The pace of the fifties seemed slower, almost languid. Social ferment, however, was beginning just beneath this placid surface.
David Halberstam, The Fifties
They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
To understand the free-for-all of the late 1960s, you have to start in the boxy 1950s. It’s a decade that even baby boomers like Greg Laurie know little about, really, even though we lived in it. But the ’50s set the stage to shape the world for all of us today; it’s important to know the history.
It’s complicated. But if you were white and middle class in America, the time period between 1950 and 1960 is often presented as that cheerful decade in which the American family and other institutions provided normalcy after the turmoil of World War II. Americans had come through the hard times of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the horrors of the war years. Now there was a sense of a new wind blowing: American prosperity. Many a man of the Greatest Generation finished college on the GI Bill and went to work in his conservative gray flannel suit, making an average of $4,100 a year. At 5:01 p.m. he’d return to his tidy suburban home, which cost him $22,000, situated on a block full of zippy kids riding bikes with no helmets and dogs running free with no leashes.
Our crew-cut man was met at the front door by his lovely wife, who was likely wearing pearls, a dress, and an apron. She did not work outside the home.1 Wifey had a hot dinner in the oven, courtesy of her new Mixmaster and her electric stove. After meat loaf, mashed potatoes with gravy, green-bean casserole, and strawberry Jell-O, everyone would gather around the rabbit-eared black-and-white TV. It did not have a big screen, but it weighed a ton and took about a week to warm up. The fam would eagerly watch shows like Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which were short on adventure but long on wholesome life lessons. Then everyone would put on their striped pajamas with piping on the lapels, drink a glass of whole milk, and jump into bed. The TV itself went to bed at midnight, signing off with the national anthem playing to scenes of saluting soldiers and a waving American flag. Then the screen went to a rainbow test pattern until it woke up the following morning.
Television’s effect on mainstream baby boomers’ experience was huge. Social critics say that TV homogenized America, just like a big carton of frothy, white milk from cows on steroids. For the first time, persuasive images and cultural “norms” were right there for all to consume, in your own living room, regardless of where you lived. While books, newspapers, and radio targeted regionally or educationally diverse audiences, television story lines and advertisers catered to the lowest common denominator in an effort to target everyone. People in California, Iowa, and the East Coast all saw the same shows and the same advertisements. Television had a nationalizing influence, creating or revealing realities that trumped local, traditional ties to neighborhoods, churches, or ethnic groups.2
In this, television has been called a great equalizer, though it was very selective about who it equalized. In TV Land—with a few rare exceptions—everyone was white.
And on 1950s TV, sex didn’t exist. I Love Lucy’s Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, married in real life, went to bed on-screen in cute little twin beds separated by a chaste nightstand. It was a mystery how little Ricky was ever conceived. Another mainstream message was that it was normal, healthy, and desirable to smoke cigarettes. For example, NBC’s nightly news broadcast peddled Camels relentlessly; everyone knew that Hollywood stars and anyone else who was cool smoked like chimneys all day long.
Life wasn’t all cheerful TV and status quo family life in the suburbs, of course. There were cranky rebels like Jack Kerouac, whose drug- and alcohol-induced rants on life in America emerged from the frenzied pages of On the Road, the countercultural classic of the day. Kerouac and other Beat writers, along with abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, questioned mainstream culture’s prevailing values. Other, lesser-known kindred spirits wore goatees and jaunty French berets, played bongo drums, smoked weed, and hung out in Greenwich Village and other cultural scenes that didn’t care for the 1950s’ conformity, consumerism, and predictability.
Meanwhile, in spite of the great victories of World War II, the world was still a scary place. The worldwide conflict was soon followed by the Korean War of the early 1950s, which killed 37,000 Americans and ended with a demilitarized zone separating communist North Korea from democratic South Korea. A peace agreement was never actually signed; the dark and volatile tensions endure to this day.
In 1949, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin detonated the first Soviet atomic bomb. The race was on to develop a more deadly hydrogen bomb, which the US did in 1952. Tested on a remote atoll in the Pacific Ocean, it created a cloud 100 miles wide and 25 miles high, killing all life on the surrounding islands.
The Soviets surprised the world by detonating their own hydrogen bomb in 1953, and then a bigger, badder one in 1955. Such deadly weapons demanded delivery systems with far more range than conventional airplanes. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth; the message was clear that they now could attack anywhere, at any time. The US launched its own first satellite in 1958.
The Space Race and the Cold War were on. By the end of the 1950s, both the US and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear buildup so even if one side launched an annihilating attack, the other side could retaliate with a similar, obliterating response. The resulting term is still familiar today: mutually assured destruction.
This grim competition trickled down to everyday experience. Any old geezer who was in elementary school in the 1950s can tell you about “bomb drills,” a routine part of school life. These “duck and cover” exercises were designed by the Federal Civil Defense Administration for “emotion management.” In the middle of the school day, a siren would howl and small children, all managing their emotions properly, would dive beneath their little wooden desks, which they were told would protect them in case of nuclear attack.
Right.
The fear of the end of the world at the hand of godless communists was exacerbated by witch hunts at home. Senator Joseph McCarthy embarked on a mission to flush commies from the government and woodwork of American life. His Committee on Un-American Activities reflected an atmosphere of overt threats in the world at large; it fomented hidden fears right here at home. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover maintained secret files on everyone from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the political stars of the Kennedy family to journalists and suspicious Hollywood celebrities. Potential blackmail, fear, and intimidation were political weapons.
The biggest blight on the “innocent” 1950s, however, was the status of race relations in America. The injustices are too many to recount. The Civil War had been fought less than a century earlier; it’s shocking to realize that racial segregation was the law of the land in America, with deep-seated bigotry the attitude of many. Interracial marriage was illegal, underscoring yet again that the notion that African Americans were “separate but equal” was only halfway true.
While legal segregation of schools was abolished by the Supreme Court in 1954, all public segregation would not be banned until 1964. African Americans were known as Negroes, colored people, or other derogatory terms. They were forced to use separate bathrooms, telephone booths, seats on buses, and entrances to movie theaters. An eloquent southern preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King became more and more well known, stirring the hopes of millions with his vision of nonviolent resistance and racial equality. Black churches provided the scriptural language that undergirded the movement. In 1955 a gutsy and faith-filled black woman named Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, when a white man “needed” her seat. Parks’s civil disobedience set a trail that would blaze for many more in the 1960s and onward. But in the ’50s any fruit of the civil rights movement was still a dream, and much blood would be shed for decades to come.
Back in suburbia, mainstream American pop culture hummed right along. War hero Dwight Eisenhower, a smiling grandpa, was shown on TV playing with his grandchildren in the White House. People drove giant cars with cool, colorful fins, enjoying more disposable income than previous decades, and ate fifteen-cent hamburgers at a new restaurant called McDonald’s. Elvis was still in the building; in fact, he’d just released his first hit, “Heartbreak Hotel.” Glamorous stars like Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Rita Hayworth, and Gary Cooper filled the big screen. You could watch them at a drive-in movie theater for twenty-five cents.
God was popular too. In 1957, the Treasury Department started issuing bills emblazoned with the motto “In God We Trust.” Nationwide church membership grew at a faster rate than the general population.3 When CBS News recently conducted a poll asking people to choose a decade to which they’d like to time travel, the nostalgic majority chose the 1950s—a time when marriages, children, churches, and families all boomed.
If these institutions were the cherished norms of the decade, Greg Laurie, born in 1952, didn’t experience any of them. Unlike the TV shows that glorified America’s ideal childhood, his mom was no June Cleaver, and his father didn’t know best.
Greg never knew his father, and his restless mother, Charlene, looked a lot more like Marilyn Monroe than Mrs. Cleaver. She’d run away from her strict, fundamentalist Christian home when she was seventeen, seeking the bright lights of Hollywood. She didn’t hit the big time, but in small-time bars she was a star. Men found her irresistible, like the sailor with strawberry-blond hair she met on the dance floor one night in 1952 in Long Beach, California. Maybe it was a one-night stand; maybe it lasted a week or two. But the sailor was soon gone, and when Charlene discovered she was pregnant, she quickly married a guy named Kim.
Greg was born in December of 1952. As a little boy, he thought Kim was his father. It never made sense to him as to why his “dad,” often drunk, would rage at him, beat him, ignore him, or prefer his two older brothers. It wasn’t until Greg was about forty that he discovered Kim was not his biological father, his “brothers” were not actually bros, and his paternity was a lie.
In between husbands, Charlene and Greg moved around a lot. They lived in motels. Greg was a creative, observant kid, artistically gifted and pretty good at figuring out if adults were sincere or not. In the evenings, Charlene would hang out in clubs while Greg ate a hamburger and drew cartoons. Since he was in elementary school, he wasn’t technically allowed to sit at the bar, but most bartenders liked the little blond artist and bent the rules for him.
The classic Star Wars movies hadn’t been made yet—they were still in a future galaxy far, far away—but many of Greg’s childhood memories feature characters who seemed a lot like aliens from the famous Star Wars bar scene. There was Fuzzy, an adult who was even shorter than Greg. Fuzzy had no hair. He had strong opinions. After a few rounds, he’d usually hold forth to Greg about the proper way to make a tuna fish sandwich. No pickles. The bar was dimly illuminated by shellacked puffer fish whose insides had been scooped out and replaced with lightbulbs. Fishnets hung from the ceiling. An ancient diving helmet sat on the bar like a decapitated human head.
At the end of long evenings at the bar, Charlene wasn’t always steady on her feet. Sometimes there would be a man to help her walk straight, and they’d all head home, wherever home was that month.
Sometimes, when he became inconvenient to Charlene, Greg would live with his grandparents. Mama Stella and Daddy Charles went to church a lot and had a lot of strict rules, which is why their daughter Charlene had run away. But Greg loved his grandparents. As a child, his only exposure to religion was through them. They had a portrait of a pale Jesus on their living room wall. His long, blondish hair was parted in the middle, and he didn’t make eye contact. He was just looking up, up, and away, to some distant place like Heaven.
Greg’s grandparents loved Billy Graham crusades. Unlike that pale Jesus, Billy Graham, through the magic of television, looked right at people when he preached. At the time he was a celebrity, almost like a movie star. He was young and handsome and a friend of the president. Greg thought he was pretty cool, particularly at the end of the crusades. He’d always say, “Just write to me, Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota. That’s all the address you need.”
Who else in the world could you write to with just his name and his town on the envelope? Greg thought. He’s like Santa Claus, care of the North Pole!
What kids like Greg did not realize at the time was that Billy Graham would become the primary religious figure in America for the next six decades. He would be one of the ten most admired men in the US every year for sixty years.
His evangelistic crusades—stadium meetings with singers, testimonies, and Graham’s energized preaching—had been immensely successful in Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, London, and New York. His Hour of Decision radio program was hugely popular. He was written up all the time in Christianity Today, the new magazine he helped found in 1957. He was the standard-bearer for the evangelical movement in America at that time.
And though Graham was the darling of white churchianity, he did not ignore the situation of black Americans. He reached out to Dr. Martin Luther King and other African American pastors. In 1957 he invited Dr. King to New York to discuss the racial situation with him and his colleagues, and to lead Graham’s enormous Madison Square Garden crusade in prayer. Not too many white evangelical preachers were doing that back then.
Graham had critics on all sides. Some didn’t support his racial reconciliation stance. Some felt he didn’t go far enough and should have done so much more for the civil rights movement. Some didn’t care for his friendships with the rich and powerful. But for the most part, both Christians and non-Christians liked Billy Graham. They respected the courage of his convictions, his trademark but natural way of preaching the Bible plainly all over the world, and the way he steadily conducted himself with refreshing moral integrity over the course of his long ministry.
Greg Laurie didn’t know back then that Billy Graham would eventually become his mentor and friend. Nothing really penetrated his mind or heart from Graham’s televised crusades. And Greg knew nothing of the classic 1950s life at the wholesome suburban house with the picket fence. But he did know a lot about cleaning up his mom after she’d passed out again. He knew a lot about fending for himself. And somehow—maybe because of the pixie-dust veneer of that cheerful decade, or perhaps from watching a few too many episodes of Lassie—Greg believed that one day life would be much, much better.