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25 – SORTING THROUGH THE GARBAGE

In 1954, people just took out the trash.

They didn’t think about what was in it. They didn’t have multiple containers, each having a different purpose.

So my parents would need some explanation for the recycling containers that would show up on their front lawn in the 21st century.

Recycling in some form has been around for a very long time. Up until the 1960s, glass bottles for milk and soda/pop went back to the store for a penny or two. And people who endured World War II were well aware of scrap metal and rubber drives to provide materiel for the Allied forces.

But companies moved away from glass – it does have a nasty ability to shatter – and toward plastic, aluminum and cardboard. Deposits virtually disappeared and other forms of packaging showed up in landfills.

The environmental movement and the gas crises of the 1970s helped popularize recycling. The idea was not only to stop the clutter and pollution caused by all that packaging and, at the same time, save money because using recycled material for packaging was cheaper than using virgin material.

So people each week go through the process of sorting. Where I live, bottles and cans go in the green pail, paper stuff in the blue box.

And then the town recycling truck comes every Monday and dumps all of it into the same place.

If they’re going to sort it themselves at the collection facility, why the hell do they make us use separate containers?

Sorry for the tangent. 

Supposedly, recycling saves us money and is helping battle climate change and overcrowded landfills. Those are noble goals – I guess I just wonder why people didn’t think of this back when my parents took the glass bottles back to the store and thought what a pain in the neck that was.

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26 – THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS

(NOTE: Admittedly, I’m biased about this. But at least I didn’t make it No. 1)

The evolution of television news as a window to the world was still in its early stages in 1954.

Both CBS and NBC carried network newscasts that were 15 minutes long, having done so since the late 1940s. The anchor for CBS was Douglas Edwards; for NBC’s “Camel News Caravan,” it was John Cameron Swayze, who puffed away on Camels.

But 1954 was a very important year in TV news.

Just four days after I was born, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy finally responded to Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” March 9 broadcast highly critical of his brutal tactics. 

McCarthy, predictably, tried to turn fire on Murrow, alleging he was tied to communists. He also gave a long-winded statement about the evil of communism without once specifically rebutting any of the points Murrow made.

Murrow’s efforts were a factor in the taking down of McCarthy. They showed the power TV news had on determining the national agenda.

Network newscasts expanded to 30 minutes in the early 1960s and created the image of the powerful anchorman: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds on ABC, and, of course, Walter Cronkite on CBS.

TV began to show events live or within minutes of their occurrence. More remarkable than Cronkite’s emotional delivery of the news that President Kennedy was assassinated was actually watching his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, get shot live at a Dallas police station.

But the idea of 24-hour news seemed unworkable. News wasn’t a moneymaker for the networks and it was expensive to produce.

Two things happened to change that.

First, technology made instant news possible. Cameras that were more mobile and communications satellites that allowed almost instantaneous broadcast from anywhere in the world. 

And second was Ted Turner.

The billboard magnate took advantage of the breakthroughs in technology and the fact that Georgia was a non-union state to first create the WTBS SuperStation, a local operation that was broadcast by cable across the nation.

In 1980, he started Cable News Network, the first all-news TV network, in Atlanta. After some initial struggles – he once sold bumper stickers for $5 to help support the network – CNN became a go-to for breaking news. The Challenger explosion in 1986, the upheaval in China Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1990 all embellished the network’s reputation.

The first effort to challenge CNN, Satellite News Network, failed in the early 1980s. However,  MSNBC and Fox News, both launched in 1996, cut into CNN’s dominance. Both reflected the nation’s growing political polarization, MSNBC on the left, Fox on the right.

But CNN remains the place people turn when some sudden event breaks anywhere in the world. Wars, natural disasters, political upheaval. The network’s reputation – enhanced by some of the bravest and hardest-working people in the history of journalism – brings people back in moments of crisis.

I worked at CNN for 16 years and, even though I’ve been away for almost a decade, I still call it the home team. It’s an idea that was hard to imagine in 1954, but very much on point with the mission that Murrow exemplified 70 years ago.

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27 – WHO NEEDS THE 3Rs?

“School Days” is one of those old songs that everybody seems to know – or at least they know the first few lines. Particularly this part:

“Reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. Taught to the tune of a hick’ry stick.”

Also known as the 3Rs, even though only one of the words actually starts with an R. (NOTE: We addressed the second part of the line in No. 40) Those three subjects have been considered elemental to education for as long as people remember. 

They’re also three subjects that the last 70 years have tried to render obsolete.

Perhaps math is the one that has suffered the most.

As someone who enjoys math more than most people, I loved playing with adding machines at my father’s tire store in the early 1960s. I thought the adding machine was an impressive piece of technology.

But, in 1974, my parents bought me one of the first Texas Instruments calculators. It ran on batteries and was a wonder. And, since I’ve used it on the job, it has corrected vote totals in two elections – a school board race in Evanston and a congressional contest in Michigan.

Calculators are everywhere. I really don’t know how many I have, not to mention the apps on my phone. And when it comes to doing your taxes, do you trust your math skills or the solar-powered calculator you got as a tchotchke at a home fair? Kids even use calculators on tests, including standardized ones.

Sure, you have to know whether you need to use the add or subtract or multiply or divide functions. But that’s it.

Writing was a lot of people’s least favorite subject in school. I never seemed to be able to satisfy either a teacher or my Mom with my penmanship.

Now, I don’t care. My writing is illegible. If I want to jot something down, I can type on any number of devices. 

And there is no way the signature you create on one of those supermarket checkout screens resembles what you would sign with a pen. I’ve stopped trying – a couple of swirly lines seem to do the job.

Reading is the most persistent R. After all, that’s what you’re doing right now.

Except if you’ve got a program that converts text to sound. Then some robotic voice is reading this to you. I’m guessing it doesn’t sound like me, but that’s not the point.

You also don’t have to know how to read to read a book. (that’s not a typo!)

The first audiobooks were developed to help the visually impaired soon after record players became widespread. But the selections were limited – usually somebody, often a service group, read a book after it was published.

When cassettes became popular in the 1970s, publishers got the idea of recording a book at the same time the hardcover was released. Then books would show up on CDs and now they’re available as digital files for play in your car, on an airplane or anywhere else you can think of.

I doubt schools will ever stop teaching the 3Rs. But do you need to know them? Hmm.

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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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