| Subject: Re: 1958 friends |
Author:
Jim Scott
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Date Posted: 22:29:33 12/10/12 Mon
In reply to:
Wes
's message, "1958 friends" on 12:31:15 11/28/12 Wed
Wes,
You used a Studebaker in the Bradford Speedway story and now in Susan you gave her parents a Pontiac Aztek which is one of the weirdest looking cars of the last decade. But for 1958 you should have instantly thought of the most written about car of that decade which was the Edsel. I have always thought it got a bad reputation from the press but was at least as good as the Mercury with more daring styling. In the wide-spot-in-the-road in West Kentucky where I grew up a friend's older brother was the most popular DJ on the local radio station and he had a red Edsel convertible which was one of only 930 built that year. The DJ said it would run over 120 MPH with its big Lincoln engine but we teenagers drove it more sanely when we borrowed it that summer. The girls certainly loved it.
The DJ's younger brother went on to do two tours in fighter planes in Viet Nam and later became the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then the NATO commander during Clinton's second term before he retired.
Jim
>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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