how was everything like in 1951?

Question

-technology
-fashion
-economics
-entertainment
-food items

please help! and it would be great if you gave me links too

Answer 1

in UK it was the year of the festival of Britain - a post war trade fair

Food was still rationed - til 1953.

Furniture fashion developed big asymetric prints which were not allowed during the war as they wasted fabric.

A fridge was a luxury, so was a telly.

Times were hard

Entertainment was the cinema

Answer 2

Technology: No calculators. TV was black-and-white. Color was beginning to come in. Autos had automatic shift as now. Gasoline was 25 cents/gal. Still, people short of money said, "Give me 10 gallons." We put garbage out in cans, but I burned our waste paper in the back yard.

My father bought a turntable that would play 33-1/3-rpm longplay records. He hired a technician to wire the turntable into our radio. At first we could only afford two records. $5 each! I got a 45-rpm changer, and I paid a technician to fit it to my small radio. These records slowly replaced our collections of 12-inch 78-rpm shellac (breakable) records

Fashion: Girls wore long, pencil-thin skirts, tight sweaters. It was the time of the sweater girl. One author of the time wrote of a girl with a sweater-full of torpedos in full launch. Another wrote of girls whose clothes were so tight their bodies were machined metal breast-and-buttock surfaces.

Entertainment: Movies. Double-features. There was only one movie house in town. They ran one show Sun-Mon-Tue and changed Wed-Thur-Fri-Sat.

They showed a newsreel, short films (like the Three Stooges), coming attractions, and a cartoon. Then came the first film. Then came the second film. After that, they did not make people leave. They started again with the newsreel, or whatever.

I often came in with my friends half-way through the first film. We figured out what was going on. We stayed through the whole show until the first film came on again. Half-way through we would say to one another, "I think that this is where we came in." And then we would leave.

Because they changed the show Sat. to Sun., I could go both days and see a different double feature. But new films would play in Chicago first and months later in my town. My father wanted to give me a treat. I asked him to take me to downtown Chicago to see "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," because it would not come to our town for months.

On TV, I loved "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. I was devastated when they cancelled the show. I never understood why.

Food items: Canned goods, very common. Frozen food, also. It was the day of the invention of the TV dinner. People watched TV so much that they did not want to get up and have dinner. So housewives heated TV dinners so other family members wouldn't have to leave the TV.

Red meat was expensive, and fish was cheap. Fresh fruit and vegetables were also cheap, but they were a lot of work, and so my mother avoided them.

Economics: Times seemed good, but also hard. My parents had a mortgage on the house, but paid it every month. We weren't poor. When it came time to go to college, I sent for the catalogs of Harvard and MIT. But it was clear that we could only afford the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. I went there until my father moved the family to New Jersey to take a job in New York. Then I transferred to Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey.

I wanted to take part-time jobs and summer jobs, but they didn't exist in those days. "Our business is full time, so we don't need part time workers." "Our business is the whole year, so we don't need summer workers." "Can't you give me a job when your other workers take summer vacations?" "But then you'd go back to school in the autumn." Scholarships were uncommon. "Your parents make alot of money. There are alot of students better than you are and needier than you are."

Stores were open 9am to 5pm, Mon. through Fri. Thurs., they were open till 9pm. Sat. either 9am-12 or 9am-5pm. Sunday, everything closed. There were no malls on the highways out of town. There were isolated stores on the highways every so often. I remember going to a highway store with my parents to buy eyeglasses, and to another to buy shoes. So most of the time, every thing was shut tight.

Things are better today. My childhood of 1951 was so boring. At least I got to watch four films per week, Sat. and Sun.