One Family’s Story
There is so much written about 1950s America, so much nostalgic focus, largely because it was in many ways a unique time. Yes, the economy was booming following the Second World War. Yes, there was great societal pressure for women to quit employment, marry the returning veterans, conform to domestic life, and raise families. No, there wasn’t a medically approved birth control method until 1960 when the pill was introduced. And finally, the nostalgic image of a house in the suburbs, new car in the driveway and Mom surrounded by well-dressed children as Dad went off to work, was rarely if ever true.
And if any of it was true, it was limited by design to white middle-class families whose patriarchs possessed both the education and skills needed in the post-war economy, and for those Moms who were indeed happy homemakers rather than, in reality, desperate domestic workers. Blacks, immigrants and most other ethnic groups that made up 1950s America did not qualify and faced a steep climb toward assimilation.
So I thought it useful to offer one family’s experience of this peculiar time period in the nation’s history. This is about one immigrant family whose parents seized the opportunities offered by this country, and who put their lives on the line to serve it in return.
I am a product of 1950s America. Born in 1956 to parents who married immediately following the war. My father had served four years in the military and rose to the rank of Tech V, a specialist tank mechanic in General Patton’s army. When he was not repairing tanks, he was a rifleman assigned to a front line unit and saw a good deal of combat. He was released just before the war ended with a case of “shell shock” — a concussion combined with PTSD — and spent a month recuperating in an Army hospital in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He met my mother at a hometown USO event, and soon they were married.
My father was very fortunate. He had been trained by the army to repair and maintain the new Hydra-Matic transmissions installed in tanks, particularly the M5 Stuart tank which used two Hydra-Matic transmissions mated to twin Cadillac V8 engines. After the war he accepted an offer to train at General Motors under the G.I. Bill and became one of the few auto mechanics at the time who knew how to repair the new automatic transmissions in consumer automobiles. Following a stint at a GM dealership, he soon started his own business from a rented bay in a local auto shop. This would grow into a successful family-operated business.
My mother finished high school with top grades and took a job at the original Maidenform clothing factory in Bayonne, New Jersey, which produced women’s lingerie, and later in the war, women’s military uniforms. She was smart, forthright and could brighten a room with her smile. Initially hired as a seamstress trainee, she was soon promoted to front office staff. Like many women at the time, she continued with this work until after her marriage to my father and just before their firstborn arrived, my sister, in 1946.
My parents had three children including myself, each five years apart. My mother always shied away from our questions about how that happened. As adults we could only guess that it was some version of the rhythm method.
The 1950s were boom times here in the States and my parents did well. Although my father never finished high school, and instead opted to join the Civilian Conservation Corp at the age of sixteen, and then two years later enlisted in the Army, he was an intelligent young man with a unique skill to examine a mechanical part just once and understand how it works. My mother was very good with mathematics and would later run the front office of the family business processing invoices and keeping the books. She was a master of the mechanical adding machine, and in different times could have been a math teacher.
Only later as I grew into my teenage years did I begin to understand how unusual my parents’ experiences were for their time. Both were the children of Italian immigrant families, both first generation Americans. My father arrived in the U.S. at seven years old with his mother. My mother was born here, having arrived in the U.S. with her parents just before her birth. Her father had a well-paying job at a Standard Oil facility in Newark, and he owned a few properties in Bayonne. In contrast, my father’s parents were of very modest means, his father a merchant mariner in the Italian fleet.
My father had a similar urge to leave home, and he wanted nothing more than to leave his small immigrant town of Hoboken the moment he was old enough to join the CCC.
But as I grew up and looked around at the extended family, I saw mostly truck drivers, longshoremen and laborers. None of the men of their generation had completed high school, and only a few of the women. As best as I could tell, all of the women had quit jobs to marry and were busy raising young families through the 1950s.
Historians point out that gender roles in the 1950s were intimately connected to the Cold War. The concept of nuclear family emerged to describe and encourage the stability of the family as the essential building block of a strong and healthy society. Women were largely expected to stay home and take care of the children and the bread-winning husband. But in fact, an estimated forty percent of mothers with young children and fifty percent of mothers with older children chose to continue working. As often happens, the image of gender roles during this period contrasts with the reality.
Another thing I noticed about my extended family relatives is that they had raised their children to speak Italian at home, although of course they were learning English in school and from their friends. My parents in contrast were very concerned about appearing too “ethnic” during the 1950s, and it is true, this was not a good time to be viewed as a “foreigner.” Assimilation, while unspoken, was definitely part of the pressure to conform. So they decided not to speak Italian at home because they believed it would interfere with our learning English. The goal was to raise us as Americans, plain and simple.
As a result I was never able to speak to my grandparents, at least not without a translator, nor with any of the elders of the extended family. This was not without some controversy. My father’s mother, my grandmother, was particularly upset about this situation and strongly disapproved. But my parents held firm, determined to raise American children. This would later result in a serious split in the family.
So we were an ethnic “white” family speaking English and with a successful and respectable local business. Well, more or less. There were occasional slurs, stories I heard mostly from my older siblings: greaseball, wap, guido and others. Even as I was growing up through the 1960s I would sometimes hear one of these hurled my way. Oh, and there was the local mafia, the Italian mafia.
As I was growing up in the 1960s, I began to work at my father’s automotive shop on Saturdays and sometimes after school, and every once in a while I would notice sleek black sedans driving slowly down the dead-end street and collecting at a small building that I understood was once a bus depot. The bosses would go in, and the drivers and other guys — probably soldiers — would hang around outside smoking cigarettes. A strange sight to be sure.
Even worse, I would sometimes notice one of these sedans on a lift in the shop being repaired. As time went on, I would come to learn that my father had built a relationship with the local mob boss, and in exchange for keeping their vehicles running well (at no charge of course), he received “protection,” meaning that they wouldn’t shake him down for cash payments. This relationship was not of my father’s choosing. It was more of a given for any small business in Jersey City at the time, but especially Italian-owned small businesses. My dad once explained it to me. He said, shrugging, “It’s like the old country. We help each other out.”
There was a Black neighborhood not far from our Jersey City home, but except for the kids in my elementary school classes, we pretty much stayed separate. Then, I believe in the early 1960s, my mother hired a Black lady to come in and clean the house once a week, and this was my first experience getting to know an African-American adult. The cleaning lady was pleasant but generally tried to avoid talking with us kids.
Of course I had Black friends in my public school classes, but I honestly did not think anything of it. There were also Black families living opposite our home, our backyards facing each other, and I would often play with the kids my age, climbing the rickety fences without a thought. It is not uncommon that ethnic and racial differences hold little meaning for children until much older.
So by the end of the 1950s, my father was spending long days running the business while my mother ran the household and looked after her three children, ages 4, 9 and 14. I will admit that I loved my father dearly and preferred his company. On so many evenings I would wait patiently on the front porch waiting for him to drive down the block and arrive home.
They were able to purchase the house early in the marriage with a loan from Mom’s father, and maintained the upper floor as a rental apartment. For as long as I can remember, a kindly older lady lived in that apartment. We lived on the first level and later the finished basement. The latter has its own story. One Saturday afternoon, my father showed up with a bunch of “guys,” the men who worked for him, and a truck full of lumber and other supplies. Within a week, they had completed a drop ceiling, tiles on the floor and thin wood paneling on the walls. They installed a small kitchenette on one side, a bathroom, and even a bar at one end.
Of course I helped however I was able. This was 1961 and I was only five years old, but I helped all the same. Once finished, the basement became the center of family life, a party room, and to our utter delight, a screening room for borrowed movies (shown via a projection booth, no less) and slide shows. The films were multiple reels of 16 mm motion picture film. These were “borrowed” somehow, not rented. A fellow with a truck would come around to the shop and offer an ever revolving selection of titles. Since we had only one film projector, we had short breaks every 20 minutes or so to switch reels. In just a few years, I would be the one operating the projector.
Aside from the basement, my favorite place to play at this age was our gated side driveway, or what passed for a driveway. The homes on our street were detached, but with only about ten feet of space separating one from the next. We had a free-standing garage in the rear, but it was mostly for bikes, beach umbrellas and similar recreational items. This driveway was where I learned to ride a bike, and it was the scene of my earliest memories of playing with friends.
I lived in this home with the family until 1966 when we moved to a new development home in Bayonne, the next town over. My Dad’s business was at its peak at this point, with a new building addition and six full-time mechanics on payroll. It was still largely transmission repair work, since automatic transmissions at the time frequently broke down and needed repairs. Later, as the transmissions improved, my father expanded into used car sales alongside the repair shop.
We moved to a nicer home in a quiet section of Bayonne. But in the long trajectory of my family, we can see that this was really about white flight on the one hand and middle-class striving on the other. By 1965, the Black neighborhood in Jersey City was beginning to encroach upon our street and my parents were concerned about our safety, thus white flight. But the new home also represented moving up in the world, more firmly entering the middle-class in America.
Soon thereafter and as I began middle school, my mother began working at the newly constructed front office at my father’s business managing invoices, keeping the books, processing payroll and working with an accountant. At first she worked part-time so that she was home to greet me as I returned from school. Later, it became a full-time job.
We had made it, firmly planted in middle-class America, speaking unaccented English, and having achieved the American Dream. But there was a price to pay for the family’s aggressive assimilation and economic success. Some of the extended family began to reject my parents, and by the time I was in college, there were far fewer gatherings at my home than there had been in the old days.
American Dream or not, it was clear that the family’s success owed a great debt to my father being in the right place at the right time. A significant part of the American Dream was every family owning an automobile, and every one of these vehicles needed repairs. Of course, the reality for many fell well short of this nostalgic 1950s image.
Almost seventy years later we in America have many more immigrant families trying their best to conform and assimilate to American life. Let us be patient and give them a helping hand.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
From The Good Men Project on Medium
 |
 |
 |
 |
***
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—–
Photo credit: Brett Jordan on Unsplash
