Supposedly there is a young lady looking to get married by 30 to end her oppressive virginity. (Thanks, BTW to our former president for changing the landscape of this sort of stuff.)
Hey, I'll be 49 next month. We were raised different. Some of us were raised to actually respect women. We were taught that you wait until marriage. But then again we were born in an era where cars had tail-fins. The space age had just begun. Radios and computers still had tubes in them, and a personal computer was someone who had their own adding machine. Captain Crunch didn't exist yet. either as the cereal or the phone phreek. Most of us had to call long distance by dialing '0'. Many of us had phone numbers with real words in them, like PUllman 5, WAterfall 8 or HIlltop 5. If you wanted to find a geek, look for the guy with taped up glasses and a slide rule in his pocket. The Classic (55-57) Chevys were just going off the new showroom floor to be replaced by the ugliest Chevy ever made, the
58's, and the Classic T-Bird was being replaced by the 4-square Bird. There were no "pony cars". There was a Japanese car called a Toyopet, not quite the Toyota Crown (Corona) of the 60's and 70's yet. If you wanted a small economical car, you bought a VW Beetle, that's about all there was, although in the 1958 model year there were a number of smaller foriegn cars trying to break into the market.
You could have any color phone you wanted, as long as it was black. An answering machine was your mother taking a message then telling you that so-and-so called. A really fancy answering machine was when your mom wrote down the message. Most people had 4-60 air conditioning in their cars, roll down the 4 windows and go like 60. Most states had to put in numeric speed limits for the first time as a result of the Interstate Highway Act. Illinois, which had been Reasonable and Proper for cars, and with a very 'loose' interpretation by the cops thereof, finally make the speed on the open highways 65. (Funny, it's now 55). In very few places were there 4 lane divided roads, most everywhere you went was a two lane road, or sometimes even a few one lane roads with shoulders still existed. One of the busier 4 lane roads ran from Chicago to Saint Louis, the famous US 66, to be replaced shortly by I-55. And lane markers changed when you crossed state lines, so you had to know them.
That was before the influence of Al Kinsey and his book of LIES had made such an inroad on the country. Everybody waited, because everyone expected it back then.
I wonder what our poor little 29 year old would feel like if she had to wait to 49 . . . . Or maybe she should just marry me and we both try to figure it out together, like couples used to. . . .
Charles of Schaumburg