Some American friends invited us to a “1950’s Sock Hop” in the Denver area and tonight we joined them for a trip down memory lane, a nostalgic evening of eating hamburgers over checkered table cloths, drinking root beer floats and dancing to the music of Ritchie Valens and his contemporaries. And when we heard the stories of some older Americans that lived in that post-war era, it suddenly dawned on me that although I was born in 1971 in Romania, I grew up in the 1950’s.
The Sock Hops were informal social events that took place in school gyms. The schools did not want the dancers to mark the floor with their shoes so the young Americans danced in their socks. Tonight I was transported back in time and found myself dancing next to guys in blue jeans and rolled up white T-shirts and ladies dressed in white and pink with poodle dog motifs sewn over their skirts. I remembered the first high school party at my house when my mother made everyone take off their shoes and we danced in our socks, sparing our new hardwood floors from premature wear.
Growing up in socialist Romania we did our laundry the old fashioned way and then at some point my family bought some low tech washing machine. The 1950’s in America saw the advent of the washing machine as an affordable house appliance. And then came the TV, black and white to start with, that a lot of American families purchased, and for me, more than 20 years later in Romania it was still black and white.
At the Sock Hop party someone told me how back in the 1950’s his family got their first rotary phone. My family was finally approved to have a phone (rotary of course) in 1981 so I know how is to live in a time when, to make a call, you had to go to one of the handful of people on your street that had a phone.
America got wheels in the 1950’s, every house started to have a car and the 1955 Classic Chevy became an icon of that age. My family applied for and waited in line for years to get a humble Dacia 1300 and in 1985 our turn finally came to buy that car! How exciting were those days…
The 1950’s American music was melodious and romantic, not unlike the songs we heard on the Romanian National Radio when I grew up in the 1970’s (a lot of other music genres were censored by our vigilant state).
I came to this party as a curious stranger and it was hard to leave. I did not grow up in the 1950’s America but somewhere deep inside I knew I experienced my own 1950’s.
