In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy white time. Brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides. You take the rest — my cue to wander away to the sidelines, to wander away.
In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?'
West Side Story was terribly important because of the style of the dancing and the gangs of New York.
I hitchhiked to Miami in 1953, and there were oranges laying on the road, black shantytowns, and marinas with nice boats. The museums were virtually empty.
I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.
In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the 'Feminine Mystique.'
I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.
When I was 15 years old in 1955, I heard of Rosa Parks. I heard the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. on our radio.
Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.
I'd read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: 'I want to be part of that.'
Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.
Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'
Looking at photographs of New York in 1952, you find a powerfully pre-Eisenhower era - sagging, tired, distressed - and the palette is slightly dissonant.
I suspect most likely that more Nazis came to America. I was a student at Harvard during the early 1950s. There was practically no Jewish faculty there.
I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time.
When you think of the later '50s and 'Far From Heaven' and Eisenhower and Sirk, you think of that Hollywood panache and gloss to American middle-class life.
Just personally, I've been attached to 'On the Road' since 2007 and it was the greatest thing in my life when I got cast in it. I couldn't believe it. When I was 17 and read the book, I looked it up on IMDb and it said that Francis Ford Coppola was going to direct it.
I really like The Catcher in the Rye a lot.
Very few teachers or leaders in my small Michigan community ever discussed the issue of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' and certainly no one came to the 1951 Novel's defense.
In the 'Mad Men' era, the archetypal dad came home; put down his briefcase; received pipe, Manhattan, roast beef, potatoes, key-lime pie; and was - apparently - content.
I remember reading 'Catcher in the Rye,' but I don't think I got it.
I've always been drawn to the American style in the late '50s and '60s.
My childhood is completely... when I look back, it was '50s in New York, upper-middle class, it was completely idyllic and golden and wonderful - sweet in every way.
I started with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee and Lou Gossett, Jr. and the rest of the wonderful cast of 'A Raisin In The Sun.' We were directed by the great Lloyd Richards. The play was written by the wonderful Lorraine Hansberry, and it was produced by Phil Rose. That's where my start was, so... not a bad way to start.
I really liked 'Walk The Line,' and I really liked 'Girl Interrupted,' and I really liked '3:10 To Yuma.'
