The Good Ole Days

Bill O'Reilly

          The 1950's & 1960's

I recently watched the Fox News cable show, "The Factor" with it's host Bill O'Reilly. I know your wondering why I would watch such a show, but there is an old saying, "Keep your friends close and keep your enemies even closer." I sat in amazement on Mr. O'Reilly's lamenting on how good America was back in the 1950's and he even stated, "White America was kind of unified" in the 1950's.  Mr. O'Reilly's selective memory of this Leave It To Beaver kind of America is quite revealing.  Since I was a young boy in the segregated South during the 1950's & 1960's I have different memories of that then Mr. O'Reilly. TV shows like "Leave It To Beaver" "Father Knows Best" "Ozzie & Harriet" and "Make Room for Daddy", all portrayed the subservient housewives as possibly the best-dressed housekeepers ever seen. They wore elegant dresses, high heels, jewelry (the pearl necklace), and smiled as they dust and vacuumed. Women were to be subservient to there husbands and expected to be housewives or at the very most secretary's, nurses or teachers. You never would have heard of a women CEO, a women astronaut, a women on the Supreme Court or even a women reading the nightly news. A women in the 1950's didn't have near the opportunity's that woman have today.

It was even rougher for American Blacks or Negro's as they were called, even though they were called worst. My contact with American Blacks in the 1950's & 1960's was, they picked up our garbage, they served us our food at the cafeteria and they lived on the other side of the railroad tracks separate from our White communities.  Blacks had there own movie theaters and If they didn't they had to sit in the balcony separate from us White folks. Blacks even had separate public bathrooms and even separate water fountains.

 

 

 

 

The bathrooms and water fountains were commonly in bad shape compared to us White folks bathrooms and water fountains. I can remember going to the drive in theater where there was two movie screens, one for Whites and one in the back for the Blacks. This was all enforced under the rule of law. 

Anyone that can look back to this time and opine like Mr. O'Reilly and wants to travel back in time  aboard his ship to the past, has boarded a ship of fools.