Radios

In the 1940's, radios were large; the vacuum tubes in them needed a lot of space and needed to be warmed up before a signal could be picked up. Tuning the radio to a station required moving a knob back and forth to find the exact spot where the sound was best, and that spot would vary as the show progressed. The radio might have to be re-tuned every few minutes to hear the show all the way through. Strange noises, whines and static, much like what we now associate with outer space movies, would often emanate from the radio. 

In the late 50's I got a transistor radio. It still required tuning, but it was much more reliable and ran on batteries.

 

Type of radio from my childhood        Transistor radio

About 2 feet tall                                7-8 inches tall

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saddle shoes

Saddle shoes were the in thing when I was in high school. They were very hard to keep clean. I cleaned off the old, scuffed polish and then re-polished mine every night. But the white parts got black marks and the black parts got a white film, every day. There were a few other kids that kept theirs immaculate all day, but I never figured out how they did it. The other kind of shoes we wore in high school were white bucks, also very hard to keep clean. The white material was like white nubuck that is sold now or white suede. They were also oxfords, like our saddle shoes.  

It was very popular to wear pink and black: a black skirt for girls or black pants for boys, worn with pink blouses or shirts. Calvin, my boyfriend when I was a senior, and I would wear black and pink clothes on the same days. And on those days, we would polish our shoes pink and black, thanks to food coloring in the polish. 

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