Re: questions about the 50's, 60's, 70's....

I remember the 50's being idyllic. My mom walked me to preschool. We had one car until I was 5. Drove dad to the trolley station on Wed. so mom could have the car for grocery shopping. Nothing was open on Sunday or at night (except Thursdays). I watched Ed Sullivan every week! I spent loads of time playing in the woods, skating, sledding, and being on the beach all summer. The beginning of the sixties were pretty much the same. I was in fifth grade when Kennedy was shot. i still remember how white the face of my principal was, when she came in to tell the teacher. That was the year the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. Every Saturday afternoon, I would open the windows and blast the album Meet the Beatles with a friend! The neighbors did not like that. When i was about 12, I started hanging out in Boston and Cambridge with friends. We had a lot of freedom. Things were still pretty preppy until I was about 14. I was one of the first to wear bell bottoms. I remember going to the Army Navy store and buying them for $5.00. Those pants, plus a black turtleneck and long silver earrings were my uniform for a few years... I hung out on the Boston Common during the summer of 68 when all of the hippies came here. Did lots of things that i won't discuss here, but I wouldn't change a thing. I discovered politics. This all ended when I moved to Miami in 1969. Let's just say that the "revolution" had not arrived. But I managed to hang in there and graduate high school, with a lot of trips to Boston in between. The early seventies were more of the same. Music was really important and really good foreign films. I moved to AZ pemantly in 1975 and finished college. Again, I felt like a fish out of water. Then the disco revolution started. Boy, were those clothes ugly. Everyone just seemed a lot more open then. No fundamentalists telling us what we should think or do. I met my husband at the end of this era. He came to the door for our first date in an all white 3 piece "John Travolta" suit a la Saturday Night fever. It seems like things started changing in the early 80's, with the Reagen era. Of course, by then I had changed from a hippie to a yuppie, but I have discovered that those old values never went away, at least for me. I raised my kids the same way i was raised, with a lot of freedom and they are fine grown ups.