Remember 1963?

[Sara S]

from delancyplace.com:

In today's excerpt - culturally, on the evening before President John F. Kennedy's
assassination, America was an astonishingly monolithic country when compared to
today:
"On this Thursday, November 21, television's prime-time lineup included The Flintstones,
The Donna Reed Show, My Three Sons, Perry Mason, and The Perry Como Show, but it
was the fourteenth-rated show, Dr. Kildare, that made Time magazine's recommended
viewing. The story that week involved a pregnant unmarried teen who had gotten an
abortion. She was so psycho-logically shattered by the experience that even Dr.
Kildare couldn't help. He had to refer her to a psychiatrist in another CBS program,
The Eleventh Hour, for an episode that would air a week later. ...
"[With its new anchor, Walter Cronkite], CBS might have been number two in evening
news, but it was number one in prime-time programming. The Neilsen ratings that
week placed eight CBS programs in the top ten, led by The Beverly Hillbillies with
a rating of 34.9, meaning that 34.9 percent of all American homes with a television
set were watching it. Since 93 percent of American homes had a television set by
1963, the upshot was that the same program was being watched in almost a third
of all the homes in the United States. Those same staggering numbers went deep into
the lineup. All of the top thirty-one shows had ratings of at least 20. By way of
comparison, the number one show in the 2009-10 season, American Idol, considered
to be a gigantic hit, had a rating of 9.1.
"The explanation for the ratings of 1963 is simple: There wasn't much choice. Most
major cities had only four channels (CBS, NBC, ABC, and a nonprofit station of some
sort) at most. People in some markets had access to just one channel - the monopoly
in Austin, Texas, where the lone station was owned by Lady Bird Johnson, was the
most notorious example.
"The limited choices in television viewing were just one example of something that
would come as a surprise to a child of the twenty-first century transported back
to 1963: the lack of all sorts of variety, and a simplicity that now seems almost
quaint.
"Popular music consisted of a single Top 40 list, with rock, country, folk, and
a fair number of Fifties-style ballads lumped together. No separate stations specializing
in different genres, except for country music stations in a few parts of the nation.
Except in university towns and the very largest cities, bookstores were small and
scarce, usually carrying only a few hundred titles. No Amazon. If you didn't see
a movie during the week or two it was showing in your town, you would probably
never see it. No DVDs. With television, you either saw a show the night it played
or waited until it was repeated once during the summer. No TiVo.
"People drove cars made in the United States. Foreign cars from Europe were expensive
and rare. Cars from Japan had just been introduced in 1963, but had not been greeted
with enthusiasm - 'made in Japan' was synonymous with products that were cheap and
shoddy. You might see an occasional sports car on the road - Ford's Thunderbird
or Chevrolet's Corvette - but the vast majority of customers chose among sedans,
convertibles, and station wagons made by General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler.
"The typical American city of 1963 had appallingly little choice in things to eat.
In a large city, you would be able to find a few restaurants serving Americanized
Chinese food, a few Italian restaurants serving spaghetti and pizza, and a few restaurants
with a French name, which probably meant that they had French onion soup on the
menu. But if you were looking for a nice little Szechuan dish or linguine with pesto
or sauteed fois gras, forget it. A Thai curry? The first Thai restaurant in the
entire nation wouldn't open for another eight years. Sushi? Raw fish? Are you kidding?"
Author: Charles Murray
Title: Coming Apart
Publisher: Crown Forum
Date: Copyright 2012 by Cox and Murray, Inc.
Pages: 2-4
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
by Charles Murray by Crown Forum
Hardcover ~ Release Date: 2012-01-31