Here are some of the reasons why, in my humble opinion, the 1950s were the ideal time to be a child.

The popularity of science fiction rose steadily from the end of World War II, reaching a peak in about 1950 that led to an explosion of original hardback and paperback science fiction novels, to science fiction comic books, to science fiction on the new medium of live television, and to a flood of science fiction and fantasy films.

THE PAPER FEAST

Most kids could afford the paperbacks, at 25 cents, which featured new, original works by such writers as Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke and Poul Anderson, but which also reprinted classic novels from the long-lost pulp science fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to Doubleday's science fiction book club, we could even afford some of the hardback editions, at $1. If we could scare up $2 by mowing lawns or doing yardwork or repairing radios, or just deny ourselves comics and movies for a while, we could afford the books issued by some of the small specialty presses--- Arkham House, Gnome Press, Fantasy Press--- reprinting the pulp fiction of the great fantasy authors such as Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as the space operas of E. E. (Doc) Smith and many others. The prices of paperbacks began to rise steadily in the 1960s, but paperback original science fiction novels remained common. By 1950, the pulp magazines had almost vanished, with a few science fiction or character pulps like AMAZING and PHANTOM DETECTIVE still hanging on, faint shadows of the richness of the 1930s and 1940s, but by 1950 there were also three prominent digest-sized science fiction magazines, costing about the same as a paperback: ASTOUNDING, GALAXY and MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. GALAXY even had its own series of novels, originals and reprints, in the same digest size as the magazine. Also at the news stand, there was the unique EC line of comic books, including stunning artwork by the likes of Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Joe Orlando, Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, Reed Crandall, Graham Ingles, and many others, illustrating literate scripts by Al Feldstein based on brainstorming sessions between Feldstein and publisher William Gaines. The EC horror comics were the best sellers, but there was an incredible lineup of science fiction, suspense, war and adventure comics to chose from in the EC stables, not to mention MAD, the comic book to end all comic books, which had us worshipping Harvey Kurtzman and faithfully following his very disappointing later career. Many kids tried to draw their own comics, leading to a lifetime hobby, if rarely to a profession. In our high school libraries, we could find the "juvenile" novels of Robert A. Heinlein (actually adult novels with teenage heroes), and the Winston Science Fiction series of dozens of novels by a variety of accomplished authors, aimed specifically at teenagers. At the City Library we could find a series of more dozens novels from Avalon, reprinting classic science fiction from the 1930s, and new novels by some of the same authors.

THE FILM FEAST

At the movies, George Pal produced a series of visually stunning technicolor science fiction films, beginning with DESTINATION MOON in 1950, and probably peaking with WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1953. Other studios and producers followed suit, with a long list of low budget black and white science fiction films, often involving giant monsters or giant insects. Films varied wildly in budget and quality, from big-studio classics like THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THEM and FORBIDDEN PLANET, all the way down to the blithering low-budget no-studio idiocy of Ed Wood and Burt Gordon. The Saturday matinee usually cost only 25 cents, but with so many movies and so few movie theaters in most small towns, a given movie only played for a week or two. No matter how you loved a given movie, it was a challenge to see it more than once! The wave of science fiction movies flowed steadily throughout the 1950s, continuing a few years into the 1960s. For a while in 1953, both movies and comics burst into three dimensions, then almost instantly subsided back to their normal two.

THE RADIO FEAST

Radio wasn't dead by any means in the early 1950s, and networks provided quite a bit in the way of comedy, drama, thriller and children's shows. Kids listened raptly to THE LONE RANGER and SPACE PATROL, to Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen, to AMOS 'N' ANDY and OUR MISS BROOKS, to LUM 'N' ABNER and BEULAH, to the inimitable BOB AND RAY, to SUSPENSE, YOURS TRULY JOHNNY DOLLAR, to GUNSMOKE and Gene Autry's MELODY RANCH, to SMILIN' ED'S GANG, to ESCAPE, and even later in the 1950s to the great Stan Freberg. The best shows were on CBS, with Mutual running a distant second, and NBC and ABC hardly in the running at all, even though for a while ABC had both SPACE PATROL and SPACE CADET. There were even two science fiction anthology series, DIMENSION X, and X MINUS ONE. It's been said many times, but is nevertheless true, that radio stimulated the imagination far, far more than television and films.

THE TELEVISION FEAST

On television, it was of course the Golden Age, and science fiction was well represented, beginning with CAPTAIN VIDEO, and continuing with SPACE PATROL, TOM CORBETT SPACE CADET, ROCKY JONES SPACE RANGER, ROD BROWN OF THE ROCKET RANGERS and others, as documented elsewhere on this site. Television had other major impacts, as well. TV stations began showing the classic action-adventure serials from the 1930s and 1940s, particularly the one BUCK ROGERS and three FLASH GORDON serials starring Buster Crabbe. The 1950s were the tail end of movie serials at the theatres, but there were a few science fiction serials from Republic and Columbia at the Saturday Matinees as late as 1953. In these days, Republic gave kids the last serial hero, Commando Cody aka Rocketman, while Columbia merely exploited the TV hero Captain Video. TV stations also showed a huge number of Western films from the 1930s and 1940s, reviving the careers of Gene Autry, William (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd, Buster Crabbe and Roy Rogers, and even giving a brief boost to Lash LaRue and Gabby Hayes. [The Westerns proved so popular that they ultimately killed live TV. By the end of the 1950s, it seemed as if almost all prime-time programming was taken up with filmed 30-minute Western series, the best of which were GUNSMOKE and HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL.] Kids could still catch shorts with the original Three Stooges, Larry, Curly and Moe, and feature films of Abbott and Costello, at the neighborhood movie theatres, but TV provided a good look at their earlier work. Even more important, TV gave kids their first look at 1930s comic geniuses Laurel and Hardy, as most of their features and many of their sound two-reelers were shown over and over. Even the great days of silent film comedy were revived by TV showings. Contemporary humor was particularly well served, as TV also brought us the brillant live skits of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, and the dazzling genius of Ernie Kovacs. Television revived a whole forgotten genre of films, when the Universal Shock Theatre package was sold to local TV stations in 1957. Soon every city had a station in which a costumed host showed the classic horror films of the 1930s, and kids got their first real look at Frankenstein and Dracula, The Wolf Man, the Mummy, and other iconic horror figures, and learned to love the unique talents of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Lionel Atwell, George Zucco and Dwight Fry. The success of the TV revival of "Hollywood Gothic Horror" opened the way, in the late 1950s, for the coming of England's Hammer Films and their own soon-to-be stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, as they did their own movie versions of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy, using a color stock that seemed abnormally sensitive to blood red! Hollywood followed along, with its own color horror series, usually starring the great Vincent Price, and often wisely teaming him with the ailing but effective Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. Karloff even appeared on TV as host and star of at least three different series. Television also provided for many kids their first look at what could be done with puppets and marionettes, with the puppet work of Burr Tillstrom on KUKLA, FRAN AND OLLIE, and the antics of LUCKY PUP with puppets "Pinhead" and "The Great Foodini," together with the marionette work of Bill Baird, being particularly impressive. Kids also got their first look at professional ventriloquism, with Paul Winchell being the standout, and they saw a lot of magic, both good and bad. Many a kid was inspired by his TV viewing to ransack the stores for props and parts for puppets and marionettes, and to get addresses of magic stores and vent figure suppliers from magazine classified ads. Even if kids never became expert at voice throwing or sleight-of-hand, their imaginations were stimulated for days on end during long, hot and humid summers. The popularity of, and wonders achieved with, stop-motion animation in many of the special effects scenes in the 1950s science fiction and fantasy films spawned in some kids the desire to locate a cheap 16 mm movie camera and a heap of modelling clay and try their hands at animation themselves.

THE JUNIOR SCIENTIST

Despite the increasing richness of TV programming during the 1950s, it was rare for kids to watch TV more than 30 minutes a day, or go to see more than one movie a month. There was plenty of time to play and to dream, to experiment and to fiddle around. Chemistry sets and microscope sets were fairly common "educational" presents at Christmas time, and many middle class kids had basement or store-room "labs" where they tended to mix chemicals at random in hopes of getting heat, smoke or at least some foam. And they went on usually fruitless outdoor treks in search of stagnant ponds where they could find amoeba, rotifers and diatoms to view under the microscope, or even to preserve in resin on glass slides. During the early 1950s, companies like Skyscope provided fairly inexpensive, robust Newtonian reflecting telescopes of good quality, and many a teenager became a backyard astronomer on cool winter nights when the stars didn't twinkle, but lay like brilliant icy gems against absolute dark. The moon and bright planets were easy, but the Ring nebula in summer, and the Orion nebula in winter, were more breath-taking, as were the brilliantly contrasting colors of many close double stars, and the vast spread of the Milky Way across the summer sky. [I still remember that my hair literally stood on end whenever I moved the tube of the telescope very slowly along the Milky Way on a very dark, clear summer night, with lightning bugs slowly drifting all about, flashing their gentle yellowish tail-lights.] With not many streetlights and few outdoor lights of any kind, most kids could carry their telescope only a few feet out the back door and still have a fine view of the cosmos. A 3-1/2 or 4 inch reflector could be had for $25 to $30, ready-made, and if you had a reasonably clean workshop you could grind your own 6-inch mirror and build your own telescope, but the total cost was about the same or a bit more, once you sent your mirror off to be silvered, bought some eyepieces, eyepiece and mirror mounts, and scrounged up enough wood and pipes to make the tube and mount.

THE FEAST OF BUILDING PROJECTS

An explosion of plastic model kits available in stores all during the 1950s created for many kids a lifetime love of models and of model building. The 1950s were also the great age of the home workshop, with electronic tinkering particularly common. The simplicity and ease of construction of complex vacuum-tube circuits stimulated a number of monthly magazines such as POPULAR ELECTRONICS, that regularly featured quite elaborate hobby projects resulting in sophisticated electronic gear. Kids quickly advanced from buiding crystal sets to building PA amplifiers, theremins, and other quite elaborate items, all on a fairly modest budget, with parts readily obtained from large electronic catalog outlets. And don't forget military surplus stores, quite common in these days only half a decade to a decade removed from WW II, and contemporary with the Korean "Police Action." For literally pennies, one could come away with gas masks, dust masks, goggles, flight helmets, tank radios, and all manner of switches and meters, perfect for that backyard space ship which had originally been a cardboard refrigerator box.

THOSE LUCKY ONES

We who were fortunate enough to grow up during this era had our imaginations overloaded in the healthiest way imaginable. Our creativity was stimulated in virtually every direction. And we were left to our own devices for long periods, able to experiment and play and daydream. We usually were fortunate enough to find room to grow in every direction we wanted. And, oh, how many different directions we were being made aware of! For every lucky child, childhood is full of wonderful new things, no matter what decade they grew up in, whether they were reading dime novels at the turn of the last century or reading HARRY POTTER at the end of this century, but from the broadest possible perspective I can't conclude other than that the 1950s were unique. My own life spans the last 60 years of the 20th Century, and I have had close friends whose lives spanned much of the last 120 years, and none of us have found any precedent or comparison for the incredible avalanche of imagination-stimulating material available to kids (and to adults who retained their delight in childish activities) during the 1950s. There has never been anything remotely like it, before or since. [Note: About 20 years ago I read a book introduction by Don Glut, in which he expressed similar thoughts. I have never been able to find that book, or that introduction, again, else I would have just reprinted it here with permission, instead of hacking out my own humble version.]

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