Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism

An afternoon meeting with a central Pennsylvania family in late August 2011 at the annual Grange Fair of Centre Hall reminds me of the power of 1950s nostalgia for many a half-century later—even if they sometimes have no personal memory of that decade. On the fairgrounds organizers rent 950 tents to families who gather together the last week in August to acknowledge change and recall the past. The fair dates back to 1874, and many participants can recall how this custom has been passed down three or more generations.²

The site, which I have visited for many years to attend doo-wop and other retro concerts, has a Brigadoon time-out-of-time feel about it, as if it truly is “lost in the fifties.” Though it dates from much earlier, the 1950s seem to be the base decade of nostalgia today, in part because it is the fringe of the memory of the now dominant boomer elders. Of course, helping form this impression are the pavilions displaying traditional rural crafts and barns full of prized cows, rabbits, and sheep; the midway of traditional carnival fare; and the tables of fairgoers eating dinners of chicken, gravy, and waffles. But the most unusual and retro feature of the fair was the tent-dwelling families. Other fairgoers go modern and camp in recreational vehicles and trailers on the edge of the grounds. But the diehards insist on the traditional, uniform, dark green rectangular tents. Some fairgoers personalize their tents by outlining their open fronts with strings of colorful lights (a recent addition are lights in the shape of toy tractors or other themes of a fading farm life). Other tents are fronted with miniature white picket fences, and passersby can easily see the tent furnishings within, which are often surprisingly homey. While some use utilitarian garden and patio furniture, others bring dated upholstered chairs and carpets, old TVs, and even what appears to be the rocking chair of a grandparent, perhaps long departed.

The family that I visited went a little further, carefully decorating the tent in 1950s kitsch. The matriarch and patriarch of this clan were in their early sixties, lifelong veterans of the Grange Fair; the tent a hand-me-down from the maternal side. It was a work of love for the mother, Debbie. The dad had his own nostalgic hobby—model trains—but he was, of course, cooperative. Her display included the “essentials”: plastic Melmac dishes in pink, olive, and peach; a Formica kitchen table; a turquoise-colored rotary phone on a phone seat and table combo; ceramic lamps shaped like panthers; Danish modern chairs; a display of 1950s women’s hats and gloves on a screen; and even a hidden CD player adding a background of 1950s rock music. When I asked Debbie why she collected the 1950s, she offered a surprising answer: “because Kris [her daughter] likes old stuff too. When I’m no longer here, she can have it.” Of course, these things still evoked a personal feeling, reminding Debbie of her childhood and of her parents and their generation. But for Debbie, that wasn’t enough. Her fifties collection needed to be heirlooms—not because of their intrinsic or market value or because they had been in the family a long time (they had been recently collected at auctions and antique and junk shops) but because they represented her and her childhood to her daughter and perhaps later to her granddaughter. Her collection was to be a gift of herself across the generations, perhaps even a way of extending her life through the ephemerality of a presumed era that marked her identity. The Grange Fair tent and its decorations were the mom’s projects (just as was her house, except the basement, where the dad and his extensive collection of miniature railroads reigned). Debbie had become increasingly skilled at her collecting, especially at reupholstering chairs and restoring pillow covers in authentic fabrics. She had her eye out for Eames furniture (one of the classy brands of the era) and had learned about the range of the fifties look by perusing vintage magazines and advertisements. She was proud of the valuable pieces she obtained cheaply because others at the auction were not as knowledgeable.

I learned quickly that nostalgia for that special decade was a lot more complicated than some shallow fixation on the oddities of the past or even distorted memories of families and the “way we never were.”3 So let’s look a bit more closely at fifties and sixties nostalgia, when and why it came and the kitsch that represented it.

It is hard to date the beginning of fifties nostalgia, but consciousness of the decade surely was formed by media representations of it.⁴ While the 1960s certainly produced disdain for the 1950s as an era of conformity, Cold War conservatism, and male chauvinism, fondness for the decade emerged by the end of the 1960s. As early as 1969, following an era of turbulent politics, social disruption, and radical counterculture, fifties icons like Elvis Presley returned to the stage in Las Vegas to sing before a middle-class, middle-aged crowd (see chapter 6).⁵

In 1972, cover stories on fifties nostalgia appeared in Life and Newsweek. That year Grease, a celebration of early rock, appeared on the stage and began a long Broadway run. It was only one example of selected and romantic recollections of the 1950s, especially of youth music and fashion and a focus on a handful of media icons: Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and James Dean (two of which by then were conveniently dead), were glorified for their representations of cultural archetypes rather than for what they did or who they were. The 1974 nostalgia book, The Happy Years, represents the 1950s not as a series of evocative events but as endearingly sweet and even goofy, an America at peace with itself.⁶

Following on the 1950s rock revival was a series of sentimental films and TV shows with 1950s themes: American Graffiti (August 1973) offered a lament on the end of the lively but also naive cruising and drive-in world of white working-class teens of 1962, and the next year the TV situation comedy Happy Days entered American homes with a more sentimental treatment of the teen and his oh-so-understanding family, the opposite of the tale of youth alienation and familial dysfunctionality in the 1954 film Rebel Without a Cause and its many successors. The greaser character, the Fonz, was hardly the drag-racing juvenile delinquent or the switchblade-carrying gang member of 1950s movie dramas, West Side Story, or Blackboard Jungle; instead, he was a harmless wise-cracker, cool, but always respectful of the parents of his middle-class buddy, Richie Cunningham. By the end of the series, he had evolved into a shop teacher and school administrator. The Fonz became the 1950s. Like many sitcoms, social and familial differences were made humorous or glossed over. And reruns of family sitcoms from the 1950s (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Leave It to Beaver) reinforced the positive image of the decade as a time of wholesome, middle-class scenes—white picket fences, small-town neighbors, and ideal families—when kids were cute if continually confused and in need of bemused and gentle guidance from parents, especially from the dad.7

If music and TV nostalgia shaped sentimental views of the 1950s in the 1970s, the 1950s were resurrected more subtly as a “cool” decade, and the heart of this “coolness” was a series of new technologies that radically transformed the look of stuff. A lot had to do with plastics, so often maligned at the time as cheap and flashy. Though rooted in the 1870 invention of celluloid, derived from plant cellulose,⁸ plastic would come into its own only after World War II, with the introduction of malleable but sturdy plastics like polyvinyl chloride (PVC, which is used as pipes but also a substitute for leather on furniture) gradually removing the prejudice against plastic. Melamine (for dinettes and dishes) and Formica (for table and countertops) made kitchens far more colorful and easier to clean. Key was the development of a practical mass-production injection-molding machine in 1937 for plastic that enabled rapidly changing and flexible design—replacing craft with a machine-based aesthetic.⁹

Other postwar advances were perhaps less dramatic but no less important: molded plywood, fiberglass, foam rubber, and cast aluminum—allowing designers of furniture to break from the traditional shapes of chairs, tables, sofas, and lamps to produce an array of space-age forms and styles previously unimaginable. The American architect Charles Eames was notable for molding plywood. Eames’s armchair constructed from a glass-reinforced polyester (fiberglass) shell on steel struts was all the rage when manufactured by Herman Miller in 1948. Combinations of plastics, aluminum, and plywood offered extraordinary possibilities in molding radios, clocks, phonographs, and TV sets. The modern art of Mondrian and Calder inspired suspended lampshades in the form of mobiles and palette-shaped coffee tables. Meanwhile, the streamlining designs developed in the 1930s for locomotives and cars by the noted American industrial designer Raymond Loewy were adapted to home appliances like vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. The Finnish émigré Eero Saarinen designed cheap and comfortable chairs of molded plywood. Finally, Russel Wright introduced American modern dinnerware in 1939 with his practical and simple designs of mix-and-match colors, and in 1953 he produced his Melmac line of dishes made of melamine resin plastic.10

These styles were popularizations of often experimental and elite designs from the 1920s and 1930s that ordinary American consumers had once shunned in preference for traditional wood furniture and cloth-covered furniture, often in ornate styles. But in the “conservative 1950s” the consuming masses (though few from my grandmother’s generation) embraced Art Deco’s sleek and geometric lines, the austere and functional designs of Bauhaus and the International Style, along with its American variation, Machine Age Modern.¹¹ The success of these innovations was a classic example of fast capitalism: the profitable marketing of novelty and the consumer’s embrace of change for its own sake.

Why was there this upsurge in “modern” styles in a decade seemingly dedicated to cultural retrenchment and retreat? To be sure, the upheavals of the depressed 1930s and war-torn 1940s induced Americans to be “homeward bound,” as housewifery, motherhood, and male corporate conformity were extolled in the media and as the Red Scare produced cultural and political reactions to the avant-garde. The 1950s produced a Reader’s Digest world of neat rows of suburban tracts and “the family that prays together stays together” sentiment that inspired the construction of family/ fellowship additions to churches. But inevitably all this led to its opposite—a minority world of the hip and beat in literature, jazz, and dress (mildly manifested by my mother’s taste). But the modern also went mainstream.12 Tom Hine argues that the appeal was to a popular quest for the new and novel after nearly a generation of austerity; a lusty, giddy embrace of change almost for its own sake and the redemptive promise so often made at the New York’s World Fair in 1939 and then repeatedly through the war that the future would bring new and exciting conveniences. As Hine puts it, by the early 1950s,

the objects people could buy took on a special exaggerated quality. … They celebrate confidence in the future, the excitement of the present, the sheer joy of having so much. … Each household was able to have his own little Versailles along a cul-de-sac. … Products were available in a lurid rainbow of colors and a steadily changing array of styles. Commonplace objects took extraordinary form, and the novel and exotic quickly turned commonplace.¹³

This cornucopia was not available to all and was largely confined to the suburbs, but it reached beyond the comfortable middle class. The 1950s were not only a decade of domesticated women and corporate-conformist men but the era of the space race and abstract painting. And all this modernity was lionized in the mainstream magazines.¹⁴ Even more, it was the era of popular luxury (Populuxe, in Hine’s terminology), delighting Americans tired of austerity and enriching merchandisers.

Still, why should this contradiction of modern styles and traditional values and behaviors appeal to nostalgiacs like many hip merchants of 1950s’ kitsch a generation and more after the 1950s? Part of the answer, repeated by collectors, is the charm evoked by the almost childlike attraction to the new in the 1950s. This produced a strange sort of nostalgia for an age when people believed in and embraced the “future,” presumably in contrast to the jaded pessimism that followed and continues today. This fascination with the “past futuristic” is not limited to nostalgia for old science fiction or 1950s fantasy about future jet travel and space flight. It also was expressed in the allure of the “atomic kitchens” of that era, interestingly also sites of activity for the “traditional housewife.” Ads for appliances and home-improvement goods in the 1950s promised the glittering newness of the “ultimate in Space Age modern convenience, ease, and beauty.” At the time, this may have been an attempt to persuade women to return and stay in the home and give up dreams of fulfillment in the wider world, as Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique argued in 1963.15 Still, collectors a generation later or more admire what they see as the “optimism that housewives held for the future” in the 1950s: the promise of liberation from time-consuming chores and for replacing the “stodgy old stoves and refrigerators of a few years earlier … with the color and chrome of a new model festooned with the latest features and doodads.”¹⁶

This enthusiasm for the new in the 1950s had been fostered by corporate spectacles hyping the home of tomorrow. The Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 featured thirteen model homes built of modular steel, artificial stone, and glass; the New York World’s Fair of 1939 offered glamorous displays of GE’s streamlined all-electric kitchen. Disney’s Tomorrowland in 1957 presented curious tourists the Monsanto “House of the Future,” with its four cantilevered plastic bays radiating from a small central core, and the Whirlpool corporation set up a traveling “miracle kitchen,” complete with a center console where menus could be planned, food supplies inventoried, and, with a TV monitor linked to cameras at the front door and in the nursery, home activities observed. In the age of the Cold War and nuclear brinksmanship, designers “took the button that everyone feared and put it in the kitchen appliances.”¹⁷

Yet for all the stress on the gadgets and the mystique of progress in convenience and push-button power, nostalgic collectors look back on the “atomic kitchen” as also a time of aesthetic innovation. As one writer put it, “creative boundaries were expanded using wall-to-wall color, accessories, and spatial drama that appealed to the senses and provided a lift from normal kitchen routines.” The kitchen was to not to be like a jet cockpit or NASA control room but closer to a modern art gallery or hotel lobby. It was to be a “comfortable zone” to do chores, a “suitable space for family and friends to congregate and feel part of the activities.” And the formality of the long-surviving Victorian dining room with its break-fronts, cherry or oak dining tables, and upholstered wood chairs of often elegantly turned legs were finally replaced by causal furnishings of easy-to-clean but also comfortable modern materials. Even though Pennsylvania House, Old Colony, and Bassett continued to manufacture colonial-revival dining-room sets (which often inhabited seldom-used dining rooms, especially in more affluent 1950s homes and after), these are not collected (though they are passed down). Rather, the informal and often playful furniture of the “kitsch-en,” with their Formica tops, chrome legs, and bright vinyl chairs in pink or turquoise, attract nostalgiacs. Traditional cream-colored china with delicate designs has been passed over by the new 1950s look of Fiesta, Harlequin, and Riviera ceramic tableware in bright and cheery canary yellow and seafoam green. Adding to the glistening modernity were blenders, toasters, and coffee percolators in chrome. By tumbling so much into the woman’s workspace, once a site of drudgery and then a place of isolation from the wider world, the dream engineers of the 1950s created an aura of sensuality, convenience, and even familial happiness. They offered women “an adventure not unlike reaching for the frontiers of space.”18 This was promise of a carefree and happy future when Americans believed both in progress and the restoration of “the happy home.” This powerful affective combination in Midcentury Modern seems to have been lost and thus draws later generations.

But the attraction to 1950s domestic stuff went well beyond the sleek lines of Eames design and futuristic appliances. It included many consumer goods that can be broadly incorporated under the label “kitsch,” decorations and novelties that sometimes conflicted with the principles of Midcentury Modern values. Kitsch is “over the top” in its use of color, novelty, and playfulness, often so much so that today it often seems garish, tasteless, and even bizarre. In fact, during the 1950s, the modernist sophisticates (like my mother) deplored kitsch as cheap, commercial, and crass. However, since the 1960s, the appeal of “camp”—an attraction to popular “tastelessness” as an antidote to elite “quality”—has made kitsch cool for a new generation of sophisticates. A tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm for camp was perhaps best expressed in the hit TV show Batman (1966–1968). Originally intended for a juvenile audience, Batman’s comic-book plots and dialogue attracted millions of young adults. A knowing but bemused distance from the popular cultural icon is required to appreciate camp.19

This may explain the revival of the 1950s “paint-by-numbers” fad legitimized by an exhibit of this phenomenon at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2001. Paint-by-numbers sets offered untrained “artists” the opportunity to paint colors in predrawn shapes on a board following a numerical code, thus recreating pictures suitable for framing. Highbrow moderns disdained this craze when it first appeared in 1951 (published by Palmer Paint): Paint-by-numbers sets were uncreative, sentimental, mechanical, and merely “decorative” (a favorite put-down of my mother and her painter friends) because most of the sets featured realistic landscapes, kittens, puppies, sailboats, and sunsets, romantic images that appealed to the middlebrow masses who lived in crackerbox houses. Yet, this craze revived fifty years later, supported a number of paint-by-number entrepreneurs. In 2006 Aimee Cecil sold about five thousand kits at ninety dollars each.²⁰ It is hard to explain the appeal except by the charm of camp. Another category of 1950s kitsch were “head vases” and “figural planters,” curious colorful, even garish, ceramic vessels in the shape of Nubian slaves, Spanish dancers, or black leopards into which flowers and plants were displayed. Still other forms of kitsch/camp were canisters and other kitchen ceramics that were embossed with colorful images of poodles, cats, or owls. Collectors rediscovered these bits of bric-a-brac in the mid-1980s, leading to price increases and even the production of two books touting their wonders to collectors in 1996 as the speculative market merged with an emerging nostalgia community.²¹

Perhaps even stranger is the enthusiasm for 1950s Christmas kitsch. Travis Smith in his Kitschmasland finds that there is a sort of natural history of Christmas decorations—first Christmas kitsch appealed to Americans as novelty, then it was rejected as tasteless kitsch, and finally it returned as “camp” and ultimately as a cult. What makes aluminum Christmas trees, for example, succeed as objects of nostalgia is that they can be “whimsical, sentimental, and even beautiful.” Consider the ornamental glass balls inspired by the Sputnik satellite or even the A-bomb. The contrast of today’s generic chains of tiny lights with the bubbling “electric candles” of the 1950s creates a special appeal. And the decorative—yes, perhaps gaudy—beaded egg ornaments or reindeer candle holders have attracted collectors because they remind them of their childhoods. Smith continues: “As a culture we may be in danger of becoming too jaded and sophisticated to appreciate these designs from our not too distant past.” Focus on the good design of Eames or Saarinen, Smith concludes, is incomplete. The ironic stuff of dime-store Christmas says as much about our history and culture. “We have to realize that kitsch is … us.”22

While much Midcentury Modern and 1950s kitsch appeals to women, men collect the 1950s too, but once again very different stuff. Men have been attracted to first-generation hi-fi sets, a memory of that distinctly male accessory (at least in the view of Hugh Hefner and readers of Playboy), but some also have collected space toys, the complement to women’s space-age kitchens. A similar attraction to the futuristic naiveté of the 1950s seems in play, but in this case what is prominent is an especially childlike delight in collecting “B” sci-fi movies and the often garish posters advertising them. Interestingly, there seems to be little interest in the actual American space program of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, the now campy icons of 1950s (and early 1960s) TV and movie fantasies of space travel have drawn collecting crowds. Among the most popular were toy ray guns, robots, and rocket ships, as well as lunch boxes, figures, and other memorabilia depicting TV programs like Space Cadet.²³

The evocative appeal of kitsch is so powerful that it has long been a customer-pleasing décor for restaurants and other commercial gathering places. These are not just old diners who have refused to update. They are modern facilities (including McDonalds franchises) that have been “theming” their establishments, built in or since the 1980s, with 1950s celebrity posters, especially rock stars such as Fabian, Buddy Holly, and Little Anthony and iconic TV images of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton, characters from the Honeymooners; oversized fuzzy dice; advertisements with distinct 1950s styling; and, of course, photos or miniatures of red-and-white 1958 Corvettes. Typical also from the mid-1980s were Jim Dandy’s Rockin’ ’50s Restaurant, in Hobart, Indiana, with its turquoise booths, pink-topped tables, and a black-and-white-check floor, and Ed Debevic’s (a California and Chicago chain), which featured singing and dancing wait staff. Sonic drive-ins, with origins in Oklahoma in 1953 and success in the lower Midwest in the 1950s, expanded nationally in the 1980s, trading on its 1950s space décor and design.24

More recently, the Internet has produced websites like “Baby Boomer Memories—Nostalgic Gifts for Boomers,” offering an array of gift ensembles to “trigger” memories of a 1950s childhood. These include coffee-table picture books like Recollections: A Baby Boomer’s Memories of the Fabulous Fifties and The Oldies Music Aptitude Test: Trivia Fun for Armchair Deejays. Also offered are the “Hometown Favorites 1950’s Nostalgic Candy Gift Box,” a three-pound collection of vintage candy, and even a 1950 Time Capsule. This and similar websites attempt to create a sense of boomer nostalgia built on childhood memories of toys, games, and music.²⁵

Fifties domestic collectibles may be, but generally aren’t, “heirlooms,” and thus they are seldom something that can’t be let go because that would mean a final loss of a loved or respected one. Instead, these collectibles seem to be valued as representative of a lost time. They represent what we are no longer—or what we learn secondhand—even if we embrace this materialized memory with irony.

The impetus of the 1960s revival was, of course, the maturation of older boomers, especially those who entered adulthood in the second half of the 1960s and who by the end of the 1980s had reached their forties. By then, this group not only had money for memories but sufficient distance from their youth to be intrigued by it—or, at least, by sentimental treatments of it. Younger boomers, of course, recall the 1960s as their childhood and are nostalgic for the decade in very different ways, identifying it with toys, for example. In 1989 NBC ordered two TV pilot programs on the Vietnam War: Shooter, based on combat photographers in Vietnam, and China Beach, which featured three women stationed in South Vietnam during the war. That same year ABC planned The Wonder Years, a sweet series about a twelve-year-old boy growing up in 1968. It is revealing that Shooter was never aired; China Beach ran only from 1988 to 1991. The Wonder Years, by contrast, was a hit that aired for six seasons with much success thereafter in syndication.²⁷

Advertisers also recognized the potential of 1960s nostalgia in the mid-1980s. Sam and Dave’s 1967 hit “Soul Man” sold Campbell’s soup, and the California raisin industry animated humanized raisins to dance to the 1966 hit “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” in an oft-seen ad. Although rights to old songs cost up to $200,000 compared to the price of a jingle written for a commercial, which typically ran from $10,000 to $50,000, advertisers were willing to pay extra to reach the twenty-five-to-forty-year-old baby-boom generation.²⁸ As the media scholar Daniel Marcus notes, these ads evoked “feelings of childhood security and joy.” But they did more than tap into sentimental nostalgia:

In many ways, the material memories of the 1960s were less distinct than the 1950s, certainly in home furnishings and appliances. Yet there were obvious flashpoints in clothing that evoked late-1960s nostalgia (because the early 1960s were really culturally part of the 1950s). Perhaps inevitable was the revival of fads like bellbottom jeans as well as the geometric, multicolored print dresses inspired by Emilio Pucci’s designs.30 Inevitably other “far-out” representations of 1960s clothes appeared. By 1990, flea-market dealers across the United States reported renewed interest in 1960s countercultural makeup and clothes in day-glo colors. Antique and art dealers, unable to unload truly old furniture or paintings, found that they could sell cheap collectibles from the 1960s. Tube-shaped desk lamps covered with psychedelic designs were popular, as were the odd shapes formed in lava lamps (a fad from 1963). In 1995, even a large New York exhibition hall could present the program “Psychedelic 60’s: Pop, Op, and Peace,” featuring collectible tie-dyed T-shirts, tricolored crocheted vests, and other outfits from the 1960s to nostalgic consumers. All this appealed to the romantic memories of boomers who in the late 1960s went to the “head-shop districts” of cities to purchase their tokens of quasi hippiedom. It also attracted much younger consumers seeking to “channel” the 1960s. Miniskirts, pantsuits, and other clothes inspired by Mary Quant of London’s Carnaby Street became collectible in the 1990s, as did tie-dyed shirts, patchwork velvet dresses, embroidered jeans and denim jackets, chain belts, flowery ties, Indian kaftans, love beads, and even fringed buckskin jackets.³¹ Shortly after 2000, fad candy from the 1960s (and 1950s) was popular enough to spur Internet sites (groovycandies.com, sweetnostalgia.com, and oldtimecandy.com). Even Wal-Mart offered an array of Pez and other novelty candies for boomer adults.³² Once again, time-bound novelty returned as nostalgia.

Child “foods” like candy were especially likely candidates for nostalgia, but so were TV shows, which are so often pinpointed to memories of special times of growing up. This is particularly easy to do because TV-themed kids’ stuff was so common in the 1960s. Thus lunch boxes and posters featuring characters from Star Trek and TV sitcoms became hot items at collectible shops like that of Herb Hastings’ Way Back Machine, a store in Cleveland opened in 1984. Not surprisingly, in 1994 merchants in towns near the site of the Woodstock rock festival capitalized on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the infamous gathering of sex-and-drug-crazed hippies by stocking their stores with 1960s memorabilia. By the late 1990s, dealers in collectibles found that the Internet had greatly expanded their market, allowing them to abandon expensive storefronts necessary to attract street traffic for cheaper warehouses from which to distribute their wares. As Boston’s Rudy Franchi, the owner of the Nostalgia Factory, noted, “The number of orders we get from the boonies is unbelievable. It’s all these people who are stuck out there in the middle of nowhere” who want a bit of a lost or imagined lost youth back.³³

By 2011 the link between the time-tied TV show and retro fashion was again realized in the commercial collaboration between the clothing chain Banana Republic and the costume designer for the hit show Mad Men (aired on American Movie Classics), a series based on the Madison Avenue world of advertising in the early 1960s. Banana Republic offered a limited-edition collection of “Mad Men” clothes and accessories for men and women, including everything from “leopard print pumps to a navy shawl-collared suit jacket for men.”³⁴

Despite all this, collecting the 1960s and sentimental attachment to that decade met with greater hostility, both by those who lived through and rejected that decade and by its generational successors. From the first signs of boomer retro (in 1986), the press sided with “all those who are suffering from the current nostalgia for the 1960s and the alleged culture of that time.”35 Critics complained of the selling of a sanitized 1960s that ignored the stress and conflict of the era. As one journalist noted, “The period’s current incarnation is largely a feel-good phenomenon, long on youthful fun and freedom, reducing the entire decade to a kind of continuous rock ’n’ roll sound track.”³⁶

Inevitably, 1960s nostalgia was followed by 1970s nostalgia, which was well underway by the end of the 1990s. However, even for those for whom the 1970s was formative, it is hard to give this decade a definite “brand” culturally or politically. It was, by most accounts, a decade of disappointments, noted for Nixon’s disgrace, defeat in Vietnam, the humiliation of the Iranian hostage taking, and inflation, ending with President Jimmy Carter’s famous speech about America’s national “malaise.” The popular clothes styles (white polyester double-knit leisure suits and gold chains, as in John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever) and those “swooping wings” on women’s hair (Farrah Fawcett) and big mustaches and long sideburns were easy to mock later, as were sappy songs like “You Light Up My Life,” corny slogans like “Have a Nice Day,” and fads like mood rings and citizens’ band radio (“ten-four, good buddy, I copy you”). In contrast to the idealism of the 1960s (whatever one thought of it), the 1970s was tagged as the “Me Decade” of self-absorption.³⁷

And this was not the opinion merely of the 1960s crowd. “Happy-face buttons replaced clenched fists,” as Pagan Kennedy writes in her memoir of growing up in the 1970s. She recalls her frustration at missing all the fireworks of 1960s youth rebellion and notes how the political edge of the 1960s was blunted by commercial cooptation (“Black Is Beautiful” jeans patches and mass-produced peace-sign medallions) and that the idealism and pride of the civil rights struggle degenerated into the gangster sex and violence of the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. All this made the “seventies generation” sometimes envious, even resentful, of the sixties boomers but also defensive of the contributions of “their decade.” Probably more common was to adopt an ironic, unsentimental nostalgia that celebrated the 1970s with a heavy dose of whimsy, cynicism, and self-referential and self-deprecating humor—with few claims of “their decade’s” moral superiority. Even more than in the 1950s and 1960s, 1970s nostalgia celebrated camp. Complicating the picture more was the curious fact that the 1970s was often remembered for being a time that recalled the decades that preceded it. “It’s hard to get nostalgic about a decade that itself was nostalgic” and that, at the time, many believed was a fall from the golden age of the 1950s.38

Moreover, not much held these memories together, and the 1970s, even more than other decades, didn’t fit a clear pattern: when did it begin? Not in 1970, when the psychedelic sixties (which began in earnest only in 1967) was still in full flower. The 1970s left some distinct artifacts: a cult of macramé wall hangings, house-plants, redwood-slab coffee tables, mushroom-shaped cookie jars, crocheted afghans, and avocado-colored appliances. But, unlike Midcentury Modern, which often represented the promise of progress and plenty in postwar America, the 1970s issued a plethora of fads and fashions without any clear social or cultural meaning. As Kennedy speculates, “It was perhaps the stunning array of disposable, faddish products designed to do nothing but help the buyer feel hip that characterized the seventies.” As often noted (see chapter 5), after 1971, TV shows became more youth-oriented than ever before (given the networks’ obsession with selling ad time to companies seeking that demographic). But like so much in that decade, “controversial” programming, designed to appeal to a new generation, was “nonthreatening theater where new social values—proposed by the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution—could be explored and laughed at” (e.g., The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sanford and Son, and M*A*S*H).³⁹ Detached from or only vaguely linked to events and broad historical trends, the kitsch of the 1970s was fragmented and noted mostly for having once been a craze.

So it isn’t so strange that many 1970s collectibles are campy fads especially associated with popular TV shows: sitcoms like The Brady Bunch, Laverne and Shirley, The Partridge Family, and The Beverley Hillbillies but also action shows like Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels are all “immortalized” in toys, coloring books, paper dolls, games, posters, school supplies, and lunchboxes. “It takes about twenty years for items to become collectible, and items with TV’s The Brady Bunch, CHIPs, or Three’s Company have taken off thanks to reruns,” said Charles Criscuolo, the owner of Flashback Collectibles in Chicago, in 1993. So it’s not surprising that colorful (and, to a later era, garish) platform shoes from the 1970s were also selling again in the mid-1990s.40 In 2001, the Wall Street Journal reported with glee that for several years tuxedo suits in powder blue, sunshine yellow, and peachy peach from the 1970s were the rage for high-school proms as well as for costume and Halloween parties in California.⁴¹ The retrospective campiness of 1970s fashion and culture was even more dominant than its 1950s and 1960s predecessors.

But 1970s retro differed in still another way: nostalgia for the quintessential novelty of that decade, the video game.42 A couple of newspaper interviews of men who grew up in the 1970s suggest a trend: In 2003, Mark Murawski, a software engineer from suburban Pittsburgh, saw nothing odd about collecting the Atari 2600, a game that first appeared in 1977 when he was five. But he also owned subsequent video-game systems, including the Nintendo NES (1985) and Sega Dreamcast (1998), as well as later devices (the PlayStation 2, Nintendo Game Cube, and Xbox). Located in a basement “man cave,”⁴³ these games constituted his private museum, a record of his entire life’s dedication to gaming. “It’s not a child’s toy you’re going to grow out of,” declared Murawski.⁴⁴ In 2002, a graphic designer from Decatur, Alabama, Rodney Siddall, then thirty-five, acknowledged to a reporter that he was a 1970s junkie with collections of yellow smiley-face cookie jars, Hot Wheel cars and track sets, and magazines featuring Fonzie from Happy Days and The Six-Million-Dollar Man. He rarely listened to music not from the 1970s and loved That ’70s Show. He was particularly fixated on his first Atari 2600 and his Pac-Man game cartridge, which he got in 1977 when he was ten. But he didn’t give up gaming when he left childhood. During his teens and twenties, he bought all the trendy game systems. In the 1990s, still in his twenties, Siddall “returned” to the video-game systems of his childhood, collecting Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Mattel’s Intellivision, and more than four hundred Atari 2600 cartridges, as well as later systems. Siddall insisted, “I don’t think collecting this kind of stuff means that I don’t want to grow up. I just think it is part of a way of capturing a piece of my childhood.”⁴⁵

But these Gen-X men were doing something different from the boomer collectors who tried to recover childhood memories in middle age. They retained, continuously, an infatuation with the video games of their 1970s youth, never, or only for a short time, abandoning their enthusiasm as they matured. I saw a similar pattern at toy-and-comic-book shows: male collectors who grew up in the 1970s told me that they gave up their childhood obsessions only for a few years in their late teens and early twenties (when school and women replaced their childhood obsessions). This is hardly the old nostalgia. Moreover, these Gen-X video collectors don’t seem merely fixated on the past: they are also trendy adherents of subsequent video novelties, riding the wave of fast capitalism in this most dynamic of late-twentieth-century industries. What explains this generational difference?

It may have something to do with the particular history of video games and the generation that was first raised on them. Computer games began as diversions of the digital engineers who invented Pong, a crude electronic tennis game (1958), and Spacewar!, where dashes of light representing missiles were annihilated with blips of light across a black-and-white TV screen (1961).⁴⁶ It was only in the early 1970s that companies like Magnavox and Atari and later ColecoVision and Mattel’s Intellivision commercialized this technology with digital arcade machines and home consoles and game cartridges. These games defined the generation (of mostly boys) who were five to twelve years old between 1972 and 1983, the year the gaming boom went bust, the market saturated with hundreds of bland lookalike products.⁴⁷

That might have ended the craze and set the stage for the video game to become a site of nostalgia for these boys when they grew to manhood a generation later (as was the pattern with other, earlier forms of commercialized nostalgia). But the video game was quickly revived by the Japanese Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985, with greatly improved graphics, and Nintendo sold $3.4 billion worth of consoles and cartridges by 1990. This began an uninterrupted pulse of periodic innovation in the industry. What made the new video game particularly distinct was that it was popular not only with children: these toys continued to draw consumers into their teens and even young adulthood (often those same males who had played Atari a few years earlier). To be sure, games remained gentle and even cute in the late 1980s, appealing to children with Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog, while sports and strategy games were popular with older youth.48 But subtly the video game was transformed as it “grew up” with boys, offering not only more sophisticated graphics and challenging play but also more fast-paced violence, such as with Street Fighter II (1991) and Mortal Kombat (1992). ⁴⁹ The video-game industry not only offered consumers continuous novelty but succeeded in holding onto them after they had discarded other toys. In 2013, the Entertainment Software Association claimed the mean age of their consumers was thirty-five and of players, thirty.⁵⁰ Of course, these games have become more sophisticated since the 1970s, appealing to older gamers who may still also hold onto their “heritage” games from the 1970s.⁵¹ It seems that a “digital generation” has emerged since the mid-1970s that rather neatly separates the boomers (who matured with TV) from the Gen-Xers and today’s youth, who grew up with video games and recently the Internet.⁵²

Part of this generational difference also manifests in a divergent sense of the past, especially for men. Digital popular culture did not lead to a time-defined nostalgia as did TV, recorded popular music, cars identified by annual model changes, or other markers of previous generations. It is no surprise that collectors of 1970s video games also own their descendants. Fewer are lost in the 1970s than are lost in the 1950s and 1960s because the video-gaming hobby begun in the 1970s has no age “expiration date” and thus was not associated primarily with childhood memory, and thus a source of nostalgia, but carried on through life. The nostalgic male video gamer does not need to cling to the ephemera of his particular childhood to take refuge from the whirl of contemporary fast capitalism (as might the boomer). He embraces both the past and present by never abandoning his childhood.

Despite these recent generational shifts across the communities of “decade collectors,” from those fascinated with the aluminum Christmas trees of the 1950s and the lava lamps from the 1960s to the platform shoes of the 1970s and video games from the 1980s, there remains a common populist appeal. This longing for the consumer goods of the past is more than a fashionable rejection of taste hierarchies (that once produced “refined” collectors of antiques) or even an embrace of cynical, if playful, camp; it reflects a “dedifferentiation” of culture, an acceptance of a welter of styles in art and architecture that reflects the fragmentation of life today. As Susan Stewart notes, the kitsch collector of recent consumer culture has turned the “deep time and narrow space of the antique” into the “narrow time and deep space of the popular.” The goal, she says, is the ironic display of an “overmateriality,” a celebration of superficiality with an effort to find meaning in these goods, a meaning other than that they once had been trendy and thus are witnesses to the “speed of fashion.”53

Still, collecting a particular decade gives people a chance to relive their childhood from the perspective of their thirties, forties, and later. It also provides them a way of saying something about themselves and how they personally relate to a wider, complex world, at least as proud members of the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s generations. As we have seen, this creates community even as it breaks up society. It may be perfectly harmless, but we may still wonder if we couldn’t do better with our memories. Let’s look next at the sights and sounds of commercialized nostalgia in retro TV and old-time records and radio, to see if we can’t come up with answers.