My teenage years took place mostly during the decade of the 1950s. It was a time of the President Eisenhower era whose claim to fame was the expansion of our transcontinental highway system to accommodate all the new traffic that had grown dramatically with the ending of World War Two and gas rationing cards. For me, it was the most memorable time to start the growing-up journey. I was too young to have a driver’s license so it was a time to bicycle or hitchhike to get around to see friends or get to school. Hitchhiking to get to school on time was not too reliable so I saved it mostly for weekends. At age 14 I could get a junior operator license to go to school because the distance to Palo Alto High School was about 7 miles. My parents bought me a 1935 Ford Coupe for $50 and my sphere of discovery expanded to as far as I could buy gas. 

           With the start of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, my generation of the 1950s was renamed “the do-nothing generation.” I guess to record well in our history books of today you have to live in a time of constant change and turmoil. I think that has fairly well defined our planet Earth these last 63 years. Our songs of the 50s as I remember were sung mostly by Perry Como, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby. The sounds came mostly from big bands with lots of horns, drums and a piano. “So what? Your era is no longer relevant.” Well, I think the songs of my era are still very important and we need a big dose of them right now!

          I’ll start with the lyrics for “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative latch on to the affirmative but don’t mess with mister in between. You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum, bring gloom down to the minimum, have faith or a pandemonium libel to walk up on the scene. To illustrate my last remark Jonah in the Whale, Noah in the ark what did they do just when everything looked so dark? They said we better accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative latch on to the affirmative but don’t mess with mister in between.”  How about “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” from the stage play Oklahoma and the rest of its uplifting songs and I can’t forget “Home on the Range” where the deer and the Antelope play and never is heard a discouraging word and the clouds are not cloudy all day. I rest my case.

                See Ya, 

                  Jack