Anyone remember the '50s and '60s where lawyers, engineers and bus

[Old Troop]

drivers lived in the same development? Salaries were clearly more level then.

[femmocrat]

1. Not in our town.

Doctors and lawyers lived in the mansions on the hilltop. The rest of us peons lived down in the valley.

[Lionel Mandrake]

2. I remember them well.

For me, the 50s were in black and white; the 60s were in color.

The 50s were the age of conformity; the 60s were the age of LSD and hippies.

The 50s featured fallout shelters, President Eisenhower, Senator Joe McCarthy, the House Unamerican Committee, blacklists, fear and intimidation. Ike's garbled syntax made me think he was stupid, which he certainly was not. (I was just a kid and a poor judge of character.)

The 60s featured the Vietnam War, Assassinations, the Civil Rights Movement, Astronauts walking on the Moon, psychedelic art, civil unrest, and the police riot in Chicago. By disrupting the Democratic Convention, Mayor Daley and his thugs helped elect President Nixon (the 2nd worst, after W).

[david13]

3. I think the truth is that the gap was larger then. The income

disparity. But now it is widening more? I only know that the truth is, that the 'good old days' were not really that good.
Live for today, and the future. That's all we have.
dc

[Aristus]

5. Eugene O'Neill said that there is no future. And no present. Only the past happening over and over.

Kind of a buzzkill, that...

[david13]

6. No, I think there is nothing but the future, and if we are not moving

ahead, we are backing up. Maybe that was O'Neills problem, he spent his life backing up and never realized it.
Now we do know that for all the progress the usa made, the usa has been falling behind for about 30 years now.
dc

[DBoon]

4. I grew up in LA then

Engineers could afford to live in Palos Verdes, side-by-side with Doctors and Lawyers.

Working people lived further down the hill, but I went to a private Catholic school with the children of lawyers, doctors, engineers, longshoremen, fishermen and local businessmen.

Dockworkers were part of the middle class thanks to the ILWU

The poor were there but lived in government housing projects and went to the public schools

There were definitely class differences, but educated middle class professionals had a good life, and unionized workers had almost as good a life.

You can't say that anymore.

[Gormy Cuss]

9. That's a key difference that I remember too.

I lived on the other coast. My public elementary school drew from both an upper income neighborhood and one of the lowest income areas, and many of the kids with doctor and lawyer parents sent their kids to the public school. We all benefited from that proximity to people from different economic standing but those of us from the lower income side derived the most benefit because there were parents who were very influential members of the community. It was also true that unionized blue collar workers were more common and lived next to white collar professionals.

[LibDemAlways]

10. Me, too. I grew up in Palos Verdes. My dad was an

aerospace engineer, as were the dads of just about every kid I knew. There were also doctors, dentists, lawyers, and people who owned their own businesses. It was prosperous but not extravagant. Today the smaller older homes in my old neighborhood are rapidly being replaced by mansions. The only aerospace people who could afford a house up there today are the execs who are raking in the big bucks. The average engineer could never afford it, even if he could find and keep a job until retirement - extremely unlikely.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. I spent my elementary school years in a factory town

so most of my classmates were the children of assembly line workers. All the families had their own home, a non=employed mother, and a car. They took vacations. It was the life Michael Moore reminisces about in his film Capitalism, A Love Story.

Even more astounding, the children of owners of the factories attended the same public school as the rest of us. When I was in third grade, a classmate invited me to her house for after school. It was only then that I realized that her family had three maids and a Swiss governess. Oh, so that's why my classmate spoke French...

[nuxvomica]

8. Yes

I don't think the salaries were all that similar but whatever you did for a living, it was enough to buy a home and raise a family, and you had plenty of free time to be active in community affairs.