My father was a product of this era. He had some kind of neurodivergence as a child, failed every course at school, had an impossible time reading, got beat by both his parents constantly. Contracted polio from public pools and spent years doing physical therapy to recover. Went on to get a sports scholarship but couldn’t keep grades up, got sent to military school, got kicked out, was given a job in the family oil business doing gravy work analyzing survey maps, left after a week. Ran away to Europe to dodge the draft, came home and did massive amounts of drugs and then met my mom and told her “it’s okay, I had polio as a kid, you can’t get pregnant.”

And that’s where I came from.

No happy ending. He kept my mom and sibling abused, drugged and drunk until they died of liver failure, another sibling on the way, another sibling brought a weapon to school and lives in a halfway house. My father drank himself to death after losing all family property to scams, both his and those of others. My cousins stole the family inheritance and cut off contact with me.

So yeah, that’s what I think of when someone talks about the 50’s as “the good old days.”