What Was it Like at the Start of the Sixties?

The Way it Was

A Corner of the Universe is set in 1960, the start of the sixties. The 1960s are known as a decade of major change in America, but in the exact year of Hattie’s twelfth birthday, much of America still reflected the way of life that the coming turbulence would overthrow.

The 1950s were a time of such widespread cultural conformity that its young adults became known as the “Silent Generation.” These children of Depression and war, now living in the age of global tension, were understandably quite restrained in their self-expression. America was engaged in a tense competition with the communist Soviet Union to see which could attain the most powerful weapons, the most advanced technology, and control of various governments through out the world. Against the ominous backdrop of Soviet aggression, threats of nuclear annihilation, and supposed communist infiltration, American youth amused themselves through such activities as hula-hooping and seeing how many people could fit in a phone booth. Yet seeds of change were also sown during this time, and by 1960 they were beginning to bear fruit.

The Supreme Court’s decision to require school desegregation in 1954 and Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus galvanized the civil rights movement. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., the movement was fully underway by 1960. By 1965, the movement had achieved major reforms, including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and increased enforcement of desegregation.

American culture began to change as well, pushed by the young baby boomers. John F. Kennedy demonstrated the power of television by soundly defeating his rival, Richard M. Nixon, in the first televised presidential debate. (He later won the election narrowly). But that medium itself was changing: 1954 saw the first color TV broadcast, although the transition to color occurred gradually through the 1960s as color TV sets became more affordable.

Elvis Presley and the advent of rock ’n roll showed people that there’s more to fun than cramming into phone booths. Elsewhere in the music world, 1959 saw the release of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album of all time. Mattel released the Barbie doll in 1959, but she would have to wait until 1965 for bendable legs. Even food was changing: McDonald’s opened its first franchise in 1955 and fast food began its spread throughout the country.

In quiet Millerton, Hattie experiences these nationwide tensions and changes on a personal scale as she begins to examine the assumptions of her family and community and speak up about her ideas and values. Here are some of the cultural events and influences Hattie experiences throughout the book:

Mind Your Manners!

Nana epitomizes the focus on propriety throughout the 1950s. Her proper manners and speech, her insistence that Hattie wear gloves on occasions like visits to church and Girls’ Lunch, and her disapproval of the boarding house and the carnival all stem from her firm belief in the way one “ought” to comport oneself.

A leading manners expert of the day, Emily Post, had published her first book on the subject, Etiquette, in 1922. It sold over a million copies and was an established reference by the 1950s. In the chapter “The Kindergarten of Etiquette,” Ms. Post instructed such things as, “Terrapin bones, fish bones, and grape seed must be eaten quite bare and clean in the mouth, and removed one at a time between finger and thumb. All spitting out of bones and pits into the plate is disgusting.”

Coincidentally, the manners maven herself died in September 1960.

Everybody Loves Lucy

Adam quotes frequently from the popular TV show I Love Lucy. In this early sitcom, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo (played by real-life husband and wife Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz) live downstairs from their landlords and best friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz, in an apartment in New York City. Lucy’s constant schemes and subsequent disasters provided enough comic fodder to hook millions of viewers. I Love Lucy first aired in October 1951, and by October 1952 it had the largest audience of any TV program in the country. Americans loved spirited Lucy and the adventures that took the cast from New York to Hollywood and all across Europe. The show ended in May 1957, but reruns and a few specially produced episodes kept it on CBS primetime until 1960. Reruns of I Love Lucy are still popular all over the world. Co-stars Ball and Arnaz divorced in the spring of 1960.

Hattie also refers to a TV cutie she admires, Dobie Gillis. This character was the star of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, about a young man in a small town in search of a girlfriend. The show aired from 1959 until 1966.

The Carnival Comes to Town

By 1960, traveling carnivals were on the wane, but their deep-seeded presence in small-town America and their sense of adventure and imagination continued to stir up excitement wherever they appeared. Some historians trace the roots of modern traveling carnivals back to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, when various traveling acts met and decided to band together into a single show. Carnivals proliferated from then on, with more than three hundred performing in the late 1930s. Most carnivals included a midway filled with rides, lights, concession stands, and games of chance or skill, and a side show, or “freak show,” which included people, animals, and objects with unusual characteristics (either real or constructed).

As evidenced by Nana’s distaste, carnivals suffered from a shady reputation. The nomadic carnival lifestyle, forever moving from place to place without establishing roots in any one town, and the suspicion among townspeople that the games were fixed and the freaks likely artificial stirred up hostility and distrust against the “carnies.”

But as Hattie learns through her friendship with Leila, such generalizations are unreliable. For the carnies, traveling and performing was a time-honored way of life. Extended families often performed with the same carnival, and the children attended correspondence school, as Leila does, to get their education while learning the family business.

Round and Round We Go

A star attraction at any carnival, the Ferris wheel is named after George Washington Gale Ferris, who designed the first modern wheel for the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Ferris’s engineering marvel spanned a massive 75-meter (250 foot) diameter, and its 36 cars each accommodated 60 people at a time. The ride took twenty minutes and sent each car around the 825-foot perimeter two times.

Prior to the Ferris wheel, a simpler contraption known as an “ups and downs” or a “pleasure wheel” offered riders a similar experience on a smaller scale. Pleasure wheels were generally operated by one or two men turning a crank. The 1893 Ferris wheel, by contrast, was powered by two 1000-horsepower reversible engines.

As impressive as audiences found the Ferris wheel, George Ferris’s wonder proved too impractical for a traveling exhibition. To transport it, put it up, and take it down required much time and expertise, so carnivals incorporated smaller models into their midways. The system of gears, belts, and pulleys that controls the Ferris wheel’s movement can often jam up, so it was not unusual for people to be left swinging in the wind for some time during their ride.

Shall We Dance?

When Nana organizes the Summer Cotillion for the eleven-and twelve-year-olds in Millerton, she is not talking about a modern-day middle school dance. At a cotillion, young people partner for formal couples dances, such as the waltz or the fox trot. Often, students learned the steps during physical education class at school. Attire would be quite formal, similar to prom-wear today, and Nana would be pleased to see the prevalence of white gloves adorning the young ladies. The whole affair was carefully structured, with chaperones, prescribed dances, and refreshments.

She’s Not Just an Actress … She’s a Drink, Too

At Nana and Papa’s house, Hattie and Adam are served Shirley Temples when the grown-ups imbibe. To make a Shirley Temple, mix ginger ale with a dash of grenadine (a syrup made from pomegranates) and add a maraschino cherry. The drink is named after the child movie star who rocketed into the affections of the American people during her illustrious acting career. Shirley Temple was born April 23, 1928, and appeared in her first film at the age of three. Her golden curls and dimples cheered up America during the Depression. According to legend, she drank the ginger ale/grenadine drink at her movie premieres, and now we call the mixture by her name. Later in life, Shirley Temple served as an ambassador to Ghana, and then to Czechoslovakia.

Room and Board

At a boardinghouse, along with lodging, the owners provide communal meals for their tenants. The term “board” comes from an archaic usage of the word, meaning “table” or, more specifically, “a table with a meal on it.” There is a long tradition of boardinghouses in this country, and there are a few still active today. In the nineteenth century, some country people who came to the cities looking for work moved into boardinghouses. These migrants lived alone and worked long days. In some cases, like the textile mills in New England, the factories ran the boarding houses, too, enabling the owners to keep track of their employees off the job as well as on.

Nana’s staid disapproval of the Owen boarding house may be rooted in the 1950s elevation of the idea of home. To be forced to open one’s private home to commerce struck Nana as a sign of failure.

Home Movies

Home movies have been steadily gaining steam since the technology was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1923, the Eastman Kodak company produced a more affordable, easier-to-use film gauge, the 16 millimeter. Despite this advance, the camera remained a challenge (the filmmaker had to turn the camera’s crank at a rate of two rotations per second for the entire time he or she was filming), and it still cost almost two-thirds the price of a car!

The earliest film Hattie refers to in the story is from 1945, of her parents’ wedding day. By that time, and through the 1950s, Hattie’s father was probably using 8-millimeter film, an innovation from the 1980s. A standard reel was about four minutes long, which required fifty feet of film. The millimeter measurement refers to the width of the film, so at a narrower width, each frame took up less physical space.

Although home movie-making became progressively more accessible in terms of skill and cost, it was not until 1965 that the technology grew simple enough for a true amateur. In that year, Kodak released the Super-8, a loadable cartridge which allowed pretty much everyone to feel comfortable and successful at filming. Later, videotape cameras and digitial video would replace this technology, although the spirit of capturing family members doing strange, meaningful, ordinary, or embarrassing things remained the same.