need to interview somone from the 1950's? need help?

[justagrandma]

I was a teen ager in the sixties and yes I remember all of those things.
There are a lot of questions there, and a lot of reactions.
The assassinations left us wondering what was going on in the world, it seemed like death was all around us, At eighteen the men were drafted, the boy voted best looking lost his arm in Vietnam. Bay of Pigs seemed miles away, And JFK standing down Khrushchev was the kind of thing that had the young men enlisting. Or running to Canada, Vietnam was universally hated, we, the younger generation of the time, felt we were bearing the burden of a group of old generals who no longer fought on their own. We got pictures of the war, I think that changed forever the way people looked at war, no amount of bravery, or pageantry could make up for the pictures we saw that showed those at home that war was ugly and unremittingly terrifying.
Rock and roll music was loathed by the older people some of whom saw it as lustful, or even racially based. Civil Rights wasn't universally welcomed, people on both sides felt it was forced, and even among friends it was not always easy.
What those speeches did though is offer hope, that things could and would get better, that we could recognize worth no matter what.
I'm still not sure we can do that, but for a while there, some people really did believe that.
Between the war and civil rights we didn't have much trust in older people or the government. But far and away we simply did what we did, went into the service, got married, had families, far younger than most generations, because marriage was a way out of the draft. One reason so many from that generation got divorced.
We were all starting out in life back then, most of us without a clue, so innocent that it hurts to think about it. There was a split, between those who lived the drug culture, arty, hippie life, and those who were pretty tame, married with children and yet no matter where you were on that scale, there was an us and them attitude, I often wonder if our parents didn't understand that we didn't want their burdens, their hates, their ways. It was gloves and hats for us as a child, and no one's worn them since but the British.
Recollections of popular culture were along what you've listed, and the clothes, really quite daring considering where we had been, I've always been fashion conscious and I could list some items that make me laugh now when I think of them.
I also owned six bikinis, considered a scandal, that also makes me laugh now, they had more coverage than many dresses do now.

I didn't go to Woodstock, my sister did, or tried to, it was the worlds largest parking lot. She never got there. Few were really hippies, some were weekend hippies.
I do remember the moon landing, we had a party to watch such a miraculous thing, and I was seven months pregnant, she was born early on Splashdown day four days later.

Politics in the sixties was so full of change and anger and what seemed to me to be a whole society giving rebirth to itself, all the pain and blood and agony rippling through the country as we came out of the safe, straight grey fifties and moved into the sixties and seventies. It was not the best of times, but it was interesting times.
Very difficult times. If you'd like more email me.