In my high school class in 1958 with 607 students, we had one girl get pregnant. This was shocking because nothing like this had happened in our school before that I was aware of, and it was a good friend of mine, a girl I went to church with. She left school, had her child and married the father. The stayed together about three years before they split, and it completely changed her life. She finished her college degree, got an MA, and came home to teach at the local junior college. She has lived with her mother ever since. People took things like this very, very seriously. This was a girl with talent, money, and all sorts of opportunity, but it changed her forever.
In the 1940s and 1950s, people in general obeyed social conventions and respected each other. Society was well ordered and ran very smoothly for the most part. I did not live in a big city “where the action was,” but in my small city, things were very, very calm and it was an ideal place to live. Boys and girls respected each other. Boys called girls to ask for dates and girls generally accepted unless they wanted to kill that connection permanently or they were genuinely busy. Girls always had curfews, usually 11 pm on both Friday and Saturday nights, sometimes midnight after a football game. High school dances were the picture of decorum and politeness. There was none of this vulgarity that is so common at school dances today. It did not matter whether there was a real band or a DJ, the level of decorum was the same. Smoking at school was forbidden and drinking was not even considered. I never heard of drugs in my town while I was in school at all. Can anybody say that this is true today?
To give you a feel for the times, let me describe a single incidence involving a girl I dated briefly in the middle 1950s. I wanted to ask Missy to the church youth group meeting one Sunday evening, so I cruised past her house in my ‘47 Plymouth just to be sure no one else was calling on her. To my horror, there was another car there. I parked about a block a way and waited. After about 20 minutes, they came out to his care, she and this boy. I was distressed! And they talked and they talked! But finally he left. By that time it was about 4:30, so I made a dash to my grandparents house a couple of blocks away where I could telephone her. Trying to sound casual, I ask who the other guy was, she said, “Oh, that was just my cousin from Taft.” All that time I had been sweating it out over nothing! We went to the youth group that night and had a great time. She was a great girl; she could shift my column shift Plymouth!
Does anybody do anything that innocent today?
