Mature Life Features

. . . the wine-tasting guru

t’other evening and

he said he gets

a lot of his news

through the grapevine.

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Golden Age Depends on Your Age

By Tom Morrow

We often hear the phrase “that was back in the ‘golden age’ of” – fashion, cars, Hollywood, you pick it.

Remember Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Look? If you don’t, you didn’t arrive on earth until after the 1950s because these popular weekly publications were the People magazines of their day. News magazines such as Time and U.S. News & World Report were vogue by mid-20^th century.

One could say the golden age of newspapers stretched from the late 1800s through the first half of the 20^th century. Every major city in America had at least two newspapers. New York City had seven until the late ‘70s. Today, Los Angeles has just one, down from three just a couple of decades ago.

The automobile’s golden age began in the 1920s and lasted through the ‘60s. Some of the most inventive vehicles were born and sold during that era.

There was the Stanley Steamer. Yes, it was powered by steam and went very fast. There was the luxurious hand-built Duesenberg, which was a “real doozie.” There were a number of electric-powered cars way back then – one-third of all cars on the road in 1900 were powered by electricity.

One of America’s first transportation companies, Studebaker, built horse- and oxen-drawn wagons during the Civil War and many of the so-called “Prairie Schooners” for the great migration to settle the West.

A friend writes that his family owned a 1929 four-door Studebaker-Erskine, named after Erskine, the president of Studebaker during the late ‘20s. The sedan was turned into scrap metal during WWII since gas-ration cards limited gasoline availability. One of the best-built but ugliest automobile might have been Ford’s Edsel. Its gruesome grille might have had something to do with its short life. 

Radio’s ruled the air waves from the late ‘20s through the 1940s. Many of television’s star performers, sit-coms and drama formats were developed during this period. We would rush home from school to listen in on “The Lone Ranger,” “Sky King,” “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” and “Straight Arrow.” On Sunday afternoons it was “The Shadow” and “Nick Carter, Private Eye.” Weeknights it was “Johnny Dollar” and “Lux Radio Theater.” Every night “Fibber McGee & Molly,” “Bob Hope, “Jack Benny” and “George Burns & Gracie Allen” made us laugh.

The coming generations might look at the present time as TV’s golden age with sets bigger, better and lower-priced than ever before. Added to this is the array of computers, cell phones, and video games. They might say this was the “Golden Age of Indulgence.”

(Tom Morrow’s books are available at Amazon.com and on Kindle.)