I have been looking for awhile online to try and find information about what life in 1953 was like so that I can compare and contrast it to the fictious setting of 451. I am doing this as my research paper for my english class and would appreciate any help you might be able to give me. please respond to dot1215@excite.com

dot1215

My suggestion is you locate copies in film or hard copy of 1950's newspapers, and start reading them. Look up all ythe 'Saturday Evening POST' magazines you can find from the early 50's, or 'LIFE' magazines, from the early 50's, and start reading them...Movies like 'Pleasantville' are NOT early 50's....

Early 50's was a time just a few mere years away from the greatest destruction by War ever on the face of the Earth. Approx. 70 million people died in World War II. Families and lives the world over were torn apart and damaged. When you settle on the early 1950's, you are talking 5, 6, years after the fact. People had very high hopes for a wonderful future. Yet there was another war going on, the Korean Conflict. In that generation, eveyone was very aware what was right and what was wrong, what death meant, what life meant. The American mind of the 1950's is NOT the early 21st Century. But much of Fahrenheit 451 is... and is not!

Go to a thrift store, buy old records for a quarter, find an old record player, and listen to the music of the early 50's. It's about hope, love, good days ahead, and heartache because of broken loves. But you won't hear ANYTHING like today's lyrics....Many in a new generation today have no concept of what took place just a few decades before....and how things actually were.....

The story actually takes place in the future, not in 1953, and a number of devices were introduced by Ray in the story which we now take for granted.
To understand 1953,
Just take today and remove the following: almost all TV, except for western movies and wrestling, in black and white, and most people did not yet have TV sets in their homes, cell phones and all other forms of mobile communication, mobile listening devices, any form of video in-home playback except 8 mm movies, computers, most automatic appliances except the toaster, space exploration, other than that performed through a telescope, or dramatised on TV shows such as "Space Patrol" or "Captain Video and his Video Rangers", and old movie serials of "Flash Gordon", dates at the "Drive-in movies" in Duck-tail and Beehive hair, leather jackets and poodle skirts, James Dean and "Rebel Without A Cause", "Blackboard Jungle", "Peyton Place", very strict inter-racial protocols, restricted country clubs - i.e., no Jews or Blacks allowed, and the overall feeling that the USA was the best country in the whole world and we deserved to have all that we had.
Ah well, I am sure that you now get the idea, the immagination was a more used part of one's mind, sparked by audio images obtained from the "Radio", which was not just in the dash of the car, but in the living room or kitchen, making eating together and doing dishes a pleasure rather than an nconvience.
It weren't a bad time to grow up, a little slower, sex was still bad, pregnacy worse, marriage good, divorce bad, no drive-by shootings, a lot of covering up going on of things that today are out in the open.
Guess I'll take today.

[This message has been edited by patrask (edited 10-29-2003).]

1 9 5 3

When the GI's came home from the World War ll, in 1945, television was about to leap into the limelight. By 1950, there were over 4 million television sets in homes.

In ' 1928 ', there were already hundreds of TVs in Chicago alone. The rich had to have the latest techno gadgets. Mind you, there was no progamming. And yet, about the same year, ' 1928 ', you could catch comic Milton Berle on TV. Radio was feeling the pinch of losing listeners. And for quite some time, people could record their voices and listen to recorded broadcasts with the precursor to the 'tape recorder': the Wire Recorder. Many back then already had something in their homes and offices called...a ' fax ' machine. But being too slow and large, it failed in the marketplace.

As late as 1955, many people had pay phones in their homes. It was the cheapest way to have a phone in your home. You dialed '0' for operator, you told the operator what number you wanted, and you deposited a nickle into the phone. Once a month someone from the phone company came to your house and emptied the nickels.

By 1955, Disney was already 'advertising' a day when you could record TV programs on something called a TV recorder. We always had wall screens with us. It's called the movies. Except Fahrenheit's are in the house. And are inter-active. ( Check out the popular TV show, 'Person to Person', with host Edward R. Murrow. Started in the early 1950's, it eventually highlighted a floor to seemingly ceiling-high TV screen, and an inter-active one at that.. The most popular broadcast was when John F. Kennedy was elected President. Everyone tuned in for the interview.) For more info on this, Click on, or type into finder: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/P/htmlP/persontoper/persontoper.htm

Back then, in the early 1950's, people in the general public understood sex outside of marriage to be bad. Divorce to be hushed. A different culture of what was right and wrong prevailed. Most businesses were closed on Sunday to pay respects to honoring God on Sunday. Today, that's all forgotten. And sex has gone far from the Ten Commandments as living together is no longer scandolous... because God doesn't matter anymore in the mainstream. And if someone says God does, they refuse to honor Him, at least in the Judeo/Christian sense. (Some of the businesses that still observe Sunday, are places like Car Dealerships and some banks, for instance.)

Again, please note... no where in the novel, 'Fahrenheit 451', do people walk around memorizing pornographic literature.They memorize the greats of Literature. I bring this up because no matter the foibles and failures of the author, Ray Bradbury, his climate on the nature of right and wrong runs true thru much of his works. That's what makes him so endearing. It is inherit in the very construction of our souls. And we instinctively know it when it sounds....

But I believe today NO less things are covered up than in times before. We think we are uncovering facts about ourselves, but most are lies. We blame it on genetics. But that's not the culprit. In 'Fahrenheit 451', Ray wrote about fools who burn not any idea, but 'truth'. And since in this generation truth is now before judge and jury, Ray's novel takes on more weight. We are burning, like the firemen of Fahrenheit 451, that which we know nothing about. Our true person.




[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 10-30-2003).]

Nard,

Megadittoes.

Pete

Nard:
I am not sure I would say that God doesn't matter any longer. It might be a question of Religion doesn't seem to matter as it once did. I think today we are still seeking God, just looking in other places with a better understanding of the world. In my book, trying to answer the biggest questions in science and cosmology are really just looking for a means to understand our relationship with the Creator or God.

I do think some of us are less encombered today with the guilt of having to live our lives in a certain way according to a certain Religion or prescribed set of detailed behaviours. When religion becomes all process, following only accepted canon and procedures looking to locate the True God (there are so many), arguably someting is lost in the pure joy of looking for God in new ways. It is the journey and the search that seems most important to me, not the procedures and dogma, which are the very differences that are still separating members of the Human race from becoming better brothers/sisters to each other.

The Ten Commandments ( who's Ten Commandments, as there are subtle differences in the wording among different religions ) still seem to be the best advice to be followed for conducting a life without guilt and conflict. Add to those the Golden Rule and we would have a basic set of rules of conduct that would serve us all well into the future of Mankind.

patrask:

Is it safe to say that EVERY generation tries to find their own way?

Or that often, new, bright and young faces don't give a hoot about what the previous generation discovered or re-discovered? To these, where 'youth is truly wasted on the young'...there's only the great big wonderful world out there and everything to live for. But what is the sense of all this living and working and thinking, if it all winds up gone?

Everything eventually is gone.
Histories go.
Civilizations disappear.

'The Lord of The Rings' is about a civilization in a long ago forgotten history, never written or remembered, and only thru the imagination of one writer do we learn about this place called Middle Earth.

Personally, I would say that something is terribly wrong. It ain't supposed to be like that. Think about it: There is no sane reason for you to get old, die and disappear.

In Christian religion, for instance, and others, man is to be restored to what? To an existence that always endures.

Some faiths, like Christianity, is not about rules and regulations, and when it falls into such a humdrum existence, then such meaning and value require abandonment.

I am always amazed that Ray, tho he writes eloquently about truth, sees it only embraced in his Unitarian beliefs. But then, it's like a few people I've met in the printing and publishing business. A couple of them in California did a lot of typesetting of scripture as well as lengthy pieces by those learned in the field. Every day. Month after month.
But... nothing catches.
It goes right out their ears at the end of the day.
Or like the fellow in Chicago. He spent years translating the complete Bible into the Lithuanian language. Taught at Berkeley. Ask him a question about some doctrinal truth and he just doesn't get it. How can that be?

I don't think anything has fundementally changed, or ever will. Even if people go to the stars, there will be those who will still be scratching their heads over...'what's it all about?

[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 10-30-2003).]

Well, we're certainly waxing philosophic tonight.

In the Old Testament, Godlessness and faithlessness are condemned, as they are in the New Testament, and as they are now. Religion has always been both propouned and reviled.

Each generation has to come to grips with what it thinks religion does or is. As time passes, some aspects of even very conservative churches change. Paul was wrestling with changes in the church from the very beginning.

Persons turning from God is not new or unique to this generation. While society at large is less familiar and/or comfortable with religious language, I the give-and-take of making religion relevant (or understanding it's relevance) is something that happens in each generation. When I was younger, there was the Jesus Freak movement. Rather than being the death of Christianity, it actually opened the possibility of Christ's message to persons who would not have been open to it in traditional, orthodox liturgical practices.

I meet young people all the time who are very concerned and earnest about their religious life.

Even Ray, as a Unitarian, would probably enjoy Emerson's message in the Harvard Divinity School address. Emerson criticizes much of the formalism of the church and is attempting to help new ministers understand their calling. For all it's criticisms of "the church", the essay calls for these ministers -- not to leave the faith -- but to breathe new life into old forms.

I think this is something that needs to be done in each generation and in each person.

Dot1215
Mr. Dark
patrask
pterran

Mr. Dark!

You are right.
Back to the topic... so:

(click on or type into finder....)
http://www.anzwers.org/free/retrocafe/50slifestyle.html

[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 10-31-2003).]

I have had students do timelines of the year in question. Get an almanac from 1953 or go on-line to research each month, of 1953. Jan-Dec.

Choose topics you most want to research: ie, technology, politics, sports, fashions, entertainment, education, etc. Gather bits of information and compile into brief report formats for each topic. You will end up with a very interesting and clearer view of who, what, and why things were happening.

I have used this approach with Dandelion Wine (and other titles as well) in getting 21st Century kids to better appreciate what 1928 was like. Then we discuss the character conflicts, cultures of the time, and story plot with a keener understanding of what the author was describing when he/she penned the novel. This also makes for great oral presentations for the students (charts, artwork, in character personas, and artifacts gathered from grandparnts!)

Also - For a startling view of where we have come in the past few decades, not unlike the warnings of F451, see the recent edition of National Geographic, Nov. '03, "You're Being Watched!"

A far cry from 1953 and a friendly police officer helping kids cross the street on their way to a neighborhood school!

You may also want to consider events such as the McCarthy witch hunts, which were only a few years in the past when F. 451 first appeared...

I suppose when you are witchhunting you have a better shot at catching a few hags. What McCarthy illuminated was how quick bad artists are to whine.

Nard: That was quite a post. I think of the wrong impressions one can get out of F451 and get visions of skewed readers running over and knocking trash out of a bum's hand crying, "Censorship!" while he is trying to fuel his fire.

Ought Not,

And mega-dittoes to you.

Pete

Ought Not

Clever scenario.