A 1950s Christmas
About 15 minutes south of my hometown lies the town of
Park Forest, Illinois. Park Forest has the distinction of being America's very first fully-planned post-WWII suburb. (Many believe
Levittown, New York to be the first post-war suburb, but Levittown was actually just a subdivision.) Park Forest and Levittown represented a whole new sociological phenomenon when it came to communities. As sociological big-wig Studs Terkel noted:
"The suburb, until [about 1946], had been the exclusive domain of the 'upper class.' It was where the rich lived. The rest of us were neighborhood folk. At war's end, a new kind of suburb came into being. . . . Thanks to the GI bill, two new names were added to American folksay: Levittown and Park Forest.
"A new middle class had emerged. Until now, the great many, even before the Depression, had had to scuffle from one payday to the next. . . . [Before there had only been one] car on the block. Now everybody was getting a car. Oh, it was exciting."
--Studs Terkel, The Good War (copied off that most-definitive source, Wikipedia)
Park Forest was also made famous in author William Whyte's
The Organization Man, which looked at how conformity to the organization became more important than individualism in the 1950s. A huge part of the book's research looked to the citizens of Park Forest for a glimpse into the Organization Man's home life.
The town is also featured in the "America on the Move" exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum.
The first homes to be constructed in Park Forest were single-family rental townhouses. Construction began in 1946, and the first tenants came together for a town hall meeting in a tent on November 27, 1948, which is the day before my mom was born. It's strange to think of a town being that young.
At that first meeting, the new residents were encouraged to set up their own town government. These residents are often described as "pioneers," starting a whole new town from scratch, often far from their extended families. They very quickly set up schools, churches, and shopping areas. Apparently everything was muddy for awhile, a situation common in brand-new GI towns.
To educate future generations about Park Forest's unique history, the Park Forest Historical Society maintains the
1950s Park Forest House Museum in one of the original rental townhouses. The house is set up to look like a young family lives there in the early 1950s. All appliances, dishes, toys, and clothes are accurate to the period.
The house is decorated with 50s-era decorations at Christmas. Nathan and I were able to visit the house yesterday, and, since we were the only ones there, we got a private tour.
The first thing that strikes you is how small the house is. The new homes in Park Forest generally represented the standard of living that families aspired to in the postwar era, which means the standard of living sure has changed. When I was growing up, the thing to do was to add on to your postwar suburban home, because those tiny homes that once provided ample space for an entire family suddenly seemed totally inadequate. My grandmother added another bedroom onto her house, and then turned my dad's childhood bedroom into a bathroom--and not even a particularly large bathroom, by today's standards.
Here's an exterior shot of the museum:
We first visited the kitchen, where I told Nathan about the milkman:
Or you could just read that helpful children's book there, Milkman Bill.
It was around this time that Nathan rudely announced to the docent, "I don't like this house at all."
I, however, was intrigued. Look at this refrigerator! The tiny little part in the upper-right-hand corner there is the entire freezer! They had the ice cube tray with the little handle that cuts the ice.
I was also interested to see S&H Green Stamps, which I had always heard about:
And what lovely wall decor a cake pan makes!
The hand sanitizer is not historically accurate.
Here are some 1950s toys:
My dad had talked about American Plastic Bricks, but I didn't know exactly what they were. I guess they're like a precursor to Legos:
What seems odd to me is that even the toys we still have, like Tinker Toys, came in smaller containers. I guess everything is bigger now.
One of the two bedrooms is set up to look like a classroom, to commemorate the town's first school, which was housed in one of the rental units until a permanent school could be built. Nathan was intrigued by this dollhouse in the schoolroom:
And he also liked this globe piggy bank. I'm surprised it isn't just America and the Soviet Union on there:
He also thought this paper Santa was cool:
The desks were the kind with attached chairs and very heavy tops that lifted up. Nathan thought they were intriguing:
The weirdest thing I found out was that Park Forest was once such a buzzing metropolis that it had a Marshall Field's and some other big department store. The adjacent town of Chicago Heights also had a nice department store. I never think of these little rinky-dink towns as being shopping destinations.
This was the parents' bedroom. Note the presence of Dr. Spock's book, which radically changed parenting in its time.
Next we saw the bathroom. I don't know why, but the toilet training potty made of wood with the little metal bucket underneath was interesting to me:
In the hall they had popular doll Chatty Cathy, who I think looks kind of creepy:
This newspaper photo shows all the families moving in to Park Forest at the same time:
Baby carriage, originally retailing for $19.95
Down in the basement, the tour guide introduced me to these wire things you put inside your pants to keep their shape when they were drying on a clothesline:
You didn't have a dryer. You just washed your clothes in this giant cauldron of a washing machine, then ran each garment through the ringer at the top before hanging it on your clothesline in the basement. And then you had to iron everything.
The whole thing made me think I shouldn't complain about doing my laundry anymore, but I probably still will.
Now, at this point in the tour we sort of doubled back and revisited the kitchen, because that's where the door to the basement was. Apparently the closed-back cookie cutters were common back then. Plus they spelled cookie like cooky.
This is the phone book. I still don't get old-school phone numbers that are partially made of letters.
Or course being a Fiestaware enthusiast, I had to photograph this kettle:
Here's an old stand mixer:
Nathan wanted to go back into the classroom again because it was his favorite part.
I liked this teacher's poster that said, "We went to the store. We had a penny. We got candy." Nowadays you can't get candy for a penny, and teachers would never promote foods that contribute to childhood obesity anyway.
This ad indicated that the type of house the museum is in, a two-bedroom townhouse, cost $88.50 per month to rent in 1948. Today the same unit rents for $1,000/month.
This is a picture of the headset that the librarian wore in the Park Forest Library. When answering reference calls, she could plug the headset into a jack right next to the card catalog. The original mobile phone!
I've personally never heard of Crayonex Crayons:
I took this picture of the class photo from a kindergarten in 1950. I'm interested in how a kindergarten classroom had a toy grocery store and dolls to play with, not like today's kindergartens that are so academically-oriented. The kindergartens of the 1950s are now known as
preschools.
Also isn't that kid in the upper left-hand corner a dapper young lad?
Here's Nathan in the living room in front of the spinning aluminum Christmas tree:
And here are both of us in front of the tree, with the "Family Radiation Measurement Kit" visible in the lower-right-hand corner:
A little closer look at the kit:
Exactly what level of family radiation would be safe?
And that was our trip back in time to the 1950s. The whole experience was really thought-provoking. I think what makes the 1950s and 1960s so interesting to us (as evidenced by the popularity of Mad Men and The Help) is that these decades were so very near and yet so far. On the one hand, a huge percentage of the population alive today can remember those decades, so that era is not exactly ancient history. And yet, an experience like a visit to this museum or an episode of Mad Men reminds us just how much things have changed. Some things have changed for the better--women are allowed to have identities outside of their husbands, our societies are much more racially-integrated, and nobody's wrestling with a laundry ringer.
But on the other hand, it's disturbing how much more we expect now. We eat more, we buy more, and we want bigger houses to hold larger people and more stuff. Many of the items we perceive as necessities today weren't even on people's radars in the 1950s. Indeed, the town of Park Forest itself is an example of how expectations have changed. The town once embodied the highest standard of living, and today it's largely a working-class suburb. And you kind of have to wonder if our complaints about how we can't afford everything we need is because we have just been socialized to believe we need so much more than we do.
I'm not suggesting that I'm going to offer any kind of solution here. I'm just as guilty as everybody else when it comes to needing stuff and wanting stuff and buying stuff.
But a trip back in time sure does make you think about things.
