15 February 1940 “Our Town”

You may have noticed the date up top. And strictly speaking this post is not about 1940 specifically. But as I included the film “Our Town” in it which is from 1940, I thought an image of modern hats of the time might be a fun ice breaker.

Before we get to what my post really is about, let’s quickly look at February in 1940.

On 7 February, RKO released Walt Disney’s full length animated feature, Pinocchio. It was the first since Snow White.

On 10 February the cartoon cat and mouse, Tom And Jerry get their start in the short “Puss gets the boot”, though not until 1941 will they get their own official start as Tom and Jerry.

At the end of February 1940, Hattie McDaniel will be the first African American woman to win an Academy Award for her portrayal as Mammy in “Gone with the Wind” in 1939.

And though War rages on in Europe, The US will not join WWII until 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But many Americans are asked to help if they can and try to send care packages to the British especially after the beginning of the Blitz in September of 1940.

Now, why have I brought us here to 1940? In a way it is sort of a time-travel meeting ground. A sort of halfway point from 1913 and 1955. And the film, “Our Town” that I am sharing with you was made in 1940. It was based on the the Thornton Wilder play also entitled “Our Town”. It stars Martha Scott and William Holden.

What I like about this film is it has a very ‘time-travel’ sort of feel. The narrator addresses the audience and even encourages the characters to ‘answer questions’ from the audience. It has the feel of a guided tour in a time travel scenario for me, double so as the ‘present day[ is 1940 and their trip to the past of Our Town is 1900. This version of the film, though for some reason sub-titled, maybe for the deaf, is still endearing and pulls one in.

Yet, you might ask, why Our Town, why a movie and a stop in 1940? What has that to do with 1913 or 1950? Well, here is what happened: Having been content to try to remain in 1913 this year, I found myself almost hungry for the color and also availability of the 1950’s research. Its interpretation on the screen in blog form certainly lends itself more entertaining and a better general attraction to a wider variety of people.

There is also, as I began to dig deeper, a feel of the 1930’s in my 1913 research. That is to say, it had begun to feel to raw and close to home to today’s problems. Just as I was unable to remain in 1933 very long without feeling rather depressed and wretched, mainly due to the parallels to our own time. And when I would discover things that were happening in the Depression seemed to be happening again but with possibly more dire circumstances, I had to look away as it were.

Now I find that 1913 seems to be the beginning of so much of what was failing in the Depression. And though it seemed to later be stifled for that one supreme decade of the 1950’s (as had the 1920’s after WWI) It unfortunately began to all unravel again. There is so much legislation and things like the beginning of new taxations that really began in 1913.  And even our current view of Mexican immigration was born from our War in Mexico in 1910 which will manifest itself more in 1913 with a general view and opinion of the time. 

So, there I was not living technically in 1913 but still very much ‘in it’ daily.Then I sort of had an epiphany the other day, after being without power due to our storm and then the return to it gave me pause to think.

Picture it, if you will, myself slumped at my desk, various old texts open about me, quite a few tabs open on the computer and my coffee cooling in my lovely old 1950’s cup. The weight of it all was too much for me, so I thought I needed a break. I wanted to quickly come out of the past and so turned to music. I began rummaging through some old things I have. As many of you know I have records that go as far back as the 1900’s in 78 form and plenty from the 1950’s. But, I just needed to quickly purge my palette, as it were; to get my head back in the game.

I found some old music from my college days and in the mix was this song I had completely forgot about. I put it on and was simply transfixed. It both took me out of myself and also grounded me in the present. It gave me the melancholy for the past, both my own and my imagined from the 1950’s and in its bittersweet sadness made me realize how important it is to be happy and reflect upon what is good.

I wish I could change the world about me. Sometimes I feel like we could, we rag tag band of Apron Revolutionaries, make a difference in the future. In our knowledge and thirst for learning and doing, we can enact change on a small scale. And whether our aprons are for cooking, cleaning, making art, working in labor, or a metaphorical apron of scholarly intent, we wear them with pride and practicality.

I see there is so much of the world that is out of our hands, we little people. The world of politics, banking, money and war is played out among some secret place to which we cannot get yet our children and family are often the victims of these actions. We, in most cases, simply must keep our heads down, do our best and just like it or lump it. We are all given just enough entertainment to distract us from looking to hard at our world and in many ways what we see and read about our world is simply theatre for our benefit or distraction. We must, however, in that “Keep Calm and Carry On” sort of way, forge forward.

As I was sitting there, holding my cold cup of coffee and crying to this song, I began to think of the fun and happy moments of my three years in the 1950’s. The joy that carried me into it and the fun that kept me going through the challenges and the sometimes scary realizations. And in a way that became a representation of how to really try and live through the rough patches of life. To know what was bad, see what may be coming, prepare as best we can, but along the way have as much fun and joy as possible. Though much of our life seems to be out of our control, down to what we are allowed to own, do with our own land, or even our own hard earned money, they cannot take away our ability to have joy.

So, with another change here at the Apron Revolution, I have decided to forgo 1913 in this epic format and return to a sort of 1950’s stasis. In many respects our modern world began to be formulated in 1913. And if we view the past 100 years as a sort of graph, the 1950’s seemed to have been that exact moment where it all worked on some level. The powers that be got what they wanted, laws and money and banking and corporations were getting their fill and a middle class was able to form. We built affordable homes, had cars that were affordable with cheap gas, and could send our children to college affordably. And if we could not, they could realistically work a minimum wage job and pay for it themselves, no student loans or credit cards.

In my own research I saw how quickly that 10 year peak, on that graph of the past 100 years, soon began to point downward. And if I am an arm chair time traveler and my purpose of happiness and also some entertainment for you, my readers, is important, than those brief glorious days of the 1950’s seem the best place to reside. A place for us all to meet. Our Town.

Though I may not live my actual life 100% 1950’s everyday, it will continue to be heavily influenced by it. And with all I have done thus far it gives me a solid foundation to build upon. And it offers some security, rather real or imagined, when the foundation of our present world feels a bit shaky. A sort of escapism but with an innocence of shared fun with all of you, mixed with real and oft times usable knowledge of how to do things thrown in.

As the end of my third year in the 1950’s was coming to its close I kept wondering, what now? My failed attempts at the Depression was too close to home to be of any real use to myself. Yet the joy the computer and my project brought to me still seemed important enough to continue down that path. And as we can use the computer as a sort of pseudo reality and a cyber community, I want us to have that place be a safe place. Again, Our Town.

A world where advertising, though still out to trick us into things we didn’t really need, still had a breath of innocence to it. It was less about branding and labeling us all into sub-categories unto which to sell.TV shows didn’t exist to show us how much all our varied groups were out to get each other. The auto industry, though still out to strip us of much cheap public transport in the form of trains, still co-existed with them. And many small towns in the US still had a local train station they could affordably go to so as to visit the city or bigger town on outings or days out. Malls had yet to infringe upon our downtowns and little mom and pop stores still provided us with what we needed and when a dress was too dear for our pocket books, we saved for one store bought and made the rest ourselves. When the minimum wage was higher than it is today and we also had less tax to pay so it didn’t hurt small business because we all were able to keep more of what we made. That local grocery store job Johnny took after school provided money for his college and hand delivered groceries to our homemakers.

This comparative list could go on and on. And in many ways I wonder if the “powers that be” that seem to want to own and control everything could have just been happy with their more than fair share at the time, could we have kept that feeling going forward and helped other countries to have that? Could we not have advanced in things like fairness in equality while still allowing the current tax/banking/trade laws to remain as they were? We may never know, but we can see that good or bad for the most part our idea and ideals of the 1950’s, rather all based in fact or fiction, are still a happy place for many of us. And so I wish to return my blog and my writings to a general 1950’s theme.

The layout of the blog will remain similar but the style will change as I play around with it over the next few days. I still wish to share free eBooks that are pertinent in the library as many ‘modern’ 1950’s gals and guys would still have had access to these books and probably used them accordingly. In a sense I want to continue to be a sort of time traveler but to hop about more. My main landing pad or my ‘home base’ if you will shall be the 1950’s, but one day may be 1951 and the next 1959 and at least once a month I’ll take a longer journey to 1900 or even later. But, as I have learned, the safe place the ‘Our Town” of the 1950’s is important enough to me to remain our home base. I realize I may have lost many readers when I changed my format many times before, but at least with my return to generally the 1950’s, new comers will find my old things still relevant to what I do on a daily or weekly basis.

For me I cannot simply do things part of the way. I have always been an extremist I suppose, throwing myself into things; it simply is my way. The passion for the past and writing and blogging and now even art (having returned part time to school in that venue) all seems mingled together and yet all parts of one whole passion of mine. And I don’t want that passion to only be dry research or unhappiness. In every day some rain must fall but the sun will still come again.

Now, I will share with you the song that brought me back to myself and made me nostalgic for Our 1950’s; our own little “Our Town”. It is Iris Dement’s Our Town from her first album. I have included the lyrics as well.  “Enjoy the song and the film and as always happy homemaking!

And you know the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
Up the street beside that red neon light,
That's where I met my baby on one hot summer night.
He was the tender and I ordered a beer,
It's been forty years and I'm still sitting here.
But you know the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
It's here I had my babies and I had my first kiss.
I've walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist.
Over there is where I bought my first car.
It turned over once but then it never went far.
And I can see the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa.
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall.
I bring them flowers about every day,
but I just gotta cry when I think what they'd say.
If they could see how the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
Now I sit on the porch and watch the lightning-bugs fly.
But I can't see too good, I got tears in my eyes.
I'm leaving tomorrow but I don't wanna go.
I love you, my town, you'll always live in my soul.
But I can see the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on, I gotta kiss you goodbye,
But I'll hold to my lover,
'Cause my heart's 'bout to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town.
I can see the sun has gone down on my town, on my town,
Goodnight.
Goodnight.