A 1950s Childhood Revisited

When the Screen Glowed Magic—and Safety: A 1950s Childhood Revisited

I have to confess, I was glad to get on board my recent flight from Tel Aviv to Newark Airport. I hadn’t slept well over the past month in Jerusalem. I was still  walking around on the streets or riding the bus with a smile on my face but I could not even take a nap during the day.

Like others, in the face of the war with Hamas, the fate of our hostages being unknown, the attempted coup by the hostage families, incoming rocket and missile alerts, I think I have to recognize it all got to me.

So, I plopped down into my seat, fastened the seat belt, laughed along with Lior Szuchard as he told us to keep our seatbelts “fas-tend” when the “fas-tend seatbelts light came on.

I skipped my usual booze drink when offered by the flight attendant, I just wanted to wind down. I flicked the screen to see the list of movies and started to go from screen to screen looking for something that would get me through the flight. And there it was, Walt Disney’s Snow White.

 I’m 76 now, and lately an old movie—or even a few opening bars of a TV theme—can bring sudden tears.  The moment the projector whirs or the cathode-ray glow fills the room, I’m eight again, transported to a decade when heroes wore coonskin caps and white hats, and the good guys always won.

 Disney was my first passport to wonder.  Peter Pan taught me how to fly (if only in dreams), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea showed me that monsters could be magnificent, and Cinderella assured me that virtue is rewarded.  Davy Crockett, with Fess Parker’s easy grin and that unforgettable coonskin cap, had me humming “Born on a mountaintop…” while chasing imaginary bears through the backyard.

 But Saturday-morning television added another layer of magic.  The brass fanfare of The Adventures of

The Lone Ranger and Silver

Superman promised that he would fight for “truth, justice, and the American way.” And then there was The Lone Ranger: the masked rider galloping across the black-and-white landscape to the gallop of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.”  Even now, a single trumpet blast propels my heart forward as surely as Silver carried the Ranger.  By the final “Hi-yo, Silver! Away!” I could relax: justice had been restored, and all was right with the frontier—and with my world.

 That certainty is what moves me most today.  Psychologists say our outlook forms in the first 10 or 12 years, and I believe them.  The stories of the 1950s weren’t simply entertainment; they were blueprints.  They told a child that evil is real but beatable, that courage means helping the helpless, and—most comforting of all—that things will turn out well in the end.  In a post-war America flush with optimism, that felt less like fiction and more like a promise.

 

When the credits roll now, I sometimes ache for that unquestioned safety.  Yet mostly I feel gratitude.  I was lucky to be shaped in an era whose stories taught me to hope, to dream, and to trust that a masked man, a boy in a cape, or even an ordinary kid could make a difference.

 So if you catch me dabbing my eyes during an old reel or when the “William Tell” strains burst from a rerun, know this: I’m visiting a time and place where the screen glowed magic—and where the ending was always happy.  In today’s uncertain world, that’s a memory worth treasuring.

 Nostalgia isn’t about refusing to move forward. It’s about carrying the best of the past with you. If you grew up in a time that filled you with wonder, joy, or stability, remembering it with affection isn't weakness—it's a form of strength.

 So if you find yourself tearing up at an old movie, a TV theme song, or a smell that reminds you of childhood, don’t fight it. That’s not living in the past. That’s remembering who you are.

 Well, that's what I have to say. Stephen M. Flatow