Coming Home to the Faraway ‘50s

I hold to the theory that Los Angeles pretty much invented the 1950s. And by inventing the ‘50s, it invented modern America.

You can argue with this theory, but consider Los Angeles’ contributions: fast food, freeways, prime-time television, the automobile culture and suburbia itself. They all erupted here like nowhere else and got woven into a seamless universe. The new world.

True enough, that new world amounted to a cultural horror show in many ways. Still, we remain its captives. Forty years gone, the ‘50s holds us in its grasp every day in every way.

It’s that cultural power of the ‘50s, I think, that gives a new book on L.A. its mesmerizing quality. The book, “The High School Scene in the Fifties, Voices From West L.A.” by Bonnie J. Morris, lets us see the emerging world--or parts of it--getting born like an infant star in a nebula.

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The book tells the story of seven friends who attended Los Angeles High and Fairfax High in the mid-’50s. Actually, being an oral history, the book lets them tell their own tales of coming to grips with a time that was repressive and tantalizing all at once.

There’s Roger, for example, one of the gods of the high school world. Handsome and athletic, Roger tells of being drawn to the surf at Santa Monica in his off hours. There, on the hot sand, he and his friends begin to develop the subculture of “the beach.”

This involves body surfing--surfboards were yet to be imported from Hawaii--and the modification of old cars into outlandish concoctions that were dubbed “hot rods.” At night, Roger and his friends take their hot rods and their tans and go cruising.

“You would, of course, be chocolate brown with your tan,” he says. “Your skin would be stretched so tight with all the sun you’d taken that day at the beach. So you’d be glowing. Driving down Hollywood Boulevard, Saturday night, looking for girls.”

And there’s Myra, the girl Roger eventually marries. Myra also wants to roam free but she’s caught in the opposing force field of the ‘50s: the controlling world of high school social clubs designed to crank out perfect wives for the emerging suburban lifestyle.

Myra, who is Jewish, joins a Jewish club at L.A. High called the Baronettes. The clubs are all divided between Gentiles and Jews. To make sure it stays that way, school administrators supply the clubs with lists of Gentile and / or Jewish students for recruitment purposes.

But Gentile or Jewish, the clubs have the same goal. “Everything we did was a rehearsal for what we were going to do later: get married to someone of the right ethnic and social background,” Myra says. “We all knew what was expected of us. The idea was to be pretty, popular and cool. So we all bottled up our serious thoughts.”

Myra quotes a teacher who thusly began an inscription in her yearbook: “To a girl who’s smart enough not to let the boys know it.”

And there’s Pat, who tells the story of the “Girl’s League” at L.A. High. The Girl’s Leaguers are student cops who hand out “citations” to other girls found to be violating a dress rule such as the requirement to wear stockings with certain shoes.

“If one of those girls came along they’d pinch your leg if they were unsure you had stockings on,” says Pat. “And if you weren’t, they’d write you up with these stupid citations.”

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It was a world, see, where the culture seemed to be getting richer by the month. So the women were trained to tastefully consume the incomes of their prospective husbands. That was their duty, their cross to bear.

And it filled them with rage. Eventually some of them begin to engage in ‘60s-style rebellion. Pat starts sneaking off with an “absolutely fantastic-looking Hispanic guy” and being “just wildly sexual with him.”

Speaking of sex, this crowd invented the notion of the car as a traveling boudoir. The cars were also spinoffs of the growing wealth. Everyone seemed to have one.

“We would jump in the car and drive to Palm Springs for coffee. That’s 120 miles!” says Bob with remembered awe. “It was a way of being alone with somebody. You’re in the car, you’re going someplace, you’re moving, da da da.”

Yes, indeed. That “da da da” says it all. In the ‘50s, life could be miserable and suffocating, but you could always take off for the desert. And maybe stop at a hamburger stand in Berdoo named McDonald’s. The word was they had great fries.

And no one worried where the money would come from. Affluence was expected, assumed. “At Fairfax and L.A. High,” says Myra, “the kids were all going to make it, all going to make it.”

What a peculiar time. In a way, the stories of Roger, Myra, Pat, Bob and the others seem far distant from us today and yet spookily similar. Reading this book is like going to a far place and finding yourself at home.