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- Look at the size of “middle class” houses then and now. Parents often raised four or more children in a small three bedroom, 1 bath house. (This is true for the 60s and 70s also, when I grew up.) Today you have a family with one or two children in a massive-sized house. Kitchens now are nearly three times the size of our harvest gold or avocado green kitchens.
Statistics reflect that less than half of the nostalgic houses had air-conditioning. Even in Florida, our house had no A/C. We slept with box fans in our windows.
Within the nostalgic house, notice the size of the bedroom closets which are smaller than today’s broom closets. Closets in today’s middle-income houses are massive to accommodate the wardrobe commodity that must be acquired. Expensive brand-name clothing is mandatory to keep up appearances. No hand-me-downs for the children or last year’s fashions for you—how embarrassing!
In our nostalgic time, even for the middle class, often there was only one car and a one car garage.
There was one TV. One! With an antenna and no cable or streaming. We kids were the “remote control” to change the channel, up-hill, boths ways, through the shag carpet.
There were no home computers (and no internet), never mind a computer for each child and adult.
There were no Playstations or Xboxes for gaming. Board or card games, dolls, Tonka trucks and playing outside (stick ball, hide-and-seek) were the order of the day.
Parents and children didn’t each have a cell phone, never mind a new phone nearly every time a new model is released. There was one phone at the house; anchored to the wall; probably a party line and you didn’t know who was calling. (Explain party lines to the young’uns—ha!)
Items were not designed and built for obsolescence, but to last for years and to be repaired: TVs, radios, cars, clothing. Remember covering your textbooks with brown paper bags so for the schools to reuse next school year? Who says we didn’t recycle!
Of course, in our nostalgic time, we came in for dinner when the street lamps came on. Children had choices they could make for dinner: take it or leave it—you ate what mom cooked. Eating out was occasional and a treat.
For the younger generations who feel that home ownership is out of reach, the Census Bureau reports homeownership rates were 55 percent in 1950 vs. 66 percent in 2000.
Going to college was not guaranteed, nor did a large percentage of children go. My Dad told his children to consider the new trade-type of high school where they taught electronics, welding, commercial art, data processing, cosmetology, etc., because there was no money to pay for college. (Half of the day was spent in regular studies and the other half in our chosen trade.)
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