Author:
marv
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Date Posted: 03:30:27 12/06/12 Thu
Some of the television shows that I remember are Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, Bat Masterson, Gunsmoke, Tales of Wells Fargo,Maverick, Wagon Train, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Tales of Tombstone Territory, Peter Gunn, M Squad, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Sea Hunt, Ed Sullivan, Lawrence Welk, 77 Sunset Strip.
A friend joked that CBS stood for Cow Boy Shows and NBC was for Nothing But Cowboy shows.
>Another column picked up from the paper. The story is
>far from done and probably won't be posted for years.
>
>-- Wes
>
>-----------------
>
>
>November is National Novel Writing Month among other
>things, so of course I've been working on one, not
>that I might not do it at other times of the year. I
>spent much of the Thanksgiving weekend working on a
>story of four college kids getting to be friends in
>1958; in the story they'll stay friends the rest of
>their lives. (I haven't gotten that far in the story
>yet.)
>
>Now, setting a story in 1958 means that I want it to
>sound like it's 1958, and getting the details right
>turned into part of the fun.
>
>For instance, the four kids go on a first date. Where
>are they going to go? To a movie, naturally; some
>things don't change. But what movie? Thank you,
>Google! Bridge on the River Kwai doesn't strike
>any of them as a great idea for a first date movie.
>(OK, OK. If there are any real super movie buffs or
>hairsplitters out there, yes, that's a 1957 movie, but
>this scene is set in early 1958 and it probably would
>still have been in first run.)
>
>In any case, (and that's probably not a phrase that
>would have been commonly used in 1958) and considering
>a limited selection, they wind up going to
>Vertigo. After the movie, one of the girls
>comments, "It wasn't too bad, but I don't know if I
>liked it." (I was surprised to learn that on some
>lists that the 1957 Vertigo has recently
>outplaced Citizen Kane as the best movie of all
>time. Thanks again, Google!)
>
>But anyway, in the story the four kids have fun, and
>go on to other things. After all, going on a date on a
>Friday beats hanging around a dorm room, especially
>when the dorm room is devoid of some of the things
>some college kids would consider essentials today:
>things like microwaves, refrigerators, portable TVs,
>video games, computers, and members of the opposite
>sex.
>
>They might have gone down to the dorm lounge to watch
>TV (almost certainly black and white) but what would
>they have watched? It's easy to come up with the names
>and some details of popular shows like Dragnet
>(All I want are the facts, Ma'am.) but sometimes
>even Google isn't a big help in telling me what night
>the show was on back then, so I had to be a little
>fuzzy about it.
>
>During the story one of the kids buys a used Triumph
>roadster, an English sports car. But was it a TR-2 or
>a TR-3? Good question on that one too, but thanks to
>Wikipedia, I decided it was a TR-2. Another of the
>kids drives a '53 Nash Statesman -- not a first choice
>for a college car, but he got it from his dad for the
>right price (which is to say free), so he doesn't have
>much room for complaint. But was it a six or a V-8?
>Turns out Nash wasn't making V-8s in that era; I'd
>thought they were. The parents of one of the girls
>drives a DeSoto. I already knew that was a V-8, but
>that point wasn't necessary for the story.
>
>The following summer, one of the girls in the story
>likes to wear one-piece playsuits. That helped place
>the story in time; I don't think I've seen a one-piece
>playsuit on a female older than about five in decades,
>although they were once popular for girls of the right
>age group. In my day girls were required to wear them
>in gym class. They were actually kind of cute,
>although I doubt you'll find many girls from my high
>school class who would agree with me. Of course, I had
>to do some research on that, (again, thanks Google!)
>to find out that they're considered retro these days,
>but they may be regaining popularity.
>
>1958 was a long time ago -- I was ten -- and my memory
>of those days isn't very clear, so it was nice to be
>able to go back and research those things online. If
>one of those kids in 1958 was researching a story set
>in 1904 (the same distance back) they wouldn't have
>had the internet to help them. But, I'd bet that 1904
>would have seemed as strange to them as 1958 is to us.
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