torry Lakota, but Ricky Nelson's only claim to fame was that he was another guy who looked kind of like Elvis. he had no talent, and his totally stone faced covers of songs that people like Fats Domino made hits of was pathetic. The only thing good that I can say about him is that Ozzie Nelson created the world's first music video with this song (skip to the middle of the video. It has two versions of the song. The second one was the first music video as it came to be known):
I remember all of the 50's and, as it has been posted here, they sucked. The conformity required of the time was enough to label you a juvenile delinquent if you wore a pair of jeans to school (in fact, they were banned). The commie witch hunt was completely out of control, and the country was definitely leaning toward fascism. Even JFK was telling us to build fallout shelters. I grew up in a safe, segregated white Anglo-Saxon suburban environment in the deep South. Blacks were invisible, if they existed at all, Nobody wanted to live anywhere near a Jew, and even Catholics were only barely tolerated. The KKK was having public cross burnings on Stone Mountain, while somebody blew up a bomb in front of the Jewish Temple on Peachtree Street. The only black guy who worked in the grocery I worked in was fired for drinking out of the water cooler, without using his cup. My little suburban paradise was a Cleaver family dream, but behind the scenes, every house had a secret. The teenaged kid down the street who was supposed to be visiting grandma, was actually in Mexico getting an abortion. The doctor across the street beat is wife regularly. The lady next door had a drinking problem, and us kids would raid her trash cans for liquor bottles for target practice with our BB guns. My brother was arrested for "Occupying a dive", which was actually a coffee house where beatniks read poetry. there was no alcohol or drugs found in the raid. McCarthy was happily destroying careers everywhere, until everybody had had enough. One of my classmates and neighbors shot himself as the cops were coming to arrest him for being part of a car theft ring. My brother was forced to marry the girl he got pregnant, which marriage only lasted 6 years. my step father was an alcoholic, so none of my friends ever saw the inside of my house.
The 1950's was nothing but a façade. The main difference between then and today was that everything unpleasant was hidden. It still existed.
I still remember a school bus stopping in front of a black shanty town across the street from my high school, to pick up kids and bussing them to a "colored school" 5 miles away. I did not see a black face in school until my freshman year in college, and then there were only 3 of them out of 10,000 students. Oh, and BTW, the only reason that girls went to college was to catch a husband.
