Author Archives: Mark M. Meinero

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28 – BABY, IT’S COLD INSIDE

Most Americans did not have air conditioning in their home in 1954. Most Americans do now.

The adoption of home air conditioning was beginning in the 1950s. The first domestic units, the kind that we think of as fitting in a window, were developed in the 1930s. Their cost was prohibitive – only a few really wealthy folks even considered getting one. 

If you wanted to cool off, you could go to the movies – theaters prominently advertised the fact that they had cooling systems inside.

But the industry worked hard to drive those costs down. By the late 1940s, air conditioning was becoming more affordable.

My parents did not have any kind of air conditioner until the 1980s. Their home, built in the 1920s, was not well-equipped for the electricity drain of the big AC units – and that was the case with a lot of older homes.

But newer homes and apartments began to be “fitted” for AC. I remember seeing an apartment building going up across the street from the house apartment we rented in Queens and wondering what those gray rectangles below some windows were for. 

Soon we knew. Names like Carrier, Friedrich and Emerson would show up on those boxes indicating that AC units of those brands were either in there or about to be. For older buildings and those that weren’t being outfitted for AC, window air conditioners became smaller and more portable. 

And homes began including something even better: central air conditioning. It requires a couple of big power-eating units and a lot of ducts, but it is a lifesaver – especially in warmer parts of the country such as in the South.

In 2022, the latest data available from the Department of Energy, 87% of American homes now have some form of air conditioning. And just about every car sold in the nation has AC as standard equipment – a big change from when everyone rolled the windows down and hoped for a breeze.

The concern isn’t so much cooling people off as in not warming the planet any further. 

There have been several regulations regarding chemicals used in air conditioning. Most prominently, every nation in the world banned chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, because of how incredibly proficient at destroying ozone in the atmosphere.

These arguments would have seemed strange to a generation that found keeping cool a struggle. The problem of keeping the planet cool got punted to those of us in the 21st century.

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29 – $6 FOR A CUP OF COFFEE!

It wasn’t that Starbucks invented expensive cups of coffee – there have been coffee shops and cafes around the world for well over a century.

But, in 1954, you couldn’t get an expensive cup of coffee on every street in midtown Manhattan, every strip mall in Southern California or every other town everywhere else.

When you think about it, what Starbucks did is pretty remarkable.

Before it showed up, you picked up a cup of coffee at the place where you got breakfast – unless you made breakfast at home. If you brought coffee into work, it was from a cart on the street or a Thermos from home. You paid $1 tops.

And it was always coffee. Not dark roast or light roast or Sumatra or cappuccino with foam.

It also came in small, medium and large.

Starbucks made people drink lattes that cost $6 each. It mixed in expresso shots or vanilla syrup. It decorated the foam at the top of the cup. It fresh ground the beans in the store. It started the autumn pumpkin spice craze. And it made you use some contrived Italian name to order it. If you can get out of there without spending $10, consider yourself lucky.

When I worked at CNN’s New York headquarters in Columbus Circle, there was a Starbucks across from the employee entrance on W. 58th Street. There was one on the other side of the Time Warner Center complex on the corner of W. 60th and Broadway. There was other on the next block over at Ninth Avenue and W. 59th Street.

And, in case you missed any of them, there was a Starbucks-franchised coffee stand outside the building’s 10th floor cafeteria.

People would come into the office after stopping for a frappuccino grande or a venti Americano. The cup was ubiquitous, a sign that the drinker was above that sludge in the break room.

Soon, little coffee stands tried to up their game, creating many of the same drinks that drew people to Starbucks. And coffee-and-pastry places sprang up to challenge: Paris Baguette, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Blue Bottle, Peet’s. 

And, of course, the other caffeine-and-sugar fixture of our times: Dunkin’. They’ve been around forever, but mainly for the doughnuts – oops, donuts. The quality of the pastry has declined over the years as the emphasis fell on drinks.

I do not know if my father ever went to a Starbucks. My mother didn’t drink coffee, but I got her hooked on the chai tea latte. Something she loved, but never had, until there were Starbucks even in her hometown.

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30 – SHOCKED, SHOCKED

Shoeless Joe Jackson, banned from baseball since 1920 because of his role in the Black Sox gambling scandal, died a little more than two years before I was born.

The reason for his banishment – gambling – lives gloriously in the 21st century in every ballpark in the major leagues.

In fact, in this country, states that don’t allow gambling of any kind in 2024 are almost as rare (Hawaii and Utah – one I understand, one I don’t) as states that allowed gambling other than horse racing in 1954 (Nevada and Maryland).

Gambling, like other vices, was a tool of the devil to the religious types that held sway in much of the 20th century. People in cities, on the other hand, weren’t quite as puritanical – putting up their money on everything from church raffles to the final three numbers of the race track take that day (a.k.a. Numbers).

Las Vegas set the tone for the rise of gambling, becoming a mecca for players, particularly after World War II. Casinos sprang up along The Strip, in the center of the small city and throughout Nevada. And it was in Las Vegas and Reno that you could bet on sporting events around the world.

The only thing you couldn’t put your money on – and still can’t in Nevada – is a state lottery. The commonwealth of Puerto Rico had the only one in the United States in 1954; the first state to get one was New Hampshire, in 1964. You filled your name and address on a slip of paper, gave the merchant $1, and there was a chance you could win as much as $100,000!

Other states saw how New Hampshire’s lottery took off and decided they needed one, too. The games varied. The most common was a number draw, known to most as a lotto. But there were also scratch-off games – instant gratification for someone in a wagering mood.

The lotto games expanded into two multi-state bonanzas: Powerball and Mega Millions. Jackpots reached as high as $2 billion.

As for casinos, Las Vegas’ success didn’t go unnoticed. In 1977, casinos opened in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Throughout the 1980s, Native American tribes began seeing betting parlors as a way to raise funds to improve services and to provide employment for their people.

Then states and corporations just straight out built casinos. The only states without casinos of any kind are Hawaii and Utah (again) as well as South Carolina.

But the big shocker to people in 1954 would be the proliferation of sports betting and its embrace by the major competitive sports.

The “throwing” of the 1919 World Series by the Chicago White Sox made baseball and – as they became popular – football, basketball and hockey almost evangelical about the sin of gambling. If you look at pictures of the scoreboards in ballparks and arenas of the 1950s and 1960s, you see the words “NO BETTING ALLOWED” a lot.

In 1989, Major League Baseball banned Pete Rose, the all-time leader in base hits, after it was found he bet on his own team when he managed the Cincinnati Reds.

But the fact is that sports betting was like marijuana smoking – it might have been against the law, but a lot of people did it anyway. Newspapers published the point spread for NFL games and there were people – sometimes criminal gangs – who made a fortune every Sunday.

Another form that blossomed was fantasy sports. People would draft teams of players in a sport, compile their statistics and then pay out according to who did best overall.

The surge in legalized sports betting began in the last decade following a Supreme Court ruling that threw out a law barring it for sports other than horse racing, dog racing and jai alai – three sports that virtually died when people could bet on the major sports.

At the same time, online betting blossomed. You could now bet on an app with the new colossi of sports gambling: Draft Kings, Fan Duel, MGM.

And the major sports adhered to the old saying “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” 

Which is why baseball broadcasts begin with the bets of the day. Or ads for sports betting show up on stadium walls and scoreboards. Or why Las Vegas already has major sports teams and is in line to get a baseball team – the Athletics – in three years.

What people in 1954 – three years removed from a point-shaving scandal that almost destroyed college basketball before it could grow – would ask is this: How do you protect the integrity of a sport if gambling is condoned?

I wouldn’t want to wager on the outcome.

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31 – ZEBRA STRIPES

The first question someone time-traveling from 1954 to 2024 might ask is why everything has a box of black lines on it.

Barcodes were actually invented in the early 1950s, before I was born. But no one could figure out what to do with them. The idea, as is the case now, was to scan them to identify parts and equipment. But they didn’t catch on.

Until somebody figured out that they could solve the problem of what the actual price was for something bought at a supermarket.

Before that, it was those stupid stickers or those price stamps. Sometimes, there would be more than one, and the shopper had to figure out which one was right.

Then the shopper would take a cart full of stickered and stamped groceries and household products to the cash register, wait on a long line, get to the beleaguered cashier looking all over each product for the price, who would then shout to the manager when there was a missing sticker or two prices stamped on the package and, when all that was done, handing the tired shopper a narrow strip of paper with a bunch of printed prices but little or no identification of what price went with which item.

Does that sound about right to you? 

With barcodes, also called UPCs, the cashier scanned the product and rang up items a lot faster. The receipt showed what the price was for the specific product.

That led to self-checkout – the idea that the shopper him or herself could scan the products and pay without benefit of a cashier.

Barcodes were used for tickets to events, the original intention of identifying inventory and even paying tolls and giving out tickets on highways.

Their cousins are the square-shaped, odd-patterned QR code, which is used to link to restaurant menus, videos promoting a resort hotel, the guide to a museum or any number of things.

The barcode is, in reality, the universal language of the 21st century. That would have been a real head scratcher 70 years ago.

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32 – IF A DOCTOR SAYS IT’S OK, IT MUST BE OK

In the waiting room where my Dad hung out as I was being born, he might have leafed through a magazine with the ad below: 

He wouldn’t have given it – or any of the claims Rosalind Russell makes in the ad – a second thought.

People kinda thought smoking was bad. But in 1954, there was no public evidence to link smoking to diseases like lung cancer and emphysema.

This ad, however, was one of the last of its kind. Earlier ads proclaimed that doctors recommended certain cigarette brands – and that was quickly becoming untrue.

My father was a regular smoker in 1954. Camel was his brand. And, in something that might shock my siblings if they read this, I actually saw our mother smoke a cigarette in our living room.

But by 1961, my Dad had given up the cigarettes, starting an 18-year devotion to cigars as a “healthier” option. I never saw my Mom smoke again.

In January 1964, 60 years ago, the Surgeon General of the United States issued a landmark report that changed the way Americans looked at cigarettes. Dr. Luther Terry said cigarette smoking was a cause of lung cancer for men and probably a cause for women. He also said it was a probable cause for chronic bronchitis.

That was the beginning of a major change in the relationship between Americans and smoking. Warning labels on cigarette packages and anti-smoking ads. Big taxes on tobacco. The end of cigarette advertising, first on TV and radio, then in print. Banning smoking in public places. 

Instead of glamorous – the kind of thing Rosalind Russell or, another star of a 1954 cigarette ad, Ronald Reagan would do – it was now vulgar and unappealing.

Nevertheless, it has taken a long time to bring smoking rates down. And the tobacco industry isn’t going without a fight – introducing vaping, a way to smoke without burning dried leaves. It’s still what the tough kids do to prove themselves.

What it’s not – filtered or otherwise – is healthy. Despite what Auntie Mame might say.

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33 – JUST THROW ANYTHING ON

At least once a year, I watch what I think is the most famous film clip of the year I was born: Willie Mays’ spectacular catch in game one of the 1954 World Series.

The most amazing thing about it is, well, the catch itself. (Here it is:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vrsg_-dV7Q

The other amazing thing, to me, is in the last frame of this particular clip.

The fact that everybody in the crowd sitting in New York’s Polo Grounds is wearing a jacket, a shirt and tie, or both.

I haven’t worn a tie to a baseball game since I covered Game 5 of the 1978 World Series in Yankee Stadium. That’s because I came from a friend’s wedding. I was the only reporter doing so.

Sometime between the 1950s and 1970s, people stopped dressing up all the time. Because when you look at films from that era, ballgames were not the only things that people wore what we now refer to “dress clothes.”

People wore dress clothes to the park. People wore dress clothes to the theater. Women dressed up to do housework. 

Where you really notice it is on an airplane. Everybody, even the kids, used to dress up to fly somewhere.

The only people wearing dress clothes on the last flight I took were the flight attendants. Even they were somewhat casual.

Of course, another explanation for that is that you practically need to undress to get past security. But that’s a different matter.

I’m not sure why casual became the way to dress. TV? Rock and roll? It’s a waste of time and energy? The rise of designer name clothing?

Your guess is as good as mine.

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34 – YEAH, BABY

If you asked my parents in 1954 where babies come from, I wager they’d be more likely to believe they were delivered by a stork than what some of the actual answers are today.

In 1954, if a couple was unable to have children of their own or a woman wanted a child without engaging in sex with a man, tough. The only way they could be parents would be to adopt – and that was pretty much not an option for a single person, man or woman. Many couples did, however, to their everlasting joy.

But, in 1978, British researchers announced the birth of Louise Joy Brown, the first person conceived by in vitro fertilization, in which sperm and egg are fertilized outside the egg. In Brown’s case, that was a Petri dish – not, as popularly described, in a test tube.

This breakthrough in assisted reproduction led to others.

Couples who had trouble with fertility or the physical ability to conceive children now could. Women could have sperm implanted from an anonymous donor and bear a child of their own. 

Women structurally incapable of carrying a child to term could have a laboratory-fertilized embryo – often frozen – implanted in another woman who could then deliver the baby. Gay couples who wanted to be fathers could do so.

Woman who wanted children but also wanted a career so that they could provide for those kids were able to freeze embryos for a time when they more ready to be mothers.

There were moral questions raised at first. The man who became Pope John Paul I (who died a month after investiture) worried that women could be reduced to becoming “baby factories.” But he also expressed joy for the families that so wanted to bring life into the world that they would try something like this.

In vitro fertilization, though, is not easy, even after 46 years. There’s a high failure rate. There’s a high miscarriage rate. It is an expensive proposition. 

As a result, there is a lot of heartbreak.

Adding to it, just this year, were idiot Alabama judges who ruled that frozen embryos are people – and that destroying them, as sometimes needs to be done as part of the process, is akin to murder. It’s part of the extreme right-wing effort to demonize anything that allows a woman to make a choice as to whether they should or shouldn’t have children.

The ruling has led to confusion and dismay among Alabama families just trying to be happy.

My parents would probably be shocked by the idea of in vitro fertilization. But they’d be horrified that anyone who would deny would-be Moms and Dads the joy they experienced from their four children.

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35 – NO BABY

The year 1954 was in the heart of what we now refer to as the Baby Boom – the vast generation of children born after soldiers returned home from World War II.

For the most part, the women who bore those children – my mother among them – wanted to do so.

But, 70 years ago, there were few options for any woman who either wanted to enjoy sexual activity with men or, more darkly, endured nonconsensual sex.

The idea of birth control dated back to the 19th century, when groups formed in the U.S. and Britain to promote the idea of family planning. Margaret Sanger, who opened the first birth control clinic in this country, was 74 years old in 1954 and funding development of medical methods of contraception. 

Those medical methods – in the form of hormonal pills taken by women on a daily basis – first surfaced in the 1960s.

There was one problem: The disapproval of large swatches of society.

Sanger, herself, was arrested for opening those clinics and spreading information about contraception. Religions – in particular, the Roman Catholic Church – condemned birth control as being against God’s will.

In the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, by a 7-2 margin, that government prohibition of contraception information was unconstitutional. The ruling opened the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and made family planning a reality for most Americans.

At the same time, circumstances contributed to the movement to legalize abortion.

It’s not as if there weren’t any abortions before 1973. It’s just that they were illegal. There were doctors who performed them in secret. There were also women forced to do terrible things to themselves, sometimes proving fatal, in order to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy,

And there were reasons besides an accidental pregnancy. For instance, in the early 1960s, women were prescribed a drug aimed at mitigating the discomfort than accompanies getting pregnant. 

The problem was the drug, Thalidomide, deformed the fetuses. Children were being born with defects that made for some very depressing photos on the pages of Life magazine.

In other instances, women developed life-threatening complications, and they and their families faced the horrible choice of delivering a possibly unhealthy baby or letting the woman who bore that child suffer and possibly die.

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to legalize some abortions – in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother or fetus. Three years later, New York became the first state to allow abortion for whatever reason a woman gave.

Then, of course, came Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion for whatever reason throughout the United States. The Supreme Court voted 7-2, with justices appointed by both political parties of the issue on both sides.

Women could choose to terminate a pregnancy or use a method of birth control that prevented one. That should have been the happy ending.

It wasn’t.

The forces that worked to ban birth control and abortion since the 19th century – mostly religious groups – gathered strength. The Republican Party – despite the fact that four of the seven votes for Roe were justices appointed by Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon – became a rallying point for those who wanted the decision overturned.

In 2022, with six Republican-appointed justices – three of them picked by Donald Trump – on the Court, Roe v. Wade and another case were overturned. Abortion was no longer legal everywhere. In some states, it was pretty much illegal.

One of those justices, Clarence Thomas, suggested that the Griswold ruling legalizing birth control should also be reconsidered.

This would all have been bewildering to my parents in 1954, But my mother lived to see a lot of this happen and fully supported the idea that a woman has the right to choose what she does with her body.

She would be really upset if she saw the current situation. 

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36 – BOW, WOW

Dogs were “man’s best friend” in 1954, and there were plenty of cats around as well. 

But the relationship between people and animals, both wild and domesticated ones, has widened considerably in the last 70 years.

One example came in the fall of ’54. That was when two television dramas, “Lassie” on CBS and “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin” on NBC, debuted. While Rin Tin Tin only lasted a few years, Lassie was a Sunday night family fixture into the 1970s.

That was followed by the advent of real-life animal shows and films. Walt Disney championed live-action films with animal characters. And NBC aired “Wild Kingdom,” animal scenes filmed around the world and hosted by Lincoln Park Zoo director Marlin Perkins and, later, zoologist Jim Fowler.

The prevalence of animal heroes in the media made people more sympathetic to all forms of animal life. And it manifested itself in different ways.

The pet industry exploded, with superstores like Petco and PetSmart, and online merchants such as Chewy, not to mention whole aisles in big supermarkets. Communities set aside areas as dog parks, where canines could mingle with others of their species. Baseball teams created “Bark at the Park” so that dogs and fans could cheer their teams.

With non-pets, the depiction of animals’ lives inspired the creation of organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, and the Humane Society of America, both joining the long-standing American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

And lots of people decided that part of that sentiment included not eating animals in any way, shape or form. Veganism, which not only forsook meat but any product that originated from an animal (i.e. honey, milk), was adopted by a large segment of the population, with such noted adherents as Paul McCartney and Bill Clinton.

My parents weren’t pet lovers (my Dad called every dog he saw Rex Cecil, as if it’s a real name) – and I imagine that’s a factor as to why I’m not either (although being bitten by dogs twice and attacked other times didn’t help). I think they probably would be surprised to the extent that animal loving has become so prevalent in society. 

But they probably wouldn’t bark too much about it.

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37 – FADE AWAY

Of course Alzheimer’s disease existed in 1954. 

It’s just that the people you and I think of as having the disease wouldn’t have had it back then. Or at least be able to say they had Alzheimer’s.

Until the 1970s, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was limited to people in their 40s, 50s and 60s who experienced memory loss and other signs of dementia.

But once the definition changed, it turned out that the majority of elderly people diagnosed with dementia had Alzheimer’s. 

It also turned out that, with a population that was living longer, there were so many more cases.  

One of them would be my father. 

So my family and 6 million other American families understand, in a way people just didn’t 70 years ago, how devastating Alzheimer’s is. It exploded into our consciousness with all the pain a disease can deliver. And if affects one in 16 people over the age of 65, according to the National Institute on Aging.

My father passed away seven years ago today. I’ve tried to block out the memories of his last years and focus on what made him great – his sense of humor, his ability to tell a story, his way with words and the strength of his love and devotion to his family.

But as I and my peers reach these later years, the fear of Alzheimer’s gets more real. I’m not sure how to stop it – we keep hoping for a real cure. But I sure as hell am going to try.

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