I Come From an Earlier Era...

Eddie "Rochester" Anderson

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I come from an earlier era, a very different America...a very different world.

In that regard, I am truly a time traveler, as I've traversed a few generations, now.

Like any time traveler, I can offer first hand observations of different eras. In many ways, the earliest era of the America I knew, from 1954 to about 1964, was, in some ways, a much better place and in some ways a worse one.

In that period of my life (childhood) dozens of commercial trucks ran up and down most blocks; dry cleaners, the lawn mower repair and blade sharpener truck, bakery trucks, grocery delivery trucks, ice cream trucks, along with Municipal garbage trucks, street sweepers, Fire apparatus and, of course, the U.S. Postal Service's mail carriers walked the streets back then with their mail bags slung over their shoulders.

All those commercial vehicles were a testament to the lack of government over-regulation.

The economy here was buoyed by being one of the last ones standing after WWII, but that was somewhat balanced out by the massive expenditures of the Marshall Plan.

Of course, the tax system was different, depending overwhelmingly on Corporate taxes and tariffs on foreign goods, as the Dependency Deduction shielded most people's income from the income tax. Since Corporate Income taxes and Tariffs amount to hidden sales taxes, goods and services were more expensive relative to incomes, so most people lived more frugal, basic...what today we'd call "poorer" lives, but our culture was richer.

Comedy was still dominated by old vaudevillians like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Abbott and Costello, the 3 Stooges, Jack Benny and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson and Groucho Marx, who remained the king of American comedy, through the 1960s.

Today we judge that earlier, politically incorrect humor by the narrower standards of our current day. Jack Benny's long time partner, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson delivered a wide eyed country styled, stereotypical black character.(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_%22Rochester%22_Anderson)

The fact was, that at the time, many blacks WERE moving from the rural South to Northern cities and that naivete was very common, just as the "hillbilly" ways of Buddy Epson's "Jed Clampett" character was not atypical of many of the suddenly wealthy Texas "Oil men" of the period. Men who went from eaking out a living on a small ranch, or farm to having great wealth, seemingly overnight.

There were still reruns of the old radio show, turned 1950s TV hit, "Amos and Andy."

It's true that the original radio broadcast was created by two white performers (Freeman Gosden and Charles Correl), but it's not true that it was a show that mocked American blacks.

Amos Jones and Andy Brown were two devoted family men, who came to Chicago from the rural South, in search of a better life. They started a business, "the Fresh Air Taxi Company." Their foil was another black character, George "Kingfish" Brown, who was always trying to scam the pair with an assortment of "get rich quick" schemes.

Though the accents were Southern, rural and stereotypical, the characters were all honest, hardworking, family oriented and strivers.

The TV show became a hit in 1951 and 1952, but was felled by an NAACP boycott in 1953, that led to its cancellation. (https://youtu.be/8Ka6u2WA_zU)

Today, most people mistakenly believe that show was a "racist mockery," when, in fact, no other show portrayed black Americans in such an upwardly mobile, wholesome light until the "Cosby Show," some three decades later!

One of the grave injustices of the boycott and cancellation was that some great actors, like Spencer Williams (Andy), Tim Moore (Kingfish), Ernestine Wade (Sapphire Stevens) and Alvin Childress (Amos) never got their due.

A cursory look back to that era shows a starkly different America. All our TV shows depicted honest, hard working families, with uplifting themes.

Children's shows were simpler too, "Captain Kangaroo" and "Andy's Gang" offered childish themes and pure, wholesome entertainment. Later "Sesame Street" and "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" taught basic values and aided early learning.

Some may call that a "simpler time." People certainly didn't take themselves very seriously back then and we WERE, in many ways, a different country.

The seminal event that marked the end of that era and that original  or traditional America was the JFK assassination on November 22nd, 1963.

Michael Hoffman, author of "Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0970378416/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_26pMCbRFA9NKY), wrote about the Kennedy assassination, "The killers were not caught, the Warren Commission was a whitewash. There was a sense that the men who ordered the assassination were grinning somewhere over cocktails, and out of this, a nearly-psychedelic wonder seized the American population, an awesome shiver before the realization that whoever could kill a President of the United States in broad daylight and get away with it, could get away with anything."

Sherwood Kent, author of "Most Dangerous: A True Story" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634240405/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_zeqMCbXE9ZM1E), noted the many indicators of the social transformation in the wake of that public execution, "Within a year, Americans had largely switched from softer-toned, naturally-colored cotton clothing to garish-colored artificial polyesters. Popular music became louder, faster and more cacophonous. Drugs appeared for the first time outside the Bohemian subculture and ghettos, in the mainstream. Extremes of every kind came into fashion. Revolutions in cognition and behavior were on the horizon, from the Beatles to Charles Manson, from “Free Love” to LSD."

Today, we swim in an ocean of manufactured misinformation. Our "news" is mostly commentary and events, both foreign and domestic are filtered, edited, often even fictionalized in whole, or in part.

It's hard to consider any sources, "reliable," but regardless, we're all still influenced by this ocean of manufactured data we all swim in.

It wasn't always like this...
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