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  • Hello subscribers and others.

  • It's David Hoffman filmmaker, and this is a clip you're going to see by a comedian done in 1979 in interview with me talking about the 19 fifties when he grew up.

  • I'm doing this because so many of my subscribers are interested in the 19 fifties, either because you lived it or because you remember it or because your parents talked about it or because you're curious or because you're a millennial who's kind of trying to see our way advancing.

  • Where are we?

  • Are we worse off than we were back then?

  • Or are we better off than we are back then?

  • But there's a great conflict in this 19 fifties, the baby boomers and you're seeing it in my comments.

  • There are people who just hate the baby boomers.

  • They destroyed America.

  • It's never gonna be the same again because of baby boomers.

  • There are others who are baby boomers who are asking for sympathy on their selfish baby boomers and stupid baby boomers.

  • So what should take a look at this clip?

  • But before you do, I want to give you a little background.

  • First of all, the time is 1989.

  • Did I say 79 before?

  • If I did, I'm wrong 1989 And I'm doing a public television series called Making Sense of the Sixties about middle class, largely white, largely suburban kids.

  • There had been a great television series on PBS called Eyes on the Prize about the black experience.

  • So my Siri's making sense of the sixties is about the white experience, even when looking at the black community and what they were dealing with.

  • And so how am I gonna do this?

  • Well, I chose I was going to interview 200 ordinary people, largely ordinary, a few extraordinary, a few well known but mostly unknown.

  • So I hired some guys and girls they got on the phone.

  • They started calling thousands of people by asking local loose papers.

  • Well, who's interesting in your town?

  • Who's a good talker, et cetera.

  • And I had these people ask simple questions like, Do you like your work?

  • And some people answered, Oh, that's a tough question.

  • You're up.

  • Some people said, I'm gonna tell you exactly how I feel.

  • They were good.

  • They were likely to be in on.

  • They wanted people from all perspectives conservative, liberal, rich, poor, handsome, ugly north south.

  • And I did it in these 180 interviews.

  • So the interview you are about to see is with Robert Klein.

  • Robert Klein.

  • He grew up in Brooklyn, and he was a pretty much successful guy from the start.

  • He got into the Second City Club, which was a comedy club that traveled the country.

  • Brilliant.

  • He was the host of The Tonight Show.

  • He did five, I think, HBO comedy specials.

  • And in the early days of Saturday Night Live, he was one of the hosts.

  • So then he produced a record album, Child of the Fifties.

  • People compared him to George Carlin.

  • So I said, This guy's one of the guys.

  • Brooklyn, New York.

  • Successful.

  • Outrageous.

  • What do you think about the 19 fifties and how did you grow up?

  • And here's what he said.

  • Now I'm running the whole clip without editing out questions because subscribed have said to me a David in some cases, just run the whole thing.

  • Don't make any cuts, Okay?

  • We'll see how that goes.

  • You tell me what you think.

  • I'm hopeful that this enhances your awareness of the 19 fifties of the baby boomers good in bed.

  • I'm not making a lot of judgments about it, although I do agree with millennials.

  • Some fairly high percentage of what was done screwed things up.

  • I hope they get better when you were growing up in the fifties when you were growing up.

  • Um, what's the atmosphere like?

  • What is your junior?

  • Remember what it felt like to be a kid in the fifties?

  • How would you describe it?

  • Ping kid in the fifties shared something with every other area to that is, they couldn't wait to grow up.

  • You had no no say in your own destiny was in the hands of others.

  • I would say the thing that made growing up in the fifties a different experience than any other errors, that we were the first tohave the threat of complete annihilation in a milli second.

  • We were given details in school about how far you had to be from the ground zero and what would happen.

  • You know, they always presumed that the Soviets would have incredibly good aim, and that 42nd Street in Times Square would be the target so that oh, up to about the Triborough Bridge you were memory specks of dust up into Westchester.

  • We know here your shadow would appear on a wall where you were, and then Father back would take maybe several hours before you died, until you got up to about our monk north of the city.

  • Um, maybe your hair would fall out in a few days and suffer for a number of hours, and then I'd be all over.

  • He was safe.

  • If you were in Bali, that ISS for a few months, until the cloud floated and destroyed you, there was virtually no hope.

  • In addition to this, we came out of an era.

  • I, of course, don't remember World War Two as a contemporary observer because I was born in 1942.

  • We were victorious, We were righteous and we were alone standing in the world at the end of the Second World War and into the ear of the Cold War as the until the Cold War really took hold as the the only power that is we had the world's fate in our hands.

  • This, of course, by the time I began to grow up in the fifties became untrue.

  • We were impotent because the Soviets had the same weapons in the same means of delivering them as we did and they were evil and we were good.

  • And here we are again five years later, back into the same soup fighting a massive enemy.

  • Except that the stakes were all much higher.

  • We saw pictures of kids in the London blitz must have been terrifying, but at least it was a terror that could be grasped and, uh, somehow visualized that is bombs and destruction.

  • And you better watch your head and get under there underground.

  • But this was and it's over.

  • I think that, um, I don't know of one had to do with the other, but it was a Ziff.

  • Everyone had come down, but the soldiers had come back.

  • And now we're looking for the furthest thing from war family values.

  • Uh, the repressive part, I think, came there was there was a kind of little resurgence of Victorian ism or something.

  • They're showing these training films now is camp on various cable networks, maybe MTV and so forth.

  • Uh, dating the film was always bad alone.

  • Dating can be an enjoyable experience.

  • If you follow these simple rules, let your date in the door first.

  • Those kinds of, um and I guess we thought that was the way to do it.

  • But it must follow these rules.

  • Um, I had a bit years ago about, uh, dancing close to Johnny Mathis records and getting so excited having you respect me.

  • Yes, I respect you.

  • That syndrome, um, this extended right on into the sixties.

  • I suppose by the time I graduated from college, that, uh, most of the women seniors in college probably graduated most without their virginity, but it was still something.

  • Someone's virginity.

  • When's the last time you heard that?

  • Except in the Virginia gubernatorial election?

  • Uh, let me ask you that.

  • Let me ask you about school, you remembrances of school.

  • Because what's what happened in the fifties?

  • It seems that since that that school took over as the parents, you know, the parents were working at a job, had the American dream.

  • What was your school experience like?

  • Remember what your relationship to teachers did they take over with the authorities?

  • Basically, while I got a good education, I remember school is great drudgery.

  • I'm not sure that isn't universal toe all years, but the New York City point of education was chock full of these kind of child hating Spencer's, um, who went to normal school for two years, took religion and first aid.

  • Graduated 18 99 with shin unions and old lady shoes like Ms Grundy from Archie Comics.

  • And, um, corporal punishment was no longer allowed in schools.

  • You could not hit a child technical.

  • I didn't say anything about the push probe method.

  • Hole over.

  • Over.

  • Are you gonna do that again?

  • Really?

  • You know, they could tug on flesh, pretty much rip it from its mooring as long as you didn't hit you.

  • This was a technicality.

  • They were untouchable.

  • They were to see them outside of school.

  • Hours was a revelation.

  • Much like I think it best be symbolized by the fire drill.

  • Uh, fire drill was a great treat, was a break up from the school routine.

  • And, um, Children have a tendency to think that in school hours the rest of the world ceases to function.

  • So you're out on the street, but 10 after two.

  • Who?

  • Look at that.

  • A lady.

  • Look, a car thought they come out of three days.

  • Shut off.

  • Um, it was strict.

  • There were certain elements that were good, pure drudgery memory.

  • See, I don't believe that a date of history is so important.

  • It's only important if you go beyond the date toe.

  • Why?

  • It's important to know that which I think has been lost now.

  • But it was black and white.

  • Good, bad.

  • We will good.

  • Everyone else's bad.

  • We were virtuous, you know, in many ways this was there was some truth to that we had fought.

  • We seem to be idealistic.

  • We seem to be the most altruistic country have existed, the most gracious Victor's in history.

  • Uh, we poured millions and millions into the reconstruction of our enemies and got BMWs and Toyota's back.

  • Um, it is ironic that the victors, like the British making motorcycles it can't start on cars with the hood up on the side with people.

  • Some kits, you know, you can hold up a thumb, get a lift.

  • Um, I think that we were on overwhelming feeling that I heard as a child, and I didn't quite understand with Communists.

  • My mother was invited to a luncheon ones in Peekskill, New York, when I was about eight years old for nine Take cover House Communism presented to you.

  • Well, we were taught the part that we could not conceptualize at too young an age was the idea of community owning everything.

  • And they they certainly will light on the idealistic aspects of communism from each according to his ability to each according to his name and having on the totalitarian aspects.

  • In retrospect, that wasn't unfair either, because apologists for communism always said, But this is not the real Communist.

  • That's gonna happen somewhere in some abstract way.

  • Live the perfect companies.

  • But I remember my mother was invited to a luncheon and she was reasonably apolitical.

  • But she caught on fairly quickly.

  • And if she was terrified afterwards that she went to this, who's There were Communists, you know?

  • And then I remember, um, the arrest and trial and ultimate execution of the Rosenbergs having arguments, passionate arguments with friends at school.

  • My parents, in addition to being Americans with Jewish cause, Andi were very much shame.

  • That's all we need.

  • Right?

  • Things were that bad for the Jews.

  • I don't know these people, and I remember people arguing in school from more progressive families just is passionately the other way that these people either did nothing wrong or whether they did something wrong or not, was irrelevant.

  • That should not have been executed.

  • So it was.

  • I remember my cousin, a real siren.

  • She was going with a saxophone player and he gave her a Valentine's gift and it said, It's really not much, but what else gonna pull Communist?

  • Afford weapon where they went that relationship.

  • I haven't met the guy I met.

  • The guy seemed pretty cool to me.

  • It didn't did it.

  • And then suddenly I heard the international, you know, that's it.

  • They were There was sort of They were evil that there was.

  • I could find no justification for them believing that way, huh?

  • Of course, there were all kinds of justifications for them to believing that way, which which really began in the Depression.

  • And it can't be denied that the Communists we're in the van got against the fascists.

  • You have to take one enemy at a time.

  • Then we what we had been after all, allies of the Communists.

  • Can you can you tell me the story about when in school that the famous air raid drills that you have in school.

  • Right skin for remember kids watching this.

  • You don't understand.

  • Should I tell him?

  • Oh, we're good.

  • We, of course, had fire drills.

  • Like like any other school group.

  • We had to teach Children how to get out of the building and what to do in case of an emergency like that.

  • But we had the the added thrill of the take cover drills and the nuclear Holocaust drills.

  • First of all, each of us would dispensed a dog tag which we were told by this old teacher.

  • Somewhat, Tak Leslie could withstand the heat 1000 degrees centigrade made not to melt.

  • Unfortunately, our skin disintegrated about 900 degrees before, but Wei had the comfort of knowing we could be identified in the event we were burned beyond recognition.

  • Nuclear holocaust.

  • She actually put it that way.

  • I had my name, I think Klein, Robert Heeb something.

  • And, um, there were two kinds.

  • One if you got ample warning that the Soviets were somewhere over the end Tilly's center, where that is.

  • But it sounds like a good place.

  • Me, um when there were some distance away and we had plenty of time, that is, we would get into the holes line up along the side of the walls, cover our heads with our coats.

  • Then there was a little more serious.

  • True when the enemy was around 98th Street and Park Avenue.

  • I mean, when you could hear the whistle of the thing coming and there was no there was no warning.

  • And the way they would do this is a monitor would come.

  • And turns out I have a thing for the teacher.

  • When this monitor leaves, conduct a surprise, Take cover drill and you know she go given away.

  • Look at the class.

  • Sign it mean anywhere.

  • Children, we were talking about Thomas Jefferson.

  • Take cover.

  • We were instructed to go under the desk.

  • Put your back side to the window.

  • For some reason, that was more value less valuable to lose than your brain.

  • And, um and I don't remember if you put your head hands over your head or not.

  • But, um, of course, they never bothered to change the monitor, so it got after, while very boring monitor would come in, everyone would slowly get under their desks with teacher signed it there was involved this a system of sirens and the two short blasts, one followed by one loud blast, is take cover for short blasts and one loud blast, followed by three short blasts.

  • All clear.

  • I mean, you could confuse these and walk out and all clearing it disintegrated.

  • Also.

  • They foolishly blew a siren every day at 12 o'clock on, drove me crazy, walking home for lunch, and I think it's quite 12 o'clock.

  • And it always occurred to me that the Soviets could attack 12 o'clock.

  • We think it's lunch and we're all gone.

  • It's bye bye, baby.

  • So it's funny that I had some dreams about it.

  • Andi thought about it.

  • Also, there was a law which prohibited sirens on television programs.

  • If you were watching Abbott and Costello and there was a chase with an ambulance, how Yeah, bad and the siren started to go off for the ambulance.

  • The sound would cut off on television.

  • All stations were required to just so wouldn't confuse people.

  • I think that it had a more subtle and momentous meaning of terror that that it invaded dreams it you took it for granted.

  • After a while, I could take everything for granted, like it really didn't think it would happen.

  • You know, we have all kinds of protection, after all, will do it to them.

  • They that that was the the the truce of terror, Eisenhower called it.

  • I've forgotten exactly how he articulated, but it's true.

  • It held up for many, many years.

  • They knew they'd get it back and therefore didn't do it.

  • But it was, I think, wearing.

  • And, um, it's interesting when you think about it that our upbringing was strict and by the rules, and you didn't break those rules.

  • That was to come later.

  • The rebellion, Not surprisingly, but at a time when we could all be obliterated in an instant, it seemed that, um maybe it should have happened then, you know, idea of juvenile delinquency.

  • Remember this?

  • This concept of juvenile delinquency on nobody juvenile delinquent where the people round you Were you a juvenile delinquent?

  • I knew of the concept of juvenile delinquency.

  • I was not a juvenile delinquent.

  • No, I knew some juvenile delinquent.

  • Uh, a matter of fact, I went to a junior high school where basically the greatest crime was talking too much, You know, fooling around real crimes.

  • Um, yeah.

  • You know, it's a ziff.

  • Funny, I don't know where that name came from.

  • It must be a Postwar progressive psychological term.

  • If it was some affliction, it wasn't.

  • I think it had always been going on.

  • That always been tough kids from homes in which there was less of a a stronghold on guiding force for the Children.

  • I don't remember at that time hearing the term Greece.

  • Sirs, we called guys like that.

  • Rocks is a rock.

  • His hair was heavily petroleum.

  • The two sides met in the back ducks posterior on dhe pegged pants.

  • Sarah with the bottom, um, own style.

  • In a sense, they were in the vanguard fashion and other things.

  • At least they they were rebellious force in a very un rebellious era.

  • Unfortunately, some of them did social damage.

  • But, um, you know, certainly in style.

  • And they thought differently than others on Not always, constructively, of course.

  • What did music playing all that rock and roll we see.

  • We have this image of this kid's tuning in rock and roll in their bedrooms late night, listening on radio because their parents were saying, get that shit up in Communist influence.

  • Rock n roll.

  • Well, um I remember the invention of the name as a matter of fact that I believe it happened.

  • The 1955 my father thought this would rot my brain is What is it?

  • There's no tune.

  • Then there's no nothing.

  • You know, it's not like every little breeze seems to whisper.

  • Louise.

  • You could understand that, Um, Alan Freed, who had come from Cleveland, done gospel shows.

  • I had a show called The Moondog Show and Moondog, the famous New York blind Viking poet character who had blind Viking poet groupies, by the way, very esoteric form of group.

  • He's hard to find them.

  • They only attach themselves to blind Viking poets.

  • He threatened to sue Alan Freed because of the name.

  • And then I remember that day.

  • Boys and girls, we have a new name for the show that rock and roll party.

  • Mostly they were groups.

  • They were black groups or duos.

  • Charlie and Ray, the Cadillacs, the harp tones, the valentine, some of whom crossed over and secularized gospel music.

  • And it became our our thing.

  • It became Arthur.

  • Parents didn't understand.

  • Um, they did not get into that many, many years later, when it was universal and a wedding when they play some rock and roll.

  • I think parents parents feared it.

  • Uh huh.

  • When one looks now, yeah.

  • When one looks now at the objections to Elvis, for example, I was never a big fan of Elvis's.

  • But Elvis lapel this, you know, these these gyrations and all, um, this was old hat in the black community.

  • Jitterbugging, um also sexuality and dance was old hat, even to whites.

  • The tango.

  • I mean, it's very, very sexual dance.

  • Very.

  • But suddenly their Children would do as soon as it spreads to their Children.

  • When drugs went from some esoteric little problem in Harlem to that Oh, then it became a problem.

  • Um, it seems innocent now that should they allow Elvis to do that with this pelvis in public?

  • It was like it was the last of the naive times on, except for that little bit of convention that today you can hear anything.

  • Anybody, comedian, uses any word any time he wants to kind of spoils it.

  • Except for that little subtlety that was missing that that the dance of avoidance until the right time comes when you're married.

  • Um, except for that part that's missing.

  • I don't miss that at all.

  • It was a repression that was unnecessary.

  • It caused endless guilt and unhappiness and young women young men feeling guilty about something they did, which they couldn't help.

  • Do you remember how Rocker will affect you personally?

  • Have?

  • How did you respond to little gravel into?

  • Did you gravitate?

  • I loved it.

  • I I became a I had a group called the Team Tones and the culmination of our career.

  • We sang in the toilet in high school because of the echo.

  • We sounded like a recording studio in the boys room.

  • A deal Clinton I school anywhere else we sang.

  • It's allegories singing a toilet, but in the toilet we sounded like a recording studio.

  • We couldn't get any recording company executives to come and hear us.

  • They didn't have toilet divisions.

  • Scouting talent.

  • We're on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, which was a holdover from old major boat shows in the thirties, which I never saw it.

  • Ted Mack went around and had amateurs put them on television.

  • We sang, Oh God, do you know?

  • And we were defeated by a one armed pianist from Missouri who played a Mozart Sonata for four hands.

  • He was quite busy, but he wasn't that good, did you?

  • Did you think that rock n roll was was rebellious?

  • And did you grab until they said they don't like this?

  • Therefore, I don't think that I liked it all the more because my parents didn't.

  • I wanted my parents to like it, but it was an impossible task.

  • In fact, I used to have daydreams about the teen tones playing the mountains in the Catskill Mountains for regular grown ups and them going, Hey, that's tough.

  • That was our name for a pretty soon.

  • It's tough, not a shot.

  • They insisted on melodies, you know, Actually, we had Melanie's, too, Uh, but, you know, my father once had a breakthrough, I think, where he understood that when he was a kid, Toilets ran next tour.

  • I'm an improviser again.

  • Listen, can you hold up urinating into we're finished in?

  • This is PBS.

  • My father had a sort of breakthrough ones as every goal where he realized that they had their feds to when he was a young man may be older than 13 but, oh, everything that I found out when the music goes round and round Ooh, and it comes out here.

  • Well, I heard this, and he said This was a wild song that we had When I was a kid.

  • I said, That's wild.

  • Yeah, Boo boo, You do.

  • Every era had its own.

  • Every era thinks that has its own.

  • I must say this was more significant than most because this naive, more naive music of the fifties rock.

  • So you rock n roll led to some significant music, some of which is overrated.

  • The sixties Laing run but but but still opened up a whole avenue of a new kind of popular music, and some very talented people were attracted to it.

  • Poets and excellent musicians, and it also unabashedly brought to the population at large, meaning white people.

  • What?

  • We're basically African rhythms, you know?

  • I saw old photos of movies of the Johnsons who went filming in Africa in the twenties, and they play jazz for these natives, these Africans, and it doesn't look at all different from dances today.

  • They got right into it in a second because they fed it originally, um, I want to finish one thought every era thinks it has.

  • Oh, their Children are the most rebellious.

  • You look at quotes from ancient Greece.

  • I mean, the Children are running while we have to do something about them.

  • And also every everything's that has a foothold on morality.

  • You know, ballplayers today take cocaine.

  • Well, you know, the guesthouse gang In the thirties in ST Louis, ST.

  • Louis Cardinals never attended a game sober.

  • They're drug was liquid.

  • Um, in the days you're talking about these films and running out on a TV, that's significant are some of the stuff we're gonna be in our Siri's?

  • I'm sure we've got rules of dating a date with your family.

  • Sit down.

  • How to conduct yourself properly.

  • Um, but dating as a phenomenon in the fifties 50 fulfillment rules on every possible conceivable means of living that you have from how you dealt with your parents, that you remember Danny.

  • What was dating all about was a painful experience.

  • It was very difficult.

  • I mean, I had this burning desire for to be around girls to know them in every way possible, and then, sadly, went to an old boy's high school, which was murderous.

  • Um, it was first of all, I had a sister, not to mention the mother.

  • And I always used as a kind of credo that I wouldn't wantto that someone's sister.

  • But I'm trying to feel up, you know?

  • So I had to keep that in mind.

  • I would like someone to do that to my sister.

  • There was the idea of marriage as the what the the ultimate, the goal, and that's when it's wide open.

  • My public to my parents didn't look that wide open to me.

  • Um, I was painfully shy.

  • I felt that girls had all the cards.

  • I didn't realize what weapons I had, that they wanted me just as much as I wanted them.

  • And as far as these rules are concerned, as far as these rules are concerned, I am.

  • They are ludicrous and appear ludicrous to us now.

  • But rules and conventions keep a society intact.

  • A rule in and of itself is not bad or a convention, well, courtesy or politeness, or do unto others as you would like them to do unto you.

  • These are not bad things, order automatically.

  • I think it was.

  • It was they were brought to absurd kind of Someone in the education system got this idea.

  • G Let's use movies because movie was always a treat in school was a great break up.

  • You see a movie so automatically they figured, as did the Armed Service, is that this will automatically salvo problems.

  • You'll learn whatever you see in the movie.

  • I thought it was carried to absurd lanes.

  • And, of course, even then we knew that that was baloney.

  • I think there was a snicker and every one of those things.

  • Even then, it was camp when it was brand new.

  • It was it was just not the way life waas.

  • But, you know, you talk about rules being course, wasn't there a feeling?

  • Do you sense of hypocrisy regarding rules in the fifties?

  • Especially that, you know, you tell me to do this and do that, But I see you living your lives and as adults, kids, adults, a sense of hypocrisy, a sense that you know you're preaching one thing, but you're doing something else.

  • I perceived a sense of hypocrisy in the sixties because I got old enough to know what hypocrisy really waas and because the sixties we're more symbolized by throwing off of of all these rules in fact, that's probably what frightened grownups most.

  • It looked like the society was kind of nihilistic Lee destroying itself where people were destroying it so there wouldn't be any rules in the fifties.

  • I don't think I could conceptualize hypocrisy it really what amounted to his guilt and pain.

  • I knew I wanted to ravish this young woman, and I knew I shouldn't, and I couldn't figure that out.

  • I assumed it must have been some base instinct.

  • Um, a lot of people report when they went to Catholic schools, that was really in spades.

  • They got that message not being Catholic.

  • I couldn't say that.

  • But I'm being Jewish.

  • I could say that.

  • I mean, you were taught in a good home How to be able not to behave.

  • There was some linking.

  • I mean, uh oh, yeah.

  • You like kissing that girl?

  • I mean, spend the bottle in a party, you know?

  • But that was it.

  • And the girl that I thought that young girls had it much tougher because the burden was on them to control these base urges control the urges for another party to the boy, so I didn't perceive it is hypocritical.

  • Yet it was just I want to but that's both.

  • My body was telling me all kinds of things.

  • Did you see, as the fifties got started lying down and you were becoming what?

  • You're 18 years old in 1960.

  • Did you feel like things were gonna break?

  • You feel like the country was was changing it all things were gonna happen that, like you knew it was gonna be radically different if it wasn't you.

  • Well, your brains.

  • We didn't enter into juicy seeds in the sixties.

  • What would become what we call the sixties happening to you?

  • To the country person?

  • I don't think in the very early sixties I did.

  • I was busy in college from 58 to 62 rooting for the football team.

  • Had a girlfriend, told me she was not a virgin.

  • That was and I didn't condemn before, but I remember feeling a little sad, loving her so much thinking it doesn't matter.

  • We'll go on.

  • I mean, that was the last of my naivete with this lovely girl who had had a boyfriend before and then actually slept with him politically.

  • Eyes Now, with Sonnambula Waiting years, which, in light of recent administrations look kind of good.

  • Um, it didn't I see the the election of Kennedy as a trigger to a new optimism.

  • First of all, everything was in show business terms.

  • Don't forget very important element we're leaving out.

  • He was television which ballooned in the fifties, became I mean, my television.

  • We were purchased one in 51.

  • It's been on ever since.

  • Um, and I was interested in imitating the comedians and all this.

  • Kennedy was great looking and he was young.

  • A president was always a distant old fogey who you couldn't really relate to.

  • And Kennedy changed that.

  • And there was a sense based a lot on media hype, of optimism, of great, wonderful things to come.

  • Oh, yes, we'll be strong against those Russians, but a new reasonableness and hipness, if you will.

  • Here's a guy we can really relate to.

  • And then he, uh, he was killed.

  • And, uh, that sort of triggered a a new reality.

  • One has always left to wonder.

  • Would we have gotten sucked into Vietnam?

  • Had he lived a lot of evidence presents itself to the to think that we would have He, after all, was the 1st 1 to send the the massive amount of American advisors and all that.

  • I don't want to leave.

  • That was the message.

  • Did you get television?

  • Was very, very reluctant to break out of it.

  • Boundaries.

  • Television mirrored exactly what those training films did.

  • Father knows best and beaver in all these things where the family life First of all, it denied economic reality.

  • Everyone in a sitcom had a beautiful suburban house, which was, after all, the dream of the troops coming home.

  • Get out of the city.

  • Go into the suburbs, Get that little used to be 40 acres and a mule.

  • Now it's 1/4 of an acre in a porch.

  • But everyone wanted it, and everyone in this had come at it.

  • No one in the sitcom was urban or poor.

  • I mean, very, very few instances.

  • There were little brushes with ethnicity Molly Goldberg that soon disappeared to, largely because a lot of the cat the cast was decimated by being blacklisted.

  • That's a very important thing to that, uh, hole.

  • A group of people were deprived of their livelihood zits.

  • Another subject, but television did was not at all revolutionary.

  • You had certain visionaries like Edward R.

  • Morrow, others that began to use television to bring home to people stark visual reality of what was going on in the world in documentaries.

  • But by and large it was very, very fluff.

  • Cory ended and just reflected what everyone pretended was the truth.

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