Mature Life Features

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Golden Age Depends Upon Your Age

By Tom Morrow, Mature Life Features

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

High on the list of the most commonly discussed golden age deals with communication and spans a wide variety of topics: magazines, newspapers, radio and television.

Remember the heydays of Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Look? If you don’t, you didn’t arrive on earth until after the 1950s because these poplar 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. Chicago still has three.

Today, Los Angeles has just one, down from three just a couple of decades ago.

Interestingly enough, overseas cities such as London, Paris, Melbourne, Sydney, and Berlin still have more than four. Most of those cities sell their newspaper via street vendors. Door-to-door delivery seems to be an American thing.

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

Those of you who have been around since the ‘30s may recall the Packard, Willys, Kaiser, Frasier, Crosley, and the short-lived the Tucker. One of the best-built but ugliest 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.

Many of us rushed 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, “George Burns & Gracie Allen” made us laugh.

Today’s television programming is far-reaching. There’s very little that you can think of that isn’t available on a wide variety of “streaming” channels.

On-demand programming has new movies available while they’re still in the theaters – if you can find one that hasn’t closed down. Cable TV offers 24-hour news and talking heads spewing all sorts of opinions.

The not-too distant generation 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.)