This is our tale, the story of the members of the Class of 1964 - sort of.  It's not about what happened to so-and-so, or who did what in high school.  But it is about the world we once lived in, from the time we were born, until the summer of 1964.  Fifty-five years later, if once in a while we look back at that world, it's only natural to wonder if we've forgotten anything.  After all, day by day, year after year, we've probably had to deal with more "little changes" in the world around us than any previous American generation.

Hmmmpf, you say, you remember things just fine.  Let's see if that's true.  Although this little quasi-history is not specifically about sports, we'll start with a baseball question, because lots of us grew up watching it and hearing about it.  It would be impossible to forget the New York teams of 50s and 60s, right?  In the nineteen seasons from 1946 through 1964, the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees regularly were among baseball's best.  As a group they compiled astoundingly high numbers of World Series victories and appearances.  Question: Which MLB team got both World Series victories that book-ended those years?

Answer: In 1946, and again in 1964, the Series winner was... the St. Louis Cardinals!

Hmmmmmmm...

We Make Our Debut

While most of us soon were cozy in our cribs, our parents sometimes worried.  Even if we seemed healthy, there were risks ahead. Certain childhood diseases still were not preventable, although the new antibiotics offered optimism - secondary infections often could be controlled, and fewer children would die.  Influenza would come around again, and it would be hard on children.  Although tuberculosis often was curable, it was still around; 4 out of every 10,000 Americans had it.  Any nearby coughs would make our folks nervous.

Polio frightened our parents more than any other disease.  There was good cause to worry. For decades, it had been on the rise.  In 1952, the year most of us would begin First Grade, 60,000 American children would contract polio.  It would kill 3,000 of them, and thousands of the survivors would live afterwards with partial or total paralysis.  Some of them would be confined to iron lungs well into adulthood.

Despite all the gloomy possibilities, 1946 gave Americans at least three reasons to feel positive about their families' health prospects.  President Harry Truman proposed, and was given Congressional assistance for, Federal loans to communities to establish improved levels of hospital care across the country.  The CDC (originally called the Communicable Disease Center) was created.  The National School Lunch Act established a framework for promoting childhood nutrition.

Where We Were Born (and how that mattered)

Around World War I, commuting had become more feasible, and a number of city residents had relocated to Hicksville .  Even so, before the stunning population growth that began around 1945, the village's population was only a fraction of what it would be by the time we began school.
   
1950s newspapers reported that throughout the county, the population was swelling, and that a large majority of the new-home buyers had come from New York .  Indeed, as elsewhere in Nassau , well over 50% of Hicksville High's Class of 1964 was city-born.  So many families' moving to Hicksville in a few years overwhelmed and changed it.  Population density was only part of the story.  Newcomers brought with them their city values, customs, and expectations.  Although their neighborhood was new, people quickly turned it into something familiar, because at heart, they were New Yorkers, and they needed lots of city things, like pizza, and bagels.

By the way, whether you were born in a truly rural area or in Nassau County , you got lots of fresh air in Hicksville .  But of course, that was possible in the city, too - provided that you and your mother were up for it, and provided that the pigeons and mosquitoes stayed away:

Starting to Learn

We learned a lot by listening.  Back in my Queens home, I got to know the sound of a bus stopping at the corner.  Whenever I heard the garbage truck come by, I'd run to the window, grab the sill, and stretch up to watch.  I recognized the sound of the knife-sharpener's gong, and the clopping of the mounted patrolmen's horses' hooves.

For many of us, the familiar "white noise" of traffic was punctuated by the chugging and shrill whistles of steam locomotives, especially on hot summer nights when the windows were open.  La Guardia gave us intermittent aircraft noise, and there soon would be much more of that.  A second New York airport, commonly called Idlewild, began operating in 1948.

We watched bigger kids play outside, and were eager to be old enough to join them.  It made a difference if you lived on a street that didn't curve.  Straight streets let kids see if a car was coming, and it was easier for our parents to spot us if we wandered down the street a house or two.  Being able to see corner-to-corner gave us a sense of belonging - it was "our block."

Outside, games like tag or hide-and-seek were played by boys and girls together; games with equipment seemed more like sports, and they usually were single-gender.

Boys used Spaldeens for stickball and handball.  Or, a boy could throw one hard against his home's front steps, so that it bounced back as a pop-up or a fly ball for his buddies to catch.  A variant of catch was tossing the ball diagonally up on our home's slanted roof, so that it rolled or bounced down to a buddy waiting at the other end of the yard.  The sidewalk was the place for potsy, and for simple rope jumping.  Driveways were a good choice when two girls stood apart and kept a rope going, their friends taking turns jumping in.  They chanted rhymes, for fun, and also to help maintain the rhythmic motion of the rope.

Home Entertainment

Soon to begin their successful runs on television were radio favorites Dragnet, Richard Diamond, and Gunsmoke.  Never at the top with her own radio show was Dinah Shore , but she would have great success on television.

Our parents also listened to, and we heard, lots of, recorded music.  According to Billboard, these were the performers of 1946's ten top-selling hits: The Ink Spots, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Freddy Martin, Vaughn Monroe, Frankie Carle, Johnny Mercer, and Nat "King" Cole.  Having held down the Number 1 spot for ten weeks, The Ink Spots' record of "The Gypsy" was the hit of the year.

Echoes of World War II

 With my family, I watched uniformed veterans march in parades: Look, there's Dad's godson Joe - he was a Marine in the South Pacific.  Even ordinary visits with relatives would bring up memories of the war: Cousin Harold has very bad hearing from firing all those artillery shells during the war.  Or, Aunt Martha's son Bill died when his ship was sunk by a Kamikaze at Okinawa .  I saw a framed photograph of my Uncle Gus, wearing a uniform and Stetson hat, stiffly seated on horseback: That's from the FIRST world war.  And so I learned that there had been more than one war.

Once when the streets got washed, I asked about the round signs on the Department of Sanitation tanker trucks that sprayed the pavement: CD stands for 'Civil Defense.'  I vaguely got the idea, but I wasn't ready to find out more.  Much later, my Fourth Grade teacher in Hicksville , Evelyn Storey, would tell our class about the Office of Civil Defense, and about her wartime experiences as an Air Raid Warden.

Understandably, our parents were never going to forget World War II.

Making a New Hicksville

Let's take a look at what Hicksville was like when we first arrived.

The highlighted rectangle on the right is the site of the future Mid-Island Plaza.  Looking below it and a little left (south) along Broadway, we see the grounds and older buildings of what we later called "our" junior high.  Further south are the grounds of Lee Avenue School, already under construction.  The field visible just above my old home on 7^th Street is the farmland on which our high school will be built in a few years.  A few blocks north, at Newbridge and Old Country Roads, the Center Shops plaza is partially built, but the parking lot is not yet paved.  To the west of it, beyond Plain Lawn Cemetery , outlined in white is the future site of Old Country Road School .

The new homes in the foreground are easy to spot.  To the north, there's a great ocean of whitecaps - thousands of new homes with not a tree in sight.  It's 1951, and already new homes vastly outnumber Hicksville 's pre-war buildings.

Note: Not all of us lived in new houses, but I'm about to sound as if we did.  It's not that I favor post-war houses (on the contrary; the house I live in is more than a century old).  But Long Island 's post-war houses were seen as emblems of a new era, the one into which we had been born.

In the Kitchen

Nothing was more characteristic of the new era than our post-war kitchens.  Had a time-traveler walked into one, s/he would have had no doubt - this was the 1950s.

My family home's kitchen wasn't as grandiose as the one above, but it did have a linoleum floor, knotty pine cabinets with faux wrought-iron hardware, curvy/pointy moldings, Formica counters with metal edges, matching Formica backsplash behind the counters, and a porcelain sink like the one in the photo.

Note that the flower pot is positioned to help distract the viewer from the electric range, and that we cannot see the refrigerator - mixing white appliances with knotty pine and 1950s colors was not to everyone's taste.

Before talking about appliances, let's mention the "elephant in the room."  It wasn't really in the kitchen; it was in the living room, and it wasn't an elephant; it was a TV.  Even without colors, television was proving effective at "helping us decide what we wanted".  Maybe our family's 8½ cubic foot refrigerator wasn't big enough, and our parents wanted to try squeezing a larger one into our kitchen.

Of course our parents knew that advertising was biased, but so what?  It was a new era.  People had never owned post-war appliances before; who could know which ones would last and which would fail?  If Betty Furness showed you that you could get features you liked, why not buy a Westinghouse?

Whatever cold appliance - sometimes our parents still called it an "ice box" - graced our kitchen, inside it was something never before eaten on a grand scale by humans: frozen edible matter.  In theory, frozen food had existed for many decades, but it invariably meant miserable, soggy meals with no flavor.  The 1920s saw a breakthrough - a Brooklynite named Clarence Birdseye invented a quick-freeze process, and frozen foods started to get better.  It would take a long time to make proper commercial freezing equipment, and to overcome public skepticism.

In 1945, the war (always the war, the war...) had left manufacturers with access to plenty of aluminum, but with few uses for it.  Ecological impacts were not a concern, and it was not long until someone discovered the most significant scientific formula of the 1950s:

Frozen Food + Disposable Aluminum Tray = TV Dinner

Meanwhile, our parents' kitchens accrued more electric gadgets: blenders, hand-held mixers, rotisseries, percolators, frying pans, griddles, even pressure cookers.  I doubt that - to use the phrase from the earlier ad - "Mom's chores" got any better, but because of all the electrical doodads, the occasional LILCO power outages (e.g., during hurricanes) had a bigger impact in the kitchen than they might have had otherwise.

One of my regular childhood chores was helping my mother defrost the freezer part of the fridge.  I always expected it to be fun, and it never was.  It was messy; water would get everywhere.  The first step after turning off the fridge was to empty the contents, and wrap them in multiple layers of newspaper to keep them cold while the freezer defrosted.  Keeping the dog and cat away was essential.

Although we bought defrosting tools, similar to the one shown above, they never helped much.  We had to pry off the ice as it softened, and sponge up the water that gathered in the bottom of the fridge.  Some water always collected in some hidden spot until it decided to cascade out onto the kitchen floor.

My parents soon bought a new "Self Defrost" refrigerator.  When ice built up, you simply pressed a button, something inside heated up, and the ice quickly melted into a tray at the bottom of the unit.  Amazing.

After several months, the new refrigerator developed a strange aroma - not the food in it, but the appliance itself.  It was as if the odor came from inside its walls, and it did.  The "Self Defrost" wiring had ignited the insulation within the sides of the fridge, and it began to smolder.  On the shiny white outside, tan blotches began to grow, as the paint got singed from the heat below the surface.  The refrigerator literally "was toast" - it was not a Westinghouse; maybe my parents should have listened to Betty Furness.

That's the end of Part I.  Next month, we'll look back on the rest of our journey to the summer of 1964.

We were the ones in school, but our parents learned alongside us in those years.  There always were new things in the news, like inflation, satellites, and transistors, and new people, too, like Gagarin, Khrushchev, Clay, and King.  Places we'd known only as dots on a map acquired new, and sometimes very personal, meanings for us, as we'd hear about Suez , Berlin , Vietnam , and Dallas .