate, and knew nothing of war, hate, prejudice, or even bobby socks, rock and roll, or fast cars, but I would learn.  As the last child of a marriage that ended in divorce, I was cast into an all female household with my mother, Gladys, and my three sisters, Karlene, Phyllis, and Jean.  Like it or not, we were now a family.

In 1957, Sputnik, the world’s first manmade satellite, flew through the skies, the Frisbee, the world’s first flying disc, flew off the store shelves and, of course, the 1957 Chevrolet Belair, one of the sweetest looking cars of all time, flew down the street.  That year, the average price of a new house was $12,220.00, average rent was $90 a month, and the average annual income was $4,550.00.  Assuming a 40 hour work week, a 52 week year, and the $4550 annual income, that means the average hourly wage was about $2.18 an hour, but I’ll bet a lot of people made a lot less.  Gas was twenty four cents a gallon, eggs were twenty eight cents a dozen and bacon was sixty cents a pound.  Those prices sound cheap, but we could barely afford any of those things.

While Elvis Presley was buying “Graceland,” Dr. Seuss was debuting the “Cat in the Hat,” and Charleton Heston was parting the Red Sea in, “The Ten Commandments,” we felt lucky to have any home, thankful for the hand-me-downs we wore on our backs, and content to have the government macaroni and cheese on our dinner plates in the Projects.  We hardly noticed as Toyota sold its first car in America , and Americans were paying an average of $2,749 for “big-finned” American cars from Detroit.  Mom’s old, orange and white, Chevy Belair was our magic coach.  We did have a Philco, black and white, vacuum tube TV so we could watch “Perry Mason”, “Maverick” and a new show featuring Dick Clark called, “American Bandstand”. 

Slinkies and Hula Hoops were still just toys we could not afford, and almost no one we knew had ever heard of Viet Nam, draft dodgers, or men with long hair.  Television signals came through antennas, telephones with dials and handsets were still connected to the wall, and our computers were called, “pencils and paper.”  In 1957, segregation was still an accepted way of life, no one knew what a “Beatle” was, and the “Leave it to Beaver” 50’s were giving little hint of what would take place in the decade to come.