Lost in the Fifties
The nostalgic quality of American academic culture
In the early 1970s, I spent a lot of time with artifacts of an earlier age – the world of sock hops and saddle shoes, suburbs and soda shops. A battery-powered AM radio, tuned a station that played ‘oldies but goodies’, gave me access to the music of that era. Old copies of Life and Look, my reward for cleaning out a neighbor’s attic, filled my brain with well-curated images of the late 1950s and early 1960s. And, I am happy to say, back issues of the Reader’s Digest and books bought for pennies at yard sales, gave me a good sense of the mainstream literature of that bygone era.
In the decades that followed, I made several extended visits to colleges and universities. Separated by substantial sojourns in other subcultures, these forays convinced me that the curious customs of the folks who taught in these places owed much to the lost world I encountered, at one remove, during the dying days of the safety razor. In short, to borrow a line from an old Country song, many American academics, to include those born after Happy Days went into syndication, have often struck me as ‘lost in the fifties’.
(I tip my hat to Ronnie Milsap.)
