William S. Lind
RETROCULTURE
*** TAKING AMERICA BACK
ARKTOS
LONDON 2019
Copyright 2019 by Arktos Media Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including
photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-912975-30-3 (Paperback)
978-1-912975-31-O (E-book)
EDITING: Martin Locker and Charles
Lyons
LAYOUT: Tor Westman
COVER: Andreass Nilsson
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CONTENTS
Foreword 4
CHARTER I
Signs of Change 5
CHAPTER II
Retroculture 10
What is Retroculture? .................................................................. 10
Breaking away from "Selfism" ....................................................... 10
A Dialogue with the Past .............................................................. 11
Bringing the Generations Together ............................................... 12
A Change of Lifestyle .................................................................... 13
Freedom of — and from — Fashion .............................................. 13
CHAPTER III
Getting Started 16
CHAPTER IV
Retro-Homes 22
Older Houses ............................................................................... 23
New Homes ................................................................................. 24
"Turning Back the Clock" with the Home You Have ........................ 25
Retro-Interiors ............................................................................. 27
Retro-Neighborhoods .................................................................. 29
Retro-Homes in Retrospect .......................................................... 30
CHAPTER V
Retro-Families 31
Starting a Retroculture Family: Dating ........................................... 34
Marrying ..................................................................................... 35
Retroculture and School ............................................................... 37
The Retro-Family and Church ....................................................... 38
Living the Retro Life Alone ............................................................ 39
Retroculture and Your Life ........................................................... 41
CHAPTER VI
Retro-Clothing 42
Dressing Up ................................................................................. 43
The Retro Look ........................................................................... 43
New Old Clothes .......................................................................... 43
Retro Accessories ........................................................................ 44
Retro-Shopping, or Making a Chore a Pleasure .............................. 45
Period Clothing: Going All the Way .................................................. 46
Amazing Grace ............................................................................... 47
CHAPTER VII
Retro-Entertainment 48
Retro-Television .......................................................................... 49
May I Have This Dance? ............................................................... 51
Shall We Have a Musicale? ........................................................... 51
Entertaining at Home ................................................................... 52
"Johnny, YOU Must Learn to Entertain Yourself" ............................ 55
Period Entertainments.................................................................. 56
CHAPTER VIII
Retro-Manners 58
The Golden Rule .......................................................................... 59
Must We Then Act "Hoity-Toity?" ................................................. 59
Where Do Retro-Manners Apply? .................................................... 59
Are Retro-Manners Just "Victorian"? ............................................ 60
Difference Without Disrespect ..................................................... 60
Public Manners ............................................................................ 62
Office Etiquette ........................................................................... 63
Which Retro-Manners? ................................................................ 63
CHAPTER IX
Retro-Travel 65
The Train ..................................................................................... 66
First Class "Plus" .......................................................................... 67
Urban Travel: The Second Coming of the Trolley Car ...................... 68
Motoring ..................................................................................... 70
Walking and Bicycling ..................................................................... 72
CHAPTER X
Retro-Business 74
CHAPTER XI
Retro-Service 78
Retro-Service Is Good Business ..................................................... 79
Offering Retro-Service .................................................................. 80
Serving the "Public Good" ............................................................ 80
CHAPTER XII
Retro-America 83
Foreword
WHAT'S GONE IS GONE. You have to keep moving
forward. There's no turning back. You can't stand in the way of progress. You
can't live in the past.
Everyone has heard these sayings and a hundred
others like them. But recently, the tone of voice people use when they say them
has begun to change. They used to say them calmly, matter-of-factly, perhaps
with a slight chuckle, the way you would tell a child that he really can't fly
like Peter Pan. Now, the tone of voice is defensive, insistent, like a person
who is trying to keep someone else from blurting out an awful secret.
We are told we must not doubt progress. Still,
the growing number of people who are comparing the last few decades to what
came before can't help suspecting that somehow, life was better then. We catch
glimpses of how it used to be: an old song from the fifties or the thirties on
the radio; a black and white photo of a big city street in years past, without
potholes or garbage or slums; a beautiful dress from someone's attic; a suburb
where the trolley line used to run, with big trees and sidewalks and front
porches and people outside talking to their neighbors.
People are noticing these things, and wondering.
But we still get the feeling we shouldn't talk about them. If we do, we're
told, more harshly, that doubting progress is bad. You must keep moving
forward. You have to keep trying things that haven't been done before. Terrible
things will happen if instead you try to do what people did in your grandparents'
day. You don't want to give up modern medicine, do you? You don't want to go
back to Jim Crow racial prejudice, do you? Do you want children working twelve
hours a day in dark factories?
The answer is, of course not.
But we're still not sure how most of what our grandparents did made the world
so terrible. We don't remember them being against good health. We never noticed
that they went out of their way to be mean to people. In fact, we thought they
were pretty nice. And some things are better now. Most people live longer, and
some groups of people have more freedom. That's all good.
So, what is it that attracts
us when we catch a glimpse of how people used to live? It's summed up in a word
that didn't even exist fifty years ago. That word is lifestyle.
We get the feeling we have forgotten a lot about
how to live. We have "home entertainment centers," but our
grandparents seemed to find life more interesting. We can get anywhere fast on
jumbo jets, but they got to see more from the window of the train. We have
email and texting, but people in the old movies talk so elegantly, and we can
still enjoy reading the beautifully written letters grandmother saved, letters
written by ordinary people. We may have more "leisure time," but they
seemed less rushed, less pressured, less under stress.
And amazingly, those older lifestyles often had a
lot less impact on the environment. People knew less about the dangers of
chemicals and plastics and poisons, but they used a lot less of those things
too— sometimes none at all. They didn't need as much energy as we do. They
didn't consume as much — or waste as much. They knew how to reuse many things
long before the word recycling was ever heard.
When all is said and done, we seem to have lost a
lot that was really worthwhile in the last five decades or so. It's not
surprising that we yearn to have some of it back again. Nor is it wrong. We
know, when we think about it, that it should be possible to recapture the good
things people used to do — without giving up modern medicine or sending kids to
work in sweatshops.
Much of what we used to have is still around, in
bits and pieces here and there. We come across it every day: comfortable,
well-built old houses, nice old ways of dressing and talking, old courtesies we
find refreshing. Why can't we gather these things up and rebuild the best of
what used to be? Why can't we restore old lifestyles the same way people are
restoring gracious old houses?
The answer is, we can. And when we look around,
we begin to see that a growing number of people are doing it.
JOHN J. PATRICK
CHAPTER I
Signs of Change
VERY OFTEN, the most obvious things are the
hardest to see.
At the end of a long, dreary, dismal winter, we
are all eager for spring. Then, sometime around March or early April a new day
dawns, with a fresh smell in the air, a new warmth, and a powerful sense of
quickening life. It's spring, and no one can mistake it.
But long before the first real day of spring,
signs of the change in seasons are showing. The first green shoots pop up under
the snow. Branches of forsythia take on a hint of color. Country people see
these signs, but most of us miss them. Laden down with our daily cares and
burdens, we do not notice spring is coming until, suddenly and gloriously, it
is upon us.
So it is also with greater changes. Here and
there, signs pointing to something new spring up independently. Most of us do
not notice them. We do not "connect the dots" to see the outline of
the future they portend.
Such signs are now appearing, in places like
Medina, Ohio. Like many other small towns in the midwest, Medina was mostly
built in the late-19th century and the first years of the 20th.
Its Victorian buildings were grouped around a central square of trees and green
lawn, along with a statue or two and a small fountain. Over the years, some of
the buildings had become run down. Others had been modernized with metal and
plastic facades and signs. A few had been torn down; one corner of the square
faced a modern gas station. To most people's eye, the town had nothing special
to distinguish it.
But as early as 1967, some Medina citizens began
looking at their town through a different eye. They saw it as it once had been,
in, say, 1910. They imagined what it might have been like to go to an ice cream
social on the square in that year. The buildings were new, clean, and handsome.
They reflected the elegant style of the Victorians in their arched windows,
elaborate cornices and mansard roofs. They realized that once upon a time,
Medina had been a beautiful town. They knew it could be so again.
So the people of Medina turned back the clock.
They formed a citizens' group called the Community Design Committee and set out
to return Medina to its turn of the century appearance. They fixed up the buildings
that had become run down, restoring them, not modernizing them. They stripped
the ugly modern facades and signs off the old buildings that had acquired them.
They tore down the gas station, and in its place built a Victorian bank so well
designed that an observer has no clue that it was built in the 1980s, not the
1880s. They engaged Amish carpenters to build a Victorian bandstand on the
square.
If you visit Medina on a Friday evening in the
summertime, you will usually find a band playing in the bandstand. Around it
are gathered Medina's citizens, listening to turn of the century tunes and
enjoying an ice cream social.
What happened in Medina is happening in a growing
number of American communities. Instead of tearing down or modernizing old
buildings, people are preserving and restoring them. They are turning back the
clock.
Telluride, Colorado, is another Victorian town.
As in Medina, the old buildings have been restored and the town again looks and
feels as it might have in the 1890s. But Telluride has gone even further: all
new buildings must be in a Victorian style. Real estate developers have joined
in the new movement with enthusiasm. As one article on the town puts it, in
Telluride, "developers have a fervor for the past."
Big cities, too, are joining in the effort to
preserve and restore their history. Citizens' commissions in many cities have
been empowered to channel and guide development to preserve local history. They insist that old
buildings be preserved in their appearance, even as they are converted to new
uses. In Washington, D.C., not only are famous government buildings like the
Capitol protected, so are many 19th-century commercial buildings.
Some Washington streets are rapidly recovering their 19th-century
appearance.
There are other signs of a change in season. One
is Seaside, Florida. In recent years, his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales
has become Britain's most noted architectural critic. Perhaps surprisingly, one
of his favorite new towns is in America: Seaside, Florida. Seaside was designed
from the beginning to have the feel of an American seaside community of the
past. Houses are required to have porches, gazebos and pavilions are scattered
throughout the town, and everyone has a picket fence. Seeing Seaside as a
prototype for new communities built to look and feel like old-fashioned small
towns, Prince Charles wrote: People will say, 'It's all very well for those
with money...' But I believe that the lessons they've worked out at Seaside
have very serious applications both in rural areas and in our cities. The
founders certainly believe that a sense of real community will grow here; that
people will live here. I wish them well.1
1 "Poundbury," an urban extension of Dorchester in Dorset, UK, has
since been built along the guidelines laid down by Prince Charles in "A
Vision for Britain" (1989). The premise was to favor traditional and
new-classical architectural styles, period features, and a rejection of
suburban development patterns and zoning. Prince Charles has long been an
advocate of traditional architecture and community management, as well as other
anti-modern aesthetics and customs. — Editor.
The architects who designed Seaside, Andres Duany
and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a husband and wife team, have proposed more than
thirty new towns built along historical lines, some of which have been built.
Time magazine wrote of their work:
It seems incredible that such a simple, even obvious premise—that America's
18th and 19th century towns remain marvelous models for
creating new suburbs—had been neglected for half a century. Today Duany and
Plater-Zyberk ... and their allies are proposing to go all the way, to build
wholly new towns and cities the way our ancestors did.
Architects Larry Garnett and Associates are
offering plans for new houses built to a style that suggests the 1920s and
1930s. One such is the "Hampshire." With a steeply sloped, long roof,
quaint dormers and a stone-framed entryway, the "Hampshire" suggests
both the English countryside and American homes of eighty or ninety years ago.
An important fact about this house is that it is not just for the wealthy. With
just 717 square feet, it is not a large house, and is affordable to build.
Other firms are offering updated house plans from
earlier eras, Victorian through to colonial. Moreover, many new housing
developments include such houses. You can often recognize them by their large,
comfortable front porches. "Ille front porch had almost completely disappeared
from new houses by the 1950s. But more and more people now want what a big
porch offers: a place for the family to gather and talk, away from the
television and the computer but close to the neighbors and passers-by, who can
join in the conversation easily and informally, Tie front porch serves the trend
toward a life oriented more toward people and less toward machines.
Ralph Lauren has become one of America's foremost
interior designers. For several years, his Interiors have looked strongly
toward the past. They are intended to give a feel of life in the 1930s, 40s,
and 50s. Why? Because those were times when home life was strong and
comforting. He makes heavy use of artifacts from those periods — signs,
advertisements, toys and the like —as well as traditional fabrics and furniture
designs. His rapidly growing popularity and influence attest to the fact that
Americans want to look to the past as they move into the future.
Advertisements and marketing often herald a major
change in fashion. More and more ads are now hearkening back to the past. An
advert for Hendrick's Gin makes extensive use of aesthetics and themes from the
1920s and 30s, as well as harking back to the days of the British Empire. The
Jennings Motor Group has recently launched a project in which several modern
cars from Audi, Mercedes and Ford are given retro makeovers, and presented in
their ads in a retro style. The ad agencies and designers are clearly on to the
same thing Ralph Lauren has discovered: the past sells. People want to buy
products that remind them of the past and that take them back into an earlier
time. Advertisers sense a change in taste and style, away from a cold,
ultra-modern look toward warm, traditional materials, looks and feelings.
People are willing to pay to recover some of their heritage.
Traditional styles of dressing are making a major
comeback. Men are again wearing double-breasted brown suits with floral ties
and even two-toned shoes in some cities. Several online stores are catering
specifically to the Retroculture crowd, offering every style from the 1920s
right up to the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the most popular of these stores
is Unique Vintage, whose clothes are new (rather than second hand) and offer a
variety of collections for women. The J. Peterman Company's catalogue stresses
the heritage look of many of its products: the Gatsby Pants, the 1950s
Tie-Front Blouse and the 1903 Vintage Cologne are all examples of this shift
towards "Retro-chic" in fashion. In Britain, the brand 20th
Century Chap offers a range of classic British styles from the early part of
the last century, with collections focusing on the pre-WWII look and the 1940s.
Clothing styles are a major part of fashion, and
more and more they are pointing toward the past. People are buying clothes that
suggest earlier times because they like the feeling of those times: the
elegance, the suggestion of manners and civility, the return of the idea of 'ladies" and "gentlemen," instead of "male" and
"female" (and those sometimes hard to tell apart). Men's hair is
getting shorter, too, while a recent ad for women's hair stylists speaks of the
"Retro look: Finger waves,2 just like those popular in the 1930s, that are making a
comeback." "Unisex" is clearly "out," and the
blow-dryers have gone to the attic.
2 A hairstyle featuring S-shaped undulations on a relatively bobbed cut,
popular in the 1920s and 30s, which made a comeback in the 90s due to its use
in the "hip-hop" scene. It has since recently returned in 2016 within
certain fashion circles. — Editor.
Entertainment is showing a move back toward the
past, with movies such as The Great Gatsby doing very well in the box offices
and reviving interest in the aesthetics of the period. A look back is evident
more broadly in movies as well: more and more films resemble those of the
"classic" movie era—the 1930s, 40s and 50s—in plot, acting style and
look.
The major networks are also discovering the new
audience for what is coming to be known as "retro television." The
popular AMC series Mad Men, which follows the lives of several men working for
an advertising company in 1950s and 1960s New York, not only received huge
viewing figures but also re-introduced a generation to the style, swing and
sophistication of the clothing and culture of 1950s America. A similar story
can be found with the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, set in the Prohibition era,
which revels in the aesthetics of the period.
Train travel is also making a comeback. Amtrak
trains are packed, especially in the summer months, as more and more Americans
discover the pleasures of riding the train. Trains enable people to see the
country, not just fly over it. The train cuts through all the little towns and
cities— often right through people's backyards. It offers unsurpassed views of
America's famous sights— the Rocky Mountains, the Hudson River, the Great
Plains. In the dining car you can relax over coffee or steak and watch the
country roll by. In a car on the interstate, you're lucky to see more than the
radiator of a truck in your rear-view mirror. An article published on July 18,
2018 in the Daily Mail revealed that Amtrak is bringing back their glass-domed
observation car on two more routes, the first running through Brunswick,
Portland and Boston, and the second through Montreal, Albany and New York. This is a great
indicator of the success of the company in the modern era, and the desire by
people for this kind of "Retro travel." The train offers many of the
things people will be looking for in the future — a slightly slower, more
relaxed pace of living, community with other people and places, and a chance to
look outward rather than inward.
Classic "motoring" is also coming back.
People have already discovered the pleasures of an old way to get around, with
several cars from the early 21st century capturing the spirit and
aesthetic of "Retro" driving. The 2015 Ford Mustang, the BMW Z8, the
revived Mini Cooper and several of the Jaguar sports cars all hark back to the
vintage age of motoring, without sacrificing modern comforts and engines. Not
to mention the array of "kit cars" which allow people to build their
own, with many models mimicking the most well-known classic cars.
Young people, especially young families, are
going to church again. Starting in the 1960s, the last place many young people
wanted to be seen was in church. "Liberation" was then the latest
fashion, and the Ten Commandments were one of the things young people wanted to
be liberated from. So, for that matter, were families. The fashion in the 1960s
and 70s was "relationships," temporary arrangements for "living
together," not marriage. Sad experiences, in the form of broken homes,
children raised without parents' love, and lonely people, have made some of
today's young people wiser. Families and marriage are coming back. Many young
families (and some single people too) want to do things that strengthen their
attachment to older, proven, solid ways of living. Going to church is one of
those things. And so is belief in God. Far from being unfashionable, belief in
God is something more and more young people are open about and look for in
others.
The list of old-fashioned things
people are finding fun to do is growing daily. More mothers are staying home to
take care of their children and getting together with other women in their
neighborhood who are doing the same thing. Families are finding board games and
puzzles good alternatives to the television or the computer for family
entertainment. Family-oriented amusement parks, which were big in the 1890s
through the 1930s, have made a tremendous comeback through places like King's
Dominion.
In London, a growing group of young people are
resurrecting the 1940s —the American 1940s. An article in The New York Times
reported as early as the 1990s that:
For many young Londoners, Saturday night is a time to 'rave,' to wear the
latest fashions, to dance to the latest hit songs. But just off Leicester
Square, young women in smart square-shouldered crepe dresses and open-soled,
wedge-soled shoes and men in dapper double-breasted suites and two-toned shoes
gather at Fortissimo, a basement club.... This small but ardent group, mostly
in the their 20s and 30s, wear 1940s clothing meticulously, dance the jitterbug
expertly and listen to swing, boogie-woogie and early rhythm and blues records
religiously. Some embrace 1940s social values and live in homes appointed with
40s furniture, appliances and bric-a-brac.
In certain fashionable areas of the city,
especially the Bloomsbury area, there are now a plethora of these
"vintage"-style bars, often offering various classic or retro cocktails,
radio-play evenings and dance- sessions with the old dances.
Some of the young people involved in this new 40s
lifestyle spoke about its inclusion of values and behavior. "People valued
things and people a little more," according to a Miss Celia Dunlop. At
1940s clubs, "Guys will put your coat on for you, ask you to dance and see
you back to your chair. It's a different attitude. Guys are more respectful.
They don't treat you like a piece of meat... In this day and age, it's nice to
go back to old values." Mr. Simon Owen added that those values "have
become more important. ... On the 40s scene, ifs very civilized, very social. There’s
never any fights. And girls are treated like girls." Mr. Jody Gannon said,
"Today, everything's cheap rubbish. Nothing compares to entertainment in
the 40s." Young people today, he added, realize "they’re being ripped
off. They always wear such nasty scowls, as if they hate the world they're in.
In the 40s, people had a better attitude about life in general. They didn't clog
up their mind with rubbish."
Some people are already going beyond individual
old-fashioned activities. They are adding all these activities up and finding
that they can amount to a whole new lifestyle, a lifestyle that looks to the
past for inspiration. These people are consciously modelling the way they live
on the way their grandparents or great-grandparents lived.
One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence for
this trend to lifestyles that look to the past —a big change from the
ultra-modern — is Victoria magazine.
Victoria magazine is devoted to Victorian living,
but it is a magazine for modern people — modern people who want a Victorian
lifestyle, promising a "return to loveliness." It features articles
on interior decoration, clothing and fabrics, gardens, foods, museums—on everything
a person needs to give his or her life a Victorian feel. The articles published
in the Summer of 2018 include "Cultivating a Love of Antiques,"
"Preserving Past Grandeur," "The Etiquette of Calling
Cards" and similarly themed essays.
Victoria is a glossy, expensive, well-written and
well-illustrated magazine, with ads from major companies and a circulation of
800,000. It shows how rapidly the move to past lifestyles is spreading and
growing. More and more people are taking a new look at the Victorian age—not
just at its clothing and furniture, but at the way of life of the
Victorians, with their strong families, solid homes and strong morals. They
want to recreate that world in their own lives.
Similar moves to recover past ways of life are
evident for other eras. One looks toward the era of the War of 1861. It began
with the re-creation by volunteers of War of 1861 military units, which meet to
re-enact War of 1861 battles. That created a market for reproductions of War of
1861 uniforms, tents, and other military equipment. Then, the families of the
volunteers started to participate in their activities, and a market developed
for civilian clothing and accessories. Now, there is a whole "support
network" for those interested in the 1860s, with mail-order houses,
journals, and magazines like Civil War Times.
Of course, none of this means getting rid of
modern medicine, cooking every night over an open fire, or watching out for
hostile Indians. Rather, the Object is to re-create the "feel" of a
certain period. After all, people have been doing this for years with colonial
style homes and furniture. What we may see is a broadening to include more
aspects of lifestyle, such as clothing, cooking (doing so from antique recipes
is a growing fashion), reading 18th- or 19th-century
literature and listening to period music, and also recovering the moral values
of those times. Each individual or family will decide for itself how far it
wants to go. But all will be inspired by a vision of the future that includes a
recovery of the past.
Architecture, clothing, interior decoration,
entertainment, activities, even basic lifestyles, are all looking toward the
past in the early 21st century. Is it all just nostalgia? Or is
something more happening here — something big?
CHAPTER II
Retroculture
THE ANSWER IS THAT SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING.
These revivals of past styles are signs pointing to the next change in how
Americans live. They point to the "next wave" — the big idea that will
shape the 21st century. What is it?
Retroculture.
WHAT IS RETROCULTURE?
Retroculture is a rediscovery of the past and the
good things it has to offer. More, it is a recovery of those good things, so we
may enjoy them as our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents enjoyed
them. Retroculture rejects the idea that "You can't go back." What we
have done before, we can obviously do again. For many years, Americans lived in
a land that was safe, solid and comfortable, a civil and even graceful society
where life for the overwhelming majority was both pleasant and good. What
worked for them can work for us. We can recover the good things they had and
knew.
Conventional wisdom says we have no choice but to
drive blindly onward into an undefined but increasingly threatening future.
Retroculture replies, "Hold on a minute." We do have a choice.
Through a dialogue with the past, we can shape that future. We can find ways,
by looking back, to make the future promising rather than threatening. We can
regain control of our destiny. And in the process, we can reunify the generations
instead of pitting one age group against another.
Retroculture reverses the trend this country has
been following since the mid-1960s. "Old is bad, new is good" has
been the watch-word of the last five decades. And it has ended up in a mess.
Now, Americans from every walk of life are saying "Enough!" Life
yesterday was better in a great many ways than life is today. The time has come
to recapture the good things Americans had and have lost. The future can be
better than the past— provided we look to the past for guidance.
BREAKING AWAY FROM "SELFISM"
Americans are realizing that the time has come to
free themselves from the unhealthy fascination with "self' that has become
almost an addiction since the 1960s. "Selfism," —making the self the
focus of life — goes back much further, but traditional moral values always
held it in check. Traditional values told us to put service above self. They
taught us that happiness comes from disciplining and mastering the rapacious
demands of the self, not giving in to them. American culture expected people to
focus their lives outward, to do useful things and help other people. It
regarded "me first" as a sign of childishness — and of a spoiled child
at that.
The flower children of the late 1960s turned
these traditional values upside-down. They had the amazingly naive idea that a
new "youth culture" could make the world perfect by ignoring
"what other people think" and encouraging young people to do whatever
felt good whenever they felt like doing it.
"Do your own thing!" became the battle
cry of the hippies. Of course, your own thing mustn't be anything your parents
or grandparents might do. If possible, it had to be something they wouldn't
like at all. Hippies had to be hip, and that meant cutting themselves off from
the ideas and standards of older people —except for a few older hip gurus like
Timothy Leary or Alan Ginsberg. "Don't trust anyone over thirty," the
youth culture advised. Get rid of all the garbage you've been taught. Drop out
of the world of families, schools, and workplaces. "Get in touch with your
feelings."
But self-discovery, self-realization, and
self-fulfillment didn't make life any better. They often made it worse. Youth
communes that were supposed to blaze the way to a perfect society instead fell
apart because members had no sense of loyalty to the group or to each other.
Widely publicized "alternate lifestyles" turned out to be fads, their
followers soon growing bored and wandering off. It seemed that however much the
self was given it always wanted more. A new pleasure worked a couple of times,
then it was dead, and something more extreme had to follow to keep the
ever-demanding self "feeling good."
By the mid-1990s almost everybody realized that
self-indulgence was not going to save the world or even make it better. But by
then, the habit of "selfism" had become too strong to break Besides,
there wasn't much else left. The youth culture of the 60s and early 70s may not
have produced anything of lasting value, but it managed to trash the ideals of
self-restraint and respect for the wisdom of the ages.
So, the youth culture became
"thirty-something" as the baby-boomers drifted through the mindless,
feel-good glitter of the disco scene and on into the 1990s.
The 90s completed the work of the 60s. With the self still in the driver's
seat, things—possessions and image — became the new road to self-fulfillment.
Doing your own thing became doing whatever it took to get the trappings of
wealth, power and status. In the process, modesty, honesty and fair dealing
followed all the other old values onto the scrap heap.
That didn't work either, of course. We still
couldn't keep up with the demands of the self, no matter how hard we worked to
further our career, get seen in the right places, and pile up designer stuff.
"Dressing for success," "winning by intimidation," and
keeping score in terms of possessions didn't satisfy us any more than
"liberation" and "feeling good." Paper profits melted in
the following recession. Personal debt piled up. Houses and cars and boats
became sources of worry rather than satisfaction.
Selfism, it seems, has run head-on into the wall
of reality and gone splat. Now, in the 21st century, people are
looking back to the times before the wreck. For many young Americans, it seems
that the last people they remember being really content were their
grandparents. The last time life was good was the 1950s, when most things were
still done the old way.
A national poll, taken as early as 1992, showed
how people were even then looking back fondly toward the past. 49% thought life
in the past was better than it is today; only 17% thought it was worse. 47%
felt that their grandparents' lives were happier than their own; only 29% felt
they were not as happy. 56% had a generally favorable impression of the
Victorian period. A whopping 58% of those polled thought that our nation's
political leaders should be leading us back towards the way we used to be.
A DIALOGUE WITH THE PAST
Americans today communicate with a far wider
variety of people than ever before, or at least so it seems. Social media,
Skype and email connect us to others around the world. We travel to other
countries, we go out for Thai or Vietnamese or Caribbean dinners, we see
foreign films and drive foreign cars. CNN keeps us up on the very latest news
from all around the world.
But there is a large group of people with whom we
communicate little, if at all: the Americans who lived before us. And what
stories they have to tell! We have more in common with them than with almost
anyone else. After all, they lived where we live, saw many of the same scenes
we see, and faced many of the same problems.
True, they are no longer with us. But they left
us a great many messages, in books and family letters, in the houses and towns
they built, and in the furniture, clothes and music they created. In fact, they
left us a large sample of the things that made up their daily lives.
And they also left us their thoughts: the values
and beliefs they held, ideas of how to live and the reasons to live that way,
and memories of specific people— sometimes from our own families —memories that
tell us why their lives were respected and even revered by those they touched.
Through the things they left behind we can talk
with those who have gone before us. The dialogue can add great richness to our
own lives. The immensely popular PBS television series The War of 18613 gave Americans a sense of what a dialogue with
the past can offer. Seldom has a television series gripped so many people's
emotions so powerfully. Why? Because in it Americans from the past spoke
directly to us.
3 This was a highly popular mini-series on the War of 1861 directed by Ken
Burns and broadcasted in 1990. The viewing figures were enormous, with roughly
39 million viewers tuning in to any one episode. The series has since been
digitally restored and re-released on DVD in 2015. —Editor.
The series had no dialogue between actors.
Instead, it presented the words of the people who lived over 100 years ago in
many of the same places where we live now. They spoke to us through their
diaries, their letters home, their personal photographs. They spoke to us not
as names in history books, but as real people struggling with real problems,
and we realized that they have a great deal to say to us.
In discovering our own past in people and how
they lived, not just in dry facts, we can take a fresh look at ourselves and
our own lives. We can learn from their experience. We can find out how they
protected themselves from life's harsh blows through the warmth and mutual
support of strong families. We can learn how they educated themselves and find
that in many ways they were better educated than we are, even if they did not
know how to use a computer or a smartphone. We can discover how, with much less
wealth and fewer possessions than we have, they managed to build lives we often
envy.
We realized in watching The War of 1861 that
our own past, the past that earlier Americans lived, has become stranger to us
than the African bush or the Amazon rain forest ever were to them. And we
realized at the same time that this need not be so. The past is there, waiting
for us to uncover it. We can read the words of those who are gone. And we can
also learn from the many people still alive today who remember how people lived
before America rejected its inheritance. The enduring pleasures of Retroculture
lie in coming home to what is ours.
BRINGING THE GENERATIONS TOGETHER
One writer noted that World War Il was the last
time when all the generations enjoyed the same music. In the 30s and 40s, kids,
parents, and grandparents all sat by the radio listening to Glenn Miller and
the Andrews Sisters, "Moonlight Serenade" and "Putting on the
Ritz." By the end of the 60s, that kind of sharing between the generations
was strictly out. Youth had to do things that were new and that their elders disapproved
of. Now, people are wondering, is there anything that can last, anything good
enough that people can enjoy it together from generation to generation?
Of course, every era has a certain amount of
silliness and false starts. But time is a great filter. Through it passes only
the things that are good enough to last. When we look back through that filter,
we do not dwell on the flagpole sitters and goldfish swallowing of the 20s or
the Zoot suits of the 40s. We dwell on the sound values of the Victorians, the
elegant manners at the turn of the century, the classic cars of the 30s and the
classy clothes of Fred Astaire.
And all the generations see the same things.
Young and Old stand together behind time's filter, receiving together the
things that have stood its test. Retroculture is not generational; the good
things that come to us from the past come to all of us together. All, young and
old, can again enjoy Glenn Miller. Everyone can admire a Victorian town
restored to its original appearance. For the first time in generations, we can
all sing from the same sheet of music — quite literally.
Retroculture also restores the link between
living generations. Our grandparents can tell us what it was like to travel in
the great days of the railroads, with steam engines, Pullman cars, crystal and
heavy silver in the dining cars. They can show us the places they loved. They
can have the joy of teaching, of transmitting to their descendants their
experiences, their wisdom, their lives. Young people, in turn, can again have
the excitement of discovering things through their own family and friends,
including friends from other generations. They can learn of many pleasures they
would never know if they relied only Facebook and Twitter as their guides. They can be the true
heirs of those who went before them, receiving and treasuring things of lasting
value.
Many young people today are becoming admirers of
old houses, especially Victorian and turn of the century homes. We can tour
some that are now museums, seeing their beautiful craftsmanship, the fine
woodwork and stained glass, and furnishings that speak of a rich and close
family life. But how much more it means when the fine old house belongs to
someone who is willing to share the life that went on in that house: how
great-grandfather used to preside at the dinner table, how grandmother as a
child used to wait for the iceman to catch a few cold slivers on a summer day.
These things reach across the generations and bring us together again.
The decades that we have been apart have lasted
too long. Children and parents and grandparents have lived them out finding
life meager and lonely, cut off from one another in separate worlds.
Retroculture offers things in common. The past—the same past—is open to all.
Each has a role to play, some teaching, some learning. Through Retroculture,
the 21st century will be a time for bringing the generations back
together.
A CHANGE OF LIFESTYLE
How do we recover the good things our
grandparents had? The slower life, time for hobbies, family and interests, less
rampant consumerism in our daily lives? The answer is Retroculture's little secret.
What is it? We get there by living as they did—by adopting a Retroculture
lifestyle.
Of course, this does not mean we return to the
past in everything. We will not give up modern medicine (even the Amish go to
doctors), junk the furnace and the air conditioner, or keep slaves. Each person
will be free to decide how "Retro" he wants to live; some will want
to go farther than others, and no one is "wrong" for only going far
enough to give their life the degree of old-fashioned feeling they want. But more
and more, Americans will be modelling their lifestyle on the way people lived
in the past.
FREEDOM OF — AND FROM — FASHION
In fact, freedom is one of the most important
characteristics of Retroculture. Not only do you choose just how Retro you want
to live, you also "pick your own time." This is nothing less than a
revolution in the whole notion of "fashion."
Retroculture is itself a fashion, in the large
sense of the word. But it is also freedom to choose your own fashion. Up until
now, fashion was always a tyrant. At any given time, only one style of
clothing, music, dancing, architecture, interior design, furniture,
entertainment, manners and even values were considered "in fashion."
Unless you conformed to that one fashion, you were "out of it." People
saw you as stodgy and out-of-date if you stayed behind the fashion— or radical
and weird if you got too far ahead of it. Either way, fashion said that
something was wrong with you.
Retroculture breaks the tyranny of fashion. People
who look to the past for models are "in fashion" for the time they
have chosen, but other people who have chosen a different period are equally in
fashion, even though to outward appearances the two fashions may be completely
different. People who model their lifestyles after different periods will
obviously differ from each other in the sort of clothes they want to wear, the
music they want to hear, the way they keep themselves entertained, the houses
they live in and the furniture they use. But each group will be "in fashion"
for the period it is reviving and none of these periods will be "out of
fashion." No Retroculture period is "wrong." Further, each Retro
group can enjoy and appreciate what other groups are doing.
The freedom to "pick your own period"
and live it to the extent you want is important because different times appeal
to different people. Yet all Retroculture people have something very important
in common. They all look beyond the self-gratification and accumulation of
possessions that have driven the last few decades. So they all look to the
past, to times when people's lives had a better focus, and they find that the
past offers many different and equally interesting fashions to choose from.
Is there a "cut-off point" for
Retroculture, a date too far back for a lifestyle to be at all practical or one
so recent that it can't really be thought of as Retro? There is no arbitrary
cut-off point, although it is obviously easier today for someone to live as
they might have in 1940 or even at the turn of the century than to adopt a
style of living from the colonial period. On the other hand, because
Retroculture is an effort to recapture the good things Americans had and did
before the 1960s made it fashionable to throw those things away, the 1950s are
probably the last years that offer much in the way of a model for Retro living.
The rootless rebellion, shallow hedonism, and ruthless materialism that followed
do not. We know where the last decades have led us. That is what the Retro
movement wants to get away from.
The most important thing about Retroculture is
not where it draws the line, but how much it offers: the post-World War II era,
with its energy and optimism; the 1930s, when tough times led people back to
what matters most — strong families, honest work and helping the less
fortunate; the excitement of the Roaring Twenties, when young people,
especially, knew how to have fun; farther back to the Victorian period and the
creation of great American cities and magnificent houses; even back as far as
the colonial period, the first distinctly American lifestyle. Fashion no longer
dictates that we can only have some furniture from colonial times, maybe a vintage
car from the 1930s, or perhaps a few rock-and-roll records from the 50s. All of
America's past, in all of its richness, lies open to those who choose to live
it.
What might it be like to live in the Retro years?
Lees 100k ahead a bit—say, to the year 2030— when the trends that we see
starting now have had time to develop and spread. How might people be living
then?
Bill and Mary Brunelli are both in their early
thirties and have two children, eight and ten. They love the elegance of the
late 1800s, so that is how they choose to live. They own a Victorian house
built in 1897 in a small town outside Cincinnati, Ohio. The house was in bad
shape when they bought it. Its former owners had schlocked it, trying to
"modernize" it by stripping off the gingerbread and putting in
picture windows and aluminum siding.
The Brunellis researched the house and found
photos from before the remodeling. They got a lot of useful advice from the
local Restoration Society, a volunteer group who are working to restore the
town's Victorian flavor. They read about the dos and don'ts of Victorian
restoration in articles from Old House Journal. They even talked with an old
man from the neighborhood who had grown up in the house and remembered much
more than what they could find out from the records. With the help of local
craftsmen who have relearned traditional skills, from carpentry to plastering,
the Brunellis brought their home back to mint condition.
They already had a number of
Victorian antiques, and they did not hesitate to add good reproductions from
the increasing number of companies that were offering them. Victoria magazine
and other publications that had sprung up to cater to the growing Retro movement
helped them decorate their house like the Victorians, letting them choose from
a wide variety of authentic paint colors, wallpaper patterns, and fabrics. They
found that many seed and plant catalogues had sections dedicated to period
gardens. The side yard became a Victorian rose garden, where Mary can pursue
her hobby of growing rare 19th-century varieties of roses and invite friends to
tea in the small, white-trellis gazebo.
The Brunellis sometimes wear late 19th-century
clothes as well. They dress "Victorian" for events sponsored by the
town's Victorian Society, one of several social clubs that now focus on
particular historical periods. They dress that way when they invite friends
over for 19th-century dinners on weekends, and sometimes for church or for
dinner parties with friends. Although they have a television and a computer,
the Brunellis also enjoy period entertainment. At least once a week the family
gathers in the parlor and Mary or Bill reads out loud. Light novels from the
turn of the century provide plenty of rousing tales for the children, who also
like many of the old-fashioned parlor games their parents have taught them.
When they go out walking together, the Brunellis
sometimes stop to talk with Mr. and Mrs. Chen, an older couple who now have the
freedom to recreate the 1950s lifestyle they enjoyed so much when they were
young. When the Chens sold their successful clothing store in Cincinnati and
retired to this town several years back, they bought one of the first
"ranch-style" houses that had been built in the area. It still had
the original knotty pine paneling in the den, although it had to be stripped
and varnished to bring back its original warm glow. In the kitchen, they
installed rounded "streamlined" kitchen appliances they had rescued
from an old house that was being torn down. In the bathroom, they ripped out
the wall-to-wall carpeting and laid bright yellow tile from the early 1950s
with black tile trim, which they could now order through the local hardware
store. They also put in reproduction fixtures with the same round lines as the
kitchen appliances.
Most of the Chens' furniture, which they had
bought used as newlyweds and lovingly maintained, is already right for the
period. It includes an early television, which is now hooked up with a DVD
player that lets them watch vintage television shows. Of course, they have a
record player for their vinyl collection, but they are glad that first-rate
versions of most old hit songs are also available on compact discs for the stereo
system they have tucked away out of sight. They have always loved dancing, and
they frequently attend the "hops" sponsored by a local dance revival
group at the restored ballroom of an old amusement park a few miles out of
town, an activity they say is great for keeping fit. Mr. Chen drives one of the
reproduction 1948 Buick Roadmasters General Motors now makes for fans of
post-World War Il design.
When they are not doing repairs or chores around
the house, the Chens like to dress the way their parents taught them. Mr. Chen
usually wears a three-button blazer or a cardigan sweater with a tie. Mrs. Chen
prefers dresses to jeans or shorts. Both of them appreciate the freedom to dress
and talk a bit more formally than used to be the fashion, without the neighbors
thinking that they are acting stuffy or standoffish. In fact, they enjoy
walking along the street and visiting with the neighbors in the evening, and
they find many others doing the same. Even after dark, they feel perfectly safe
out walking, now that so many other people are doing it too.
Through their dance revival group, the Chens have
become friendly with a young black family from Cincinnati, the Martins.
African-American Lateesha Martin is a middle-level manager at city hall.
Charlie is a technician at the city water plant. The Martins' real love is
swing music, particularly the music of Duke Ellington. Charlie is a good enough
trombonist to have made a living as a studio musician for a few years in New
York, but the spread of synthetic computer music for movies and television put
him out of work, and he returned to Cincinnati and settled down with his
hometown sweetheart.
Now Charlie spends many weekends playing the ballroom
outside town with the swing band he helped form. He and Lateesha and their two
young children often drive out for weekends and visit the Chens, who never had
children or grandchildren of their own. All of them go to hear Charlie's band
play, and the Chens have been teaching Charlie and Lateesha late - 40s dance routines. If the number of swing fans continues to grow, Charlie
may even have a chance to become a full-time musician again.
Meanwhile, through their church the Brunellis
have gotten to know a young man named Jon Hendrickson, who lives outside town.
Jon prefers a colonial lifestyle. He has also chosen to go more Retro than
either the Brunellis or the Chens. He bought some land and built a log cabin on
it. The cabin comes in kit form, the sort many people have for a summer house,
and it's quite comfortable. Importantly for a young man without much money, it
is also relatively cheap.
Jon has made much of his own furniture, just as
pioneers in the Cincinnati area made theirs in the late 18th century. He has
electricity, mainly for his computer — he works out of his home as a graphic
designer — and for the kitchen, but those rooms are separated from the rest of the
house. The main room of the house is a dining-living-bedroom all rolled into
one, just as it would have been in his period, and everything is as it would
have been then.
There is a big fireplace, candles for light, a
few pieces of furniture, and a table around which people gather to eat, drink,
talk, and play cards.
Jon wears only Colonial-style clothes at home,
which he orders through catalogs, and he looks good in them. He is convinced
that men's dress peaked in the late 18th century, with knee
breeches, bright-colored waistcoats, and buckle shoes. John also studies the
18th-century art of deportment. In that time, people were careful how they
stood, sat, and gestured, always aiming for elegance. Usually, he speaks modern
English, but he belongs to a club where he gathers with others to discuss
18th-century subjects in the English of that time. The group meets at the
famous Golden Lamb Inn in Lebanon, Ohio. If you attend one of their meetings,
you will feel as if you have traveled back in time.
John's careful re-creation of 18th-century
living does not limit him. He drives a car, flies to business meetings, belongs
to an HMO, goes to the movies, and enjoys other modern conveniences. But he
appreciates the fact that he is free to live in his chosen period without being
thought strange. A considerable number of people have chosen Colonial living.
It is not uncommon to see people dressed in Colonial clothes — or clothes from
any number of other periods — on their way to the numerous events attended by
others who have chosen the same period.
At this point, you may be saying to yourself,
"This is interesting. After all, in many ways the past was better. But... can
we really go back to the past? Is it practical? And isn't this just
nostalgia?"
These are natural questions. Answering them is
the first step in getting started toward your own Retroculture lifestyle. And
they do have answers.
Let's take a look at some of the questions that
may have occurred to you and see what the answers are.
CHAPTER III
Getting Started
"Is it really possible to recreate the past?
After all, we've been told over and over that
'You can't go back."'
RETROCULTURE DOES NOT attempt to recreate the
past precisely. That would require living in a museum. Rather, it attempts to
use the past to guide our way into the future. It draws what is good from the
past and blends it with what is good in the present, creating a
"roadmap" we can follow as we move into the future. It offers a way
to shape the future, to recapture control of our destiny — something we cannot
do if our only guide is novelty, doing that which has never been done before.
15th-century Europeans gave the world
a big boost forward by trying to go back to the ideas
and art forms of classical Greece and Rome. We call that time the Renaissance.
The Italians who created the Renaissance did not suddenly become ancient Romans
again. But they did change the direction their society was taking — and improve
it — by looking to the Classical past for guidance.
Similarly, the Protestant Reformation was an
attempt to return to what people such as Martin Luther believed was the early
Christian church, the church in the first few centuries after Christ. The
Protestants had an enormous impact on Christianity, including, through the
Counter-reformation, on the Catholic Church. Both Protestants and Catholics
sought to remedy abuses in the church by attempting to go back to their roots.
Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation
exactly recreated the past. Nor will Retroculture. But both did give people a
light by which to see and a path to follow into the future. Retroculture can do
the same for Americans today. It can give us guidance, inspiration, new ideas
(really old ideas rediscovered), and models we can follow. It can allow us to
find solutions to current problems by showing us what worked in the past. It
can recover many of the qualities of life in America in say, the year 1900,
qualities like civility, sound values, strong family life, and neighborhoods,
towns and cities that are pleasant places to live.
As to the saying "You can't go back,"
it is a warning, not against trying to recover the good things from the
past—which we can do— but against the people who keep telling us that we can't
go back. Very often, these people have selfish interests in present trends.
Some are people whose lifestyles might face disapproval if most Americans
return to traditional values. Some have financial interests in rampant
consumerism, in selling "upscale" goods with "prestige"
labels. Some work in industries, such as entertainment, that might have trouble
adjusting to Retroculture's recovery of good taste. Most of them fear the
rejection of "selfism" inherent in Retroculture, because their own
lives are very self-centered.
So, when you hear, "You can't go back,"
watch out. What the person who tells you that is really saying is, "You
can go back, and I'm afraid of what might happen to my interests if you do."
Be certain you recognize what that person's interests really are—what his
hidden agenda is.
"A lot of Retroculture seems to be about
things — fashions, architecture, furniture, etc.
Isn't it too materialistic, just like today?"
Retroculture includes things — clothing, home
design, furniture and so on — but it is not about them. They are
"props" Retroculture people use to create in their homes and lives
the feel of an earlier period. What Retroculture is really about is how life is
to be lived, the values, ideas and standards that guide behavior. After all,
what made earlier times better than the present was that people behaved
differently, not just that their houses or clothes were different.
Traditional American values are, in fact, perhaps
the most important thing Retroculture seeks to recapture. If we could bring
some Americans from the past, from the Colonial period or the era of the War of
1861 or the turn of the century, back to visit and talk with us today, they
would almost certainly tell us that the most important things in their lives
were what they believed.
What were their beliefs? We have touched on many
of them already: civility, public spiritedness, charity, craftsmanship and
stewardship, among others. But these values in turn were expressions of deeper
beliefs, beliefs past Americans got from their religious faith. After all,
America was founded by Pilgrims: people who came here seeking freedom to
worship as they believed right. Our ancestors, from almost any era, believed in
God, worshipped Him regularly, and were molded by their faith and worship.
Their morals were rooted in the Ten Commandments.
Like people at all times, they seldom lived up to all of them. But even when
they fell short, they still recognized that the Commandments were right. Only
in recent years have Americans said, in effect, "If we can't perfectly
live up to the rules while doing just what we want to, we'll re-write the
rules."
Earlier Americans recognized that the rules—
traditional morals—were right. Further, they were necessary: they were the
basis of the strong families, sound communities, and productive workplaces
those Americans knew and had. Even Americans who were not personally religious
usually accepted the Ten Commandments as something right and good.
It would be an error to think we can recover the
good things from America's past simply through reviving styles of architecture,
clothing, and entertainment. Those are enjoyable, and they are part of
Retroculture. But the more important part is reviving the values and morals and
religious faith held by the Americans who first created those styles. The one
was the form, the other the substance, and we will quickly find the form without
the substance is unsatisfying.
Retroculture is, after all, a way of living. Any
way of living requires a guide. The guides from the last fifty years, from
"do your own thing" through "I've got mine, Jack," have
proven false. Retroculture is a call to return to an earlier guide, one that
lasted and proved itself by many generations of Americans. Call it what you
will— American values, traditional morals, the Ten Commandments or the Jewish
or Christian faith —it works. As a guide, it is true. We need it, now more than
ever.
"Is it practical to try to
live as we did in the past?"
One of the biggest advantages of returning to the
past is its practicality. Americans have always been a practical people. In
many respects those who went before us lived more simply and practically in
their time than we do in ours. Despite the increased pace and distractions of
our world— perhaps, in part, because of them — many old ways of living are at
least as practical now.
For example, as late as the 1940s, people walked
a lot more than they do now. There were fewer cars and more public transit
systems. Public transit was clean, orderly, efficient and attractive. So people
of all ages rode the subways and trolleys for both business and pleasure, and
wherever they got off, they walked. Exercise was a practical part of everyday life, not
an added chore.
Today, most of us drive, even though everyone
knows that driving a car does nothing to improve our health. But, given a
chance, people are amazingly willing to go back to older forms of
transportation that include walking. Look at the many American cities that have
built Light Rail streetcar lines. Those lines not only carry many people who
would not want to ride buses, they re-vitalize the city's downtown by letting
people get around without cars. They ride the trolleys, then they get off and
walk, bringing new business to local merchants.
Retroculture is also a lot more practical for the
environment, one of today's biggest concerns. People traveling in streetcars
produce far less pollution and use up much less fuel than they would if they
were driving their cars. Only a few decades ago, people had a lot less impact
on the environment and nature’s limited resources, even though they knew much
less about the environment. And they managed to live comfortably, even by our
standards.
People got along without buying as many things,
and they demanded higher quality in the things that they did buy, so they would
last longer and not have to be thrown out. They took the time to fix things,
and they had many ways of reusing what was worn out, not because anyone thought
much about recycling but because Americans were practical and hated waste.
Ordinary citizens also demanded beauty in the
things they purchased. As a result, American consumer goods were among the best
designed and best made in the world. Indirectly, this also tended to reduce the
burden on the environment, because beautiful and well made things were less
likely to be discarded, and many older tools did not require electricity.
"Isn't Retroculture just
another word for nostalgia?"
In fact, Retroculture is quite different from
nostalgia. Nostalgia looks to an imaginary world, a perfect world that never
really was. Usually, that world is represented by an idyllic, innocent rural
life. In the nostalgic view, that world can never be recaptured. It is lost
forever. Of course it is, since it never really existed in the first place.
Retroculture, in contrast, remembers real past
ways of living. The 1950s, the 1920s, the 1890s were all real. None of them was
perfect, unlike the imagined world of nostalgia. But all of them had some—
indeed, many— good qualities. Retroculture can recapture those good things from
earlier periods because they were real. We can cook a Colonial dinner, build a
new Victorian house, dance to big band music and live solid, moral, respectable
lives because real people did those things. Through memory and history— which
is the memory of times before our own —we can find out what people used to do,
and we can do those things again. By doing so, we can regain what we had and
have lost: contentment, well ordered communities, communication among
generations, lives that are rewarding because they are lived according to good
standards.
Nostalgia, after all, is really just a feeling.
We say that a certain view or picture or song makes us feel nostalgic. It is a
bittersweet feeling, a wistfulness or longing. Retroculture, on the other hand,
is action. It is the recovery and re-creation Of things from the past to make
them part of our everyday lives. The actions we take to create a Retroculture
lifestyle, from wearing old clothing fashions to going to church, give us good
feelings, sometimes even feelings of nostalgia. But Retroculture is more than
feelings; it is a way of living.
"But wasn't the past bad?"
Some people may say that it is wrong to try to
turn the clock back. "Political Correctness" paints the past as
something bad, a dark time of "repression" and intolerance. The
Victorian period especially is often portrayed this way. Victorian family life
is seen as "uptight," stiff and formal. The Victorians were
supposedly often hypocritical, extolling virtues they did not practice. The
real Victorians, according to this view, were priggish, snobbish, cold and
nasty.
Recently, people have begun to have a more
balanced — and more historically correct— view of past times. The Victorian
period is increasingly recognized as a time of tremendous creativity and
achievement. The Victorian years saw the United States transformed from a fairly
primitive, largely agricultural country into a powerful, modern nation. What
kind of people undertook such a great transformation? Far from being narrow and
unimaginative, they were people of broad vision, tremendous energy, and great
ability to innovate. They were inventors and builders, people who could and did
remake their world — and ours.
Their strengths began at home, with a strong,
close-knit family life. Religion and morals were an important part of family
life, as was education. The Victorians were determined to build a better world
for their children, starting with a careful upbringing. They were also deeply
concerned with improving the communities they lived in. If you look at the many
towns and cities the Victorians built, you immediately see that the most
imposing buildings are usually the churches. That tells us what the Victorians
believed to be most important: the moral, not just the economic future of their
communities. Similarly, they put great effort into creating good schools. They
founded many "improvement societies," aimed at eliminating
drunkenness, helping the poor, Americanizing immigrants, and generally
improving community life.
The Victorians and people from other earlier
times were not bad people. On the contrary, they had high standards, and most
of them tried to live up to those standards. Of course, there are bad people in
every era; human nature does not change. But the Victorian period in particular
was a time when people spent a great deal of thought and energy trying to be
good —and to do good for others.
Retroculture seeks to recapture the good things
the Victorians, and those from other times as well, knew and did. The things
that were less good Retroculture will pass over. No one seeks to return to Jim
Crow laws,4
19th-century medicine, or outdoor plumbing. A Retroculture lifestyle
will have plenty of room for air conditioning and automobiles.
4 These were the official statuary acts which enforced racial segregation in
the US. Their origins can be traced back to 1865, and they stood in place until
the mid-1960s. — Editor.
"If I am the first person in my community to 'go Retro,'
won't I feel uncomfortable or even embarrassed?"
You don't have to "go Retro" in any way
that makes you uncomfortable in order to be Retro. Just do what you enjoy. For
example, if you would feel embarrassed to be among the first people to wear old
clothing styles, don't do it. Do something else instead, something less visible
to people outside your family, like reviving family Sunday dinner, or listening
to old music, or decorating your particular room in your house — your den, your
bedroom — to reflect the era you like best.
Remember, Retroculture offers freedom from
fashion. You are free not only to choose your era, but also to "get
into" it as little or as deeply as you like. Just as you will respect
others' decisions about how Retro they want to live, so they will respect
yours. After all, the past Retroculture seeks to revive was a comfortable time.
It makes sense that in adopting Retroculture, you will control how far you go
in it and will do whatever you find comfortable.
Also, if you look around, you will probably
already see other people in your community who are starting to go Retro. A good
way to get started is by doing things in groups, just like the young people who
are reviving the American 1940s in London, England. Group activities can make
everyone more comfortable, and also make Retroculture more fun by allowing
people to share their knowledge, talents, and interests with others.
"Isn't Retroculture phony and artificial — something
created, rather than something natural?"
As Oscar Wilde said, "The only thing wrong
with being natural is that it is such a difficult pose to maintain." The
fact is, anything beyond eating raw meat and sleeping in caves is created — a
pose, if you will. Civilization itself is something people deliberately create
— something "artificial," and, to some people, "phony." But
it is also something that most people are very glad we have, since raw meat
doesn't taste very good and caves are cold and damp.
Once we agree we prefer civilization over
savagery, and thus the created over pure "nature," we have to ask,
"Which is more natural, looking to the past for inspiration and guidance
or toward novelty as our only guide?" Through most of human history,
people looked toward the past, and novelty was suspect. People have naturally
preferred the known over the unknowable, and the tried and proven over the
novel and untested. It is only in recent years that we have gotten our wires
crossed and come to think that it is somehow "phony" to look toward
the past and try to revive what used to work. In a time when most people realize
that life was, on the whole, better in the past than it is today, what could be
more natural than trying to revive it?
"Is Retroculture just another fad?"
There is too much happening in Retroculture for
it to be just a fad. Fads are things like hula-hoops and granny dresses, things
than cannot last. Already, we see strong Retro influences in such serious
fields as architecture and urban planning. We see people devoting substantial
time and work to restoring old houses to their original state, to bringing back
decaying towns and urban centers, and to local history. We see real commitment
to discovering and reviving past ways of living. No fad can produce that kind
of seriousness.
Retroculture is a reaction against fads, against
living a life that follows one silly novelty after another. It is a return to
"the permanent things," to the ways of thinking and ways of living
that have defined us, over the generations, as Americans. These things have
proven their worth by standing the test of time—a test that quickly separates
out the fads and fancies. We have had to endure lives governed by fads and
social experiments since the mid-1960s, and now we are saying,
"Enough!" It's time to get back to what we know works, and that is
just what Retroculture does.
"Does Retroculture require limiting technology?"
Most Retroculture people will want to limit
technology. It will be difficult to recover old ways of living if you or your
family spend most of their time at home staring at a screen. Of course, your
work may require you to use a computer or a smart phone. But to re-create the
era you want, in your home life you will probably try to put modern technology
in its place. Most people now see that it has come to dominate and control our
lives in ways that are not healthy. Think of your home as a place that gives
you a "vacation" from all the devices that constantly fight for your
attention with their "bings and bongs." One of the nicest things
about the old days was their quiet.
Once you have answered your questions about
Retroculture, you face making a decision. Do you want to lead a Retrocultural
life? Do you want to use the past as your guide and inspiration as you move into
the future? That is a choice only you can make. And it is a serious choice,
even if it is a choice about doing something that can be a great deal of fun.
Perhaps the best way to make this choice is to
ask yourself two questions. The first is: "Do you want to take charge Of
your own life? Do you want to decide where your future will go, and how you
will live your life?" Retroculture offers a way you can do this. If you
choose the past as your guide, you can determine where you want to go and how
you want to live, because you have something real, something knowable to steer
by.
The second question to ask yourself is whether
you would enjoy being part of Retroculture. Does this sound like fun to you?
Would you enjoy being part of a national effort to
recover our past and make it live again? Like all real fun, it involves some
work and some serious commitment—just like sailing, or quilting, or gardening.
But people do those things because they enjoy them. Is this something you would
enjoy? Is it something that would give new meaning and purpose and pleasure to
your life?
If your answer is "no," we still
encourage you to finish this little book. As you look more closely at Retroculture,
you may find your answer changing. Many Americans are finding Retroculture fun,
and also meaningful and important. Most of them are people who, until recently,
would never have considered looking to the past to find good and useful ways to
live in America in the 21st century. You may discover what they have
found, that the more you look at the past, the more what you see there makes
sense.
If your answer is "yes," you may find
yourself asking the question, "But how do I get started?" Most of the
rest of this book is an answer to that question. But there are a few general
suggestions we can offer here that you may find helpful.
The first thing you may want to do is find out
more about different periods. You may not yet know what period most interests
you, the one you would like to revive in your own life. There are a number of
ways to get a feel for different times. Local museums are a good place to
start, especially museums in the form of colonial farms or Victorian homes. It
can also be useful simply to walk through neighborhoods that are solidly
Victorian or say, 1920s—1930s. You will probably find a number of homes there
that have been restored to their original appearance. Of course, especially for
the colonial period, there are towns such as Williamsburg, Virginia and
Plymouth, Massachusetts, that have been restored to their period appearance,
with people dressing in colonial styles who will explain life in that time to
you. You may want to pay one of those places a visit.
You may find in your local area groups of people
with interests in different periods. For example, you may have a local War of
1861 regiment— people who gather to reenact battles from the War of 1861. Or,
there may be a local group of people interested in ballroom dancing. Many of
them may wear period dress, practice period manners and speech, and know a
great deal about the time in which the dances they enjoy were first popular.
Groups of this kind will usually welcome your interest in "their"
time.
Of course, the local library is always a good
starting place. There are many books on life in past periods, from the colonial
through the 1950s. Magazines such as Victoria may also be found there. Further,
local libraries often have material on local history, from books through actual
archives of local newspapers and other publications. The history of your city,
county, town or neighborhood is often a good place to get started, because a
past period may "come alive" more for you when you can see how the
place where you live used to be.
One of the best sources of information on past
periods is the older generation. Your own grandparents or great aunts and
uncles will probably be happy to tell you what life used to be like, especially
for your own family—and they will be happy to be asked. Nothing adds quite so
much to your house and neighborhood as knowing what it used to be like for your
own family. If you now live far from where your family used to live, there will
probably still be local senior citizens who can tell you a great deal about
what your area was like when they were young. Even if you are in a new
development, it may have an older town center with an interesting history, and
local people who can remember it. Nothing would so nicely make the day for
people in the local senior citizens' center as to have you come by and ask them
about "how it used to be." Remember, one of the good things about
Retroculture is that it can bring the generations together again.
Once you have a feel for the period you would
like to "adopt" as your own, your discovery can get more specific.
The more you dig, the more you will find — books, periodicals, local groups of
enthusiasts, people who have restored homes, etc. At some point, you will
probably want to choose a place to start in "going Retro" yourself.
This can be almost anything. Often, people like to begin with the way they
decorate their home. Cooking period recipes and serving old-fashioned family
dinners is another good starting point. If you like to sew, you can begin with
quilting, or making clothes to period patterns, which are readily available
through catalogues. Collecting and listening to music from your period, perhaps
on original recordings, or learning to play a period instrument is another good
point to begin. Or, take up a hobby that reflects the time you like best, such
as collecting train models That is an especially good way to meet other people
interested in the same period.
Already, there are a growing number of
Retroculture items on the market, from clothing through furniture and
appliances to plans for houses. As you find yourself needing something new, you
can get it made to a Retro style. Gradually, your home or wardrobe will take on
the feel of the period you like. At the same time, you can gradually increase
the number of Retro things you do, from taking family drives in the country to
giving period dinners for friends to going regularly to church. Each new
activity turns back the clock in more of your own life.
The most important thing to remember about
getting started on a Retroculture lifestyle is that it is not difficult. On the
contrary, it is fun. It is an opportunity to discover new people, learn new
things, and find new — really old — ways of living better. Many other people
across the country are going to be doing the same thing. As the number of
people following a Retro lifestyle grows, new publications, volunteer groups,
products and services will come along to serve them. Retroculture will be the
wave of the 21st century—it's already starting to happen all around
us. Yes, it takes some effort on your part, but everything worthwhile does.
That's one of the things the past is waiting to teach us: the deep and lasting
rewards that come from something that takes time, work, and commitment.
So—let's get started!
CHAPTER IV
Retro-Homes
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, and a great deal more
as well. It is our refuge, where the wicked cease to trouble and the weary are
at rest. It is the place, more than any other, where we can really be
ourselves. For Retro-people, when we have closed the front door behind us, it
is where we at last escape the importunities of modern life.
Not surprisingly, the home is the first thing
many people want to take Retro. There, we can create the world we desire. Often
it is a world we remember: our parents' or grandparents' house, or the special
world we found as children in the home of a favorite aunt. If we are fortunate,
we may have some of the furniture or pictures or knick-knacks from those homes
of memory, tools we can use to re-create their feel.
There is a great deal more to a home than a
house, but it is with a house that the Retro-home begins. Fortunately, a wide
variety of styles is available, all suitable to Retro-living. From Colonial
through Victorian and Queen Anne to the ranch-style houses of the 1950s, you
can almost certainly find something to fit your taste and budget.
OLDER HOUSES
In fact, the budget gets some help right off the
bat from one simple fact: most Retro-people want older homes. Usually, older
homes are less expensive. Look through the real estate section of your local
paper. Often you will find nice older homes in established neighborhoods,
convenient to town, places with sidewalks and big trees, nearby schools and
streetcars, selling for one half or even one third of what new houses cost.
These older homes have what Retro-people are
looking for. Depending on their style, they may offer high ceilings, broad
front porches, and leaded glass cabinets built into the dining room; solid
brickwork, arched doorways, and slate roofs; or broad living rooms that step
down into spacious dining areas, wide windows, and big patios. They are built
better than houses are today, with thicker studs and more of them, superior
masonry (especially brickwork), and real hardwood floors (not even the cheapest
houses of 80 years ago had plywood floors disguised by "free wall-to-wall
carpet").
Most important, older houses speak of lives lived
in earlier and nicer times. That adds something even the best new house, one
carefully built to an older style, can never offer. people who lived in these
older homes, in 1880 or 1920 or 1950, have left a bit of themselves and their
lives to the people who buy them today. In a time of restless change, that
continuity is welcome.
As far as styles go, what is available will depend
on where you live. In the East, it is possible in some places to find genuine
colonial houses, though unless you are looking in a remote area they are likely
to be expensive. More probably, if you're looking for a colonial home, you will
want a reproduction. Some very nice Cape Cods and other colonial styles were
designed and built in the 1930s, 40s and 50s; they can be found in most parts
of the country and often for reasonable prices. Many of these reproductions
were small houses, especially suitable to single people, young couples just
getting started and families where the children have grown and moved on. Though
small, they are often charming, with imaginative use of space, distinguishing
features such as gables, fine interior woodwork and fireplaces, and the feel of
much larger and more expensive homes. (Note: some real estate agents now list
almost any older home as a "colonial." This is, of course, bogus; if
you are looking for an older colonial, you will probably have to spell out to
your agent just what a colonial house is.)
(Source: M -Fitzsimmons, Wikimedia Commons)
One of Retroculture's characteristics is a
re-awakened admiration for the Victorians. Not surprisingly, Victorian and
Queen Anne houses—homes built from around 1870 to about 1910 —are many people's
first choice. And what beautiful homes they often are! The outside features
great front porches; stately cupolas; long, elegant windows, often arched at
the top; or, in the later Queen Anne5, a delightful excess of scrollwork,
whimsical balconies, and as many odd corners and cornices as an architect could
dream up. Inside, you may find a wide front hallway, with symmetrical parlors
on either side, set off with elaborate fretwork; beautiful paneling, especially
around the elegant formal stairway; high ceilings with plaster moldings;
stained glass or prism-framed windows; and, instead of a few big rooms, a wide
variety of small rooms, each seeming larger than it is through its use of
vertical space, and each intended for a specific purpose: the music room, the
library, the morning room, the conservatory, and so on. Many people who follow
a Retroculture life style want nothing quite so much as one of these enchanting,
exuberant homes, so eloquent of America at its peak.
5 This Baroque form of 18th-century English architecture was revived in the
19th century, typically formed in a simple yet elegant style,
featuring sash windows in boxes, warm fine brickwork, broad porches etc. The
American form of this revival is marked by its fine gabling.
There are few areas of the country that do not
have any Victorian or Queen Anne homes. Some places, like the Midwest, have
them in abundance. If the houses are in excellent original condition or have
been restored well and are in desirable neighborhoods, they are usually
expensive. But you may find them at reasonable prices also, by looking in small
towns that were built in the latter part of the 19th century, or in
areas of the city that have run down. If you are willing to be an "urban
pioneer," one of the first people to go into a rundown area and begin
restoration, you may be able to get a beautiful Victorian quite cheaply in what
will someday become a good neighborhood.
Often one of the best buys in Retro-homes are
houses built between 1910 and 1940. These vary widely in style, from Colonial
Revival through the bungalows and American Foursquares to neo-Spanish and the
Prairie Style inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright. Not yet as fashionable as
Victorian or Queen Anne houses, these homes nonetheless offer many of their
virtues. They are often marvelously comfortable, with high ceilings, big front
porches, elegant interior woodwork and a variety of special-purpose rooms like
sunrooms and breakfast rooms. Architecturally, they can be quite distinguished,
both in overall form and quality of details. The Colonial Revival in particular
improved markedly through this period, by the end of it becoming a
nearly-faithful reproduction of genuine Colonial homes. The bungalow, which
slowly declined in popularity between 1910 and 1940, so well combines exterior
distinctiveness with interior charm that it is following Victorian and Queen
Anne in returning to fashion.
The big "sleeper" in Retro-homes, the
market no one has yet caught on to, are the houses built in the 1950s. While
houses of many styles were built during those years, including some very fine
Colonial homes, the house that best represents the era of rock and roll, bobby
socks and big American cars is the ranch-style. Often "split level" —
the latest thing in 1955 — ranch-style homes exemplify the expansiveness,
confidence and prosperity of their time. Low, open and broad, they offer large
rooms adaptable to a variety of purposes. They typically have basement
"rec rooms," where kids play and adults party, patios to symbolize
the indoor-outdoor nature of the ranch life (even in the north and east), and
big garages where that '57 Chevy BelAir can be seen by all the neighbors. Not
only are these houses often good buys, their neighborhoods, now entering their
seventies, are at the ideal age: well developed, with sidewalks, established
landscaping including big trees, and nearby services. They offer a wonderful
"start" for young people, affordable yet very Retro, recalling an era
most Americans find far preferable to the time we face now.
NEW HOMES
Some people who want a Retroculture lifestyle also
want a new house. New houses usually have fewer problems than old, need less in
the way of repairs, and offer a chance to "personalize" a home.
Increasingly, you can find new homes built to
reflect Retro styles. New colonial houses are readily available in most areas
(though again, be wary of the real estate agent's definition of
"colonial." ) Recently, some builders have started constructing
houses and even whole developments with a Victorian or Queen Anne flavor. These
new houses have many of the desirable features of the originals, such as front
porches, a variety of special-purpose rooms, and decorative woodwork and
stained glass. When built as part of well-planned communities, they can offer
the feel of a Victorian small town, with all the neighborliness, security and
sense of community those towns had.
Another way to get a "new old" house is
to have it special built. Plans for a wide variety of styles are readily found.
Blueprints for well-designed, largely authentic colonial homes have been widely
available, often through home or architecture magazines, since the 1930s.
Recently, magazines such as Victoria have
advertised house plans for Victorian and Queen Anne houses. If your taste runs
to the Early American, you may find one of the many kits for log homes of
interest; these are relatively inexpensive, a good choice for a first house or
a second home in the country, and offer the feel of the log cabin that played a
central role in our nation's settlement.
An imaginative way to build your own Retro-home
is to find an older house you like, then duplicate it in your own setting. Of
course, this requires the cooperation of the current owners, but many people
would be flattered to be asked. An architect can easily make the plans from the
original house. This approach offers the option of duplicating a house your own
family used to live in. Perhaps you have fond memories of your grandparents'
bungalow, or a fine Queen Anne where your great aunts lived, a place you used
to love visiting in the summer as a child. You always wished you could somehow
go back there, but the setting is inappropriate, or the neighborhood has
deteriorated, or it is too far away from where you work. Well then, recreate
it! Have the blueprints made from the original house, and build it where you
want it. Now you have the best of both worlds: a brand-new house, where you
want it, that brings with it all those treasured family memories — Retroculture
at its finest!
Most Americans want to own a house. But economic
realities being what they are, many of us must put that desire off for a while,
and live for now in an apartment or a condominium. From a Retroculture
standpoint, this need not be too great a sacrifice. You can find Retro condos
and apartments in most parts of the country.
The best of these are, of course, in older
buildings. Many cities have elegant apartment buildings constructed in the late
19th or early 20th centuries. After all, Fifth Avenue in
New York, one of the nation's most desirable addresses —then and now—is all
apartments and condos, many built before World War II. They offer Retro living
at its most elegant, equal to anything a private house can provide.
In many cities, these once highly fashionable
apartment buildings are in areas close to the city center, areas now not
fashionable but consequently affordable. You may be able to afford condo or
apartment Retro-living much more cheaply than you think, especially if you are
willing to be an urban pioneer. Further, many of these areas are now coming
back, with the middle class moving back into them as it discovers the
advantages of living close to town. Young single people and couples often find
the merit of living close by the city’s many cultural attractions quite
desirable, and they are resurrecting these buildings and neighborhoods. A tour
of the city where you want to live can show you some of these areas and reveal
just how nicely some apartment-dwellers in earlier times lived.
Some people may still think that to have a Retro-home,
you have to be rich, or least well off. It's just not true. Of course, if you
want a genuine Colonial on Boston's Beacon Hill, or a Victorian on San
Francisco's Russian Hill, you are going to need a pretty good income. But there
are lots of opportunities to find Retro-homes that are relatively inexpensive.
Remember that in the past, people did not expect
as much space as some modern people think they need. Parents shared a bedroom,
children usually did the same, and the kids' bedroom was also their playroom.
One all-purpose living room was sufficient, without separate rec rooms, family
rooms, and the like, at least in middle class homes. Upscale houses had more,
smaller rooms, which makes them good for growing families today, but most did
not have the huge expanses of space that became fashionable in the last forty
years. Usually, a house had just one bathroom. Because people had better
manners — something Retro people also cultivate — it was possible to live
closer together without getting in each other's way.
What sufficed in terms of space for our parents
and grandparents can be sufficient for us also, at least when we are starting
out. Nor need we regard a small house as a hardship. Shared space, instead of
everyone having "his own space," helps individual lives come together
in a genuine family. It teaches consideration for others, punctuality,
efficient use of time, quietness, and self-discipline, among the virtues our
ancestors prized. The home is the first and most important school, and a small
house is the best school of good manners.
Of course, as the family grows and your income
rises, you may both want and need more space. But by starting small, you may
also be able to start early in your quest for your very own Retro-home.
"TURNING BACK THE CLOCK"
WITH THE HOME YOU HAVE
Retroculture need not start with finding a new
home; it can begin with the house you have, if you have one. Depending on the
age and style of your house, you may be able to make it into a fine Retro-home
— and have some fun in the process.
The first step in taking your own house Retro is
to determine just what is possible. Obviously, this includes such things as
budget, your ability to put up with the temporary mess of reconstruction, and
your house's setting. If going Retro with your own home means it will no longer
fit in the neighborhood, that is a constraint you will want to respect.
Less obvious but perhaps most important is the
question of what you can do with your house without violating its architectural
integrity. Few if any Retroculture people would take, for example, a Queen Anne
house and modernize it with picture windows, aluminum siding, dropped ceilings,
and removal of all the wonderful turned decorative woodwork, filigree, and
stained glass. We would recognize that as a hideous violation of the house's
architectural integrity, the result of which would be neither a modern house
nor a Queen Anne but a mockery of the first and a desecration of the second.
FIGURE 2. The Carson Mansion in Eureka, Northern California.
(Source: Cory Maylett, Wikimedia Commons)
But the same constraint works the other way. You
will have difficulty taking a house built to a modern style and
"antiquing" it without violating its integrity and creating, not a
Retro-home, but a hopeless and tasteless mishmash. You cannot make a
ranch-style home into a Victorian, nor into a colonial (though some builders
have tried the latter, with unhappy results). The addition to a home, which is
built to look modern, of "cutsie" fake bay windows, New Orleans-style
iron grille columns, Victorian stained glass and country-house shutters will
not create a Retro feel, but its opposite: an overwhelming sensation of bad
taste. If the owner went on and added white-painted tractor tires by the
driveway, a busted sofa on the front porch and several automobiles up on jacks
and refrigerators without doors scattered about the yard, such a house could
easily be mistaken for the local West Virginia consulate.
The point at which to begin determining what is
possible with your house is, then, asking yourself, "What have I got to
work with?" What is the basic style of your house? When was it built, and
what historic period does it represent? What can be done that is consistent
with its architecture, and what would violate its architectural integrity? You
may know enough about your house and about architecture generally to answer
these questions yourself. If not, you may answer them after some research in
your local library, or you may prefer to ask an architect, an historian, or a
friend or neighbor knowledgeable in this area to help you.
In general, especially with older homes, the
safest way to take your house Retro is restoration: taking it back to what it
was like when it was built. With Colonial, Victorian, Queen Anne, and inter-war
styles, this is most often what you will want to do. It is safe, because it
restores the house's integrity rather than threatening it. The results are
usually pleasing, because you are most often removing what doesn't belong and
replacing it with what does (the original design was usually a good one). It is
Retro, because when you are done, you will have a home that looks and feels
like an earlier era, the time when it was built.
Here again, you will have to determine just what
is possible. If, for example, you have a genuine Colonial house, you probably
won't want to get rid of indoor plumbing, central heating, electricity or a
kitchen equipped with a range and refrigerator. Pure restoration won't be
practical. If you have a big Victorian house, you may want more than the
original single bathroom, and you probably won't need the servants' quarters
for servants; you will want to use those rooms for other purposes. If, however,
you have a bungalow from the 1920s, it may be possible to restore it to its
original state, with only such minor, almost invisible changes as air
conditioning and a place for the refrigerator in the kitchen (ice boxes usually
went in an enclosed entryway or on a porch).
The key to restoration is careful research.
Before you begin, you will want to determine just how your house did look,
inside and out, when it was built. This can be easy or very difficult,
depending on the house's age and how much it was rebuilt over the years. You
may do it yourself, by seeking the original blueprints, talking to people who
lived in the house when it was new, or learning how to read "clues"
that signal moved walls, changed entryways and porches, bricked-over windows
and the like. Or, you may want to get an architect or professional restorer to
do that work for you. Whichever route you take, do it right: there is nothing
so unfortunate as putting a lot of money into restoration only to find out you
got it wrong. Even if your goal is not a pure restoration, you will want to
make changes on the basis of knowledge: of knowing how it was originally, so
you realize just what you are changing and whether what you plan is
appropriate.
This part of restoration (not the dust and
disorder of rebuilding) can be fun. In doing your research, you will learn a
great deal about your home, the people who lived in it and your neighborhood
and community. That knowledge adds greatly to the pleasure of living in your
Retro-home, because it anchors your life in the earlier time you are seeking to
recapture.
But what if you do live in modern house? Does
respect for its architectural integrity mean you cannot take it Retro? Not
necessarily. Depending on the style of your new house, you may be able to "back
date" it — so long as you do so in ways consistent with its style. For
example, if you live in a new colonial-style house, you can safely make it more
colonial, with changes ranging from the addition of hardwood, broad-board
floors and small-paned windows through appropriate dormers, exterior and
interior doors and shutters to a salt-box addition on the rear. Or, if you live
in a new ranch-style house, you can probably take it back to the 1950s without
creating an architectural mishmash. The key is to understand what your new
house is modelled on—what historic style is reflects —and back date it to
reflect that style more closely. Again, you may research for yourself what that
might mean for your house, or get some professional assistance in doing so.
For both new houses and old, one of the easiest
and least expensive ways to take your home Retro is with paint. Simply painting
your house in colors that would have been used in the time its style
represents— Williamsburg colors for a colonial, or the bright Victorian colors we
see on San Francisco's famous "painted ladies," or white with dark
green trim on a home from the 1920s —can make a big difference in its
Retro-look.
Similarly, changing the landscaping can be
relatively easy and inexpensive, yet make a real difference in whether your
house looks "period." If, for example, you have a colonial house, you
can make it look much more like an actual 18th-century home by planting a
colonial herb garden/kitchen garden, or perhaps by making the back or side yard
into the sort of formal garden 18th-century people liked, a miniature
Versailles with formal beds and hedgerows, even some boxwoods (if you're
patient), a maze or some espaliered fruit trees. For the Victorian look, a rose
garden is perfect, perhaps with a gazebo if you have the space. Heritage
plants, both flowers and vegetables, are now widely available even from major
seed companies like Burpee's and Parks. Batchelor's buttons, cosmos, pansies,
and that staple of the Victorians; viola odorata, the powerfully scented violets
children sold on the street corners, can surround your home with the colors and
fragrances of the 19th century. If you own a 1950s ranch-style, your pride will
show in your perfectly cut, edged, and trimmed, absolutely weedless bluegrass
lawn.
Whether you choose to remodel extensively or
merely paint and landscape, there is probably a long list of actions you can
take to make your present house look Retro —if it was designed from the outset
to reflect an earlier period, and if that period is the one you seek to
recreate. If it is just a generic modern house, with no aspirations to reflect
a past style, or if it is, say, colonial when your interest is Victorian, then
your options are more limited (assuming bad taste is not one of them). But even
in these cases, your situation is not hopeless. We have been talking about how
your house looks from the outside. Now, let's look inside.
RETRO-INTERIORS
There is nothing new about the idea of decorating
a home in the style of an earlier time. At least from the late 19th-century
Arts & Crafts Movement onward, interior furnishings have often hearkened
back to earlier styles. 'Ihe most popular and enduring has been colonial.
What is new is the range of periods for which
furnishings are readily available. Until just a few years ago, colonial was
about all that was available in reproductions. If you wanted Victorian, or
Craftsman, or Art Deco, you had to dig around for antiques (and pay the price).
When it came to finding wallpapers, appropriate paint colors, fabrics and so
on, you were in trouble.
No more. Now, there is a vast selection.
Retroculture has caught on in interior decorating, to the point where you can
find reproductions of almost everything you need for most common earlier
styles. Victorian you will find in lush abundance; Washington, D.C., has a shop
devoted solely to Mission-style reproductions; your local hardware supplier
offers Art Deco bathroom mirrors, light fixtures, and pedestal sinks. The pages
of almost any magazine on home furnishing present wallpapers, tiles, and
fabrics from Victorian through the 1950s. Victoria magazine carries ads for
even the most obscure necessities for late 19th- and early 20th-century living,
e.g., a shop specializing in Victorian silk lampshades ("Shades of the
Past").
There are, however, some ways to be Retro in
furnishing your home that go beyond what the average person might consider.
They reflect the desire of Retro-people to capture as much as possible of the
feel of life in the past, to create in their home a warm, comfortable cocoon
made of memories, of family, and of those who may have lived in that same house
in times gone by.
One way to do this is to decorate your house around
family memories. You can try to recapture the feel of specific places and
people you remember fondly. If you're lucky, you may have some or many family
heirlooms you can feature in your own home. You may even have enough to make a
room or rooms into duplicates of rooms you remember in the house where you grew
up, or that of a favorite aunt or grandparent.
What if you are not among the lucky ones with
heirlooms? The range of reproductions now available, plus what you may find in
the antique stores and the flea markets, can provide you with "instant
heirlooms": pieces that closely or exactly duplicate furniture, wallpaper
patterns, carpets or pictures from homes you remember. Nothing is quite so
rewarding as suddenly spotting the same kind of chair your grandfather used to
sit in, or the type of lamp that hung in the front hall, or the Mail Pouch
Tobacco ad that stood above your grandfather's desk in his store. You have
found again what seemed lost forever — which is what Retroculture is all about.
Here as elsewhere, there are ways to get started
that fit almost any budget. Antiques are too expensive? Then look for
reproductions. Reproductions also cost too much? Hunt in the flea markets,
garage sales, estate auctions and junk shops. Just as with houses, some periods
are less expensive than others. If Victorian is too pricey, or Colonial, begin
with the styles of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Too young to be real antiques,
these "collectibles" can often be found very reasonably—more
reasonably that the cheap but pricey junk, made more often than not of sawdust
or pasteboard, that fills the modern furniture stores.
You can also get a leg up on Retroculture while
keeping costs down by going Retro in some areas most people don't think of. One
such area is appliances. Nothing gives a home that Retro feeling so much as a
kitchen with the classic old-fashioned stove, standing up high on legs, the
oven set above and beside the burners which in turn have a shield behind them
and a shelf (handy for warming plates) above them. If they are gas they almost
never break. The local used appliance place may have a nice selection of old
refrigerators; those from the 1930s and 40s were beautifully made and run
without a murmur for many decades, though of course you do have to defrost
them. Around your Retro kitchen, you can scatter a side-opener toaster, an old
electric mixer, maybe a breadbox rescued from the family attic or picked up for
a few dollars at a garage sale. Don't be afraid of an appliance just because it
is old; remember, old also means simpler, sturdier, and much easier to fix if
it does need some repair. Go by condition when you buy, not age, and you will
be surprised at what you can find that will provide years of dependable
service. You will also be surprised at how convenient many old appliances are
to use: side-opener toasters are perfect for bagels.
Whether in your kitchen or elsewhere, don't worry
if your Retro-home's furnishings have a few modern anachronisms. Unless you are
very lucky, you probably won't find a good old-fashioned dishwasher, because
there were so few of them. So, get a modern one; just put panels on it that
blend with the Retro-colors of your kitchen (cream or yellow with red trim was
big in the 1920s), and it will hardly be noticed. Speakers for your stereo? Put
them in a discreet corner, with perhaps an Art Nouveau lamp on a table near
them to draw the observer's attention to itself. Window air conditioners?
Again, get a color that blends with the walls and curtains, and don't worry
about them. People coming into your home will have so much else to look at that
they will never see them, and you will be so accustomed to them that you won't
either. Remember, ifs the overall effect that counts, and a few unavoidable
anachronisms won't detract from that if you've gone Retro with everything else.
In the Retro-home, the goal is to recapture the
feel of an earlier time, not create a picture for a magazine ad. Those earlier
homes were lived in, not just put on display. As you make your home Retro,
think less of museums and more of your grandmother's house. Grandma or Nana
probably had many things that weren't new and perfect, that showed the use and
wear of ordinary life. She bought her furniture and knick-knacks and mugs over
a period of many years, and they reflected a mixture of styles. She had some
items that may not have been in the most fashionable taste, but she liked them
and they said something about her. Let your own Retro-home be likewise. Make it
so that it is comfortable for you. Don't worry too much about mixing eras; in
the old days, almost everybody did.
RETRO-NEIGHBORHOODS
The doorway to the Retro-home is, ideally, a
time-lock; once you are through it, you are in another era. But wouldn't it be
nice if that time-lock could be positioned a bit further out, at the entrance
to the neighborhood? Depending on where you live or are looking to live, it can
be.
If you are not already settled but are looking
for a home, your search may turn up a Retro-neighborhood in a variety of
places. The most promising is simply an old town. Some towns feel remarkably
untouched by the withering hand of time; put the people on the street back in
straw boaters or long skirts and convert the Nissans into Tin Lizzies and
presto! you're back in 1925. The Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic region and the
Midwest are rich in such towns; in the West, they are somewhat more rare and
likely to be expensive. They are expensive because towns offer what many people
want; a sense of community, a place that is friendly to the pedestrian, not
just the automobile, and buildings that serve a variety of purposes —stores, offices,
and houses — but all work comfortably together.
If you can't find a whole Retro-town, you may
find a Retro-neighborhood within a town, a city, or even a suburb. Often built
in the Victorian era — every town had its "rich row" of great
Victorian houses, where the local grands frontages made their residences—or
between the wars, these neighborhoods, like old towns, retain their characters.
Good luck or that great preserver, poverty, has kept the schlockers at bay, and
it takes little imagination to see them as they were when they were built. In
fact, they may be even nicer now, because the trees have had a chance to grow
big. Today, many residents of such neighborhoods are waking up the value of
what they have and are taking measures to preserve it by zoning, designating
local historic districts, and forming volunteer compacts among the neighbors.
Such activities add further to the old-fashioned nature of the neighborhood by
turning it into a genuine community where people know each other and share a
common interest and purpose.
The key to finding a
Retro-neighborhood is time. If you have to move from Tucson to Cleveland in a
hurry and have two weeks to find a house, your chances of discovering a
Retro-neighborhood are not that great. Unless you already know a great deal
about Cleveland or can find a real estate agent who understands Retroculture,
you are likely to end up in another dreary housing tract. But if you have time
to search around a bit, you will find such Retro-delights as Medina, the
Victorian town mentioned in Chapter I; Hudson, a town seemingly transplanted
from early 19th-century New England; and the part of Lakewood nearest Lake
Erie, a surprisingly affordable neighborhood of magnificent homes built between
1900 and 1940.
It may be wise, if inconvenient in the short run,
to move into temporary quarters for a while and look around for what you really
want— not just your dream Retro-home, but a Retro-neighborhood as well. Get to
know the nooks and crannies of your new city; they will almost certainly offer
some pleasant surprises. Not only will you end up settling in to what you
really want, you may well save a good deal of cash in the bargain. That house
and neighborhood the real estate agent swears can't be had for less than
$200,000 may be available for a fraction of that price, once you know where to
look.
What if you are already settled? What can you do
with the neighborhood you have?
That depends on what it
offers you to work with. If your house is in an older community, you will have
at hand the raw material for a Retro-neighborhood. Just ask yourself, what was
this neighborhood like when it was in its prime? Quickly, in your mind's eye
you will see how the houses looked before the porches were stripped off and the
picture windows went in, and how your street appeared when the tree lawn held
big shade trees and the cars were parked in the alley. Your task, as a pioneer
in Retroculture, is to bring your neighbors around to share that same vision
and join together in bringing it to life.
One of the signs that Retroculture is taking hold
on the American imagination is a growing movement to build new old-fashioned
towns. Nothing offers more hope for our collective future, in terms of the
place we would like to live. These new towns offer more than just houses built
to historic patterns. They offer the integration of houses, open spaces,
streets (designed very much with pedestrians in mind),6 stores, and
places of employment. In these new old towns, you can often walk to the store
or even to work, come home for lunch, stop and talk with neighbors sitting out
on their front porch, and in general live in ways not too different from those
your grandparents knew and enjoyed. Here, the best of the old and the new are
combined, which is just what Retroculture seeks.
6 One sees an echo of this via the "pedestrianization schemes" that
are being
implemented across many European cities. — Editor.
The leaders of this "New Urbanism"
movement are the dynamic husband-and-wife duo we met in our first chapter,
architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the creators of Seaside,
Florida. They argued their case that "the future does not have to be
imagined so much as remembered" in a notable article in the Wilson
Quarterly "The Second Coming of the American Small Town." They note
that:
All of the elements of towns already exist in the
modern American suburb. For various historical reasons, though, they have been improperly
assembled, artificially separated into 'pods' strung along 'collector roads'
intended to speed the flow of traffic... These elements are the makings of a
great cuisine, but they have never been properly combined. It is as if we were
expected to eat, rather than a completed omelet, first the eggs, then the
cheese, and then the green peppers... We believe, quite simply, that all of
these elements should once again be assembled into traditional towns.
For the current unhappy state of affairs, the authors
point the finger of blame at local codes and the planners and traffic engineers
who write them:
In every community, the code is a kind of constitution that lays out the
rules that will order the life of the city, the rules that describe the form of
urbanism that will emerge, just as the American Constitution contains within it
the lineaments of American society. ... [I]n most American communities, it is
quite easy to conclude that the single most important constitutional principle
is that cars must be happy.
In pointing to the codes as the problem, Duany
and Plater-Zyberk also point to a solution: the re-writing Of those codes.
Since Seaside, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed some forty new old towns,
some of which have been built, including Tannin, Alabama, Nance Canyon,
California, and Kentlands, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. If you are moving to
a new area, you might want to see if one of their towns has been built where
you are moving.
RETRO-HOMES IN RETROSPECT
Taking your house Retro is a good starting point
for your Retroculture life. It is not difficult, it need not be expensive if
you use your imagination (and local junk shops and yard sales), and it can be
immensely rewarding. As you create a "nest" that offers the memories,
sense of place and feel of the time you love, you give yourself an ever-present
vacation from the troubles of the present. When you come home at night and take
off your coat, you leave the stress of the job and the commute far behind,
farther than mere geography allows, for you enter a different and gentler era.
As Retroculture catches on more widely, you may be able to push the time
boundary outward still more, to the doorway of your neighborhood. It is a
pleasant prospect, and for those who have already done it, a source of
unceasing refreshment.
Perhaps most important, the Retro-home is the
place where the Retro-family gathers, lives and grows. To that family, the
center of the Retroculture life, let us now turn.
FIGURE 3. American Homes and Gardens, p. 72. (New York: Munn and co, 1905)
CHAPTER V
Retro-Families
PEOPLE SEEKING A RETROCULTURE LIFESTYLE usually
want to surround themselves with things that remind them of the way life used
to be. But Retroculture, at its heart, is not about things. Rather, it is about
the quality of life that Americans used to enjoy. Quality of life may and often
does express itself in things, but things do not of themselves create a
desirable quality of life. If you ask yourself what made your grandparents'
lives better than the life we live now, your answer probably is not their home
or their furniture or the entertainment they enjoyed, though these all may have
been better than what we have now. At the heart of the matter, rather, lie
intangible qualities like community, security, stability, contentment,
togetherness, and love. And at the center of these lies the family.
We need not go on here about the sad state into
which the family has fallen in our own day. The statistics about broken homes,
children born to single parents, and similar signs of family breakdown are
familiar to any newspaper reader. Rather, our purpose here is to talk about how
to build families up again.
Americans instinctively know that a strong family
is good. They also know that in the past, we had strong, healthy families. In a
national survey, 70% of those polled said that family and community life was
better in the past than it is today; only 15% thought it was worse.
Retroculture suggests that since we want strong
families, and we know family life was better in the past than it is today, it
is obvious what we need to do: rediscover and recover the qualities that made
families strong back then. Of course, as in most other areas, we will not
recreate the past exactly. Some things have changed beyond our control. But by
looking at family life in the past, we can learn "new old" ways to
make our families stronger under today's conditions. We can move into the
future armed with the lessons of the past, instead of having to learn those
lessons over again the hard way.
What made families strong in the past? Perhaps
the best way to answer that question is simply to think about your
grandparents. How did they regard and treat each other? What kinds of things
did they do together? How did they get through the crises that have beset
families in every time? (The Great Depression of the 1930s was, after all, no
picnic.)
As in much of Retroculture, family memories are
often the best place to start in recapturing what we want from the past. Nor
must the memories all be happy ones: then as now, families had difficulties
brought on by their own mistakes and by the bad behavior of individual family
members. From these too we can learn, as we watch, for example, how some
members of the family made sacrifices to keep the whole family going in the
face of the failures and weaknesses of others.
We can also learn a great deal about how families
kept themselves strong in earlier times from books. Much of the literature from
our nation's history revolves around family life, because it was so central; it
was much more important than what governments or schools or even churches did.
Novels and stories from the pre-war years, and especially from the 19th
century, offer a vivid and compelling picture of family life. So do popular
magazines of the time. See if your local library has issues of The Saturday
Evening Post, Colliers, or Life magazine from the 1950s; you will find in their
stories a great deal about families.
(Their ads, pictures, and news stories about the
latest products also make them fun reading for anyone interested in
Retroculture.)
From your own family memories and your reading,
you may find it helpful to identify some of the things families used to do,
actions than made them strong. These might include:
• Really sharing their lives. In the past,
the family was not just an economic but also an emotional unit. Problems,
frustrations, unhappiness were shared and thus lessened, just as successes and
joys were shared and thus increased. The family, not the school counselor or
the psychotherapist, was the place people first turned when things went wrong
(or right). When dad got an unexpected raise, he rushed home, gathered up the
family and took them all out to dinner to celebrate. When junior was having
trouble in school, the whole family got involved to help, tutoring him, meeting
with his teachers and the principal, and helping him discipline himself to
study. When mom was overwhelmed with housework, everyone pitched in to share
the load. What we now regard as individual crises or triumphs became family
crises or triumphs, and through this sharing, the family grew strong.
• Families spent a lot of time together.
They gathered every even- ing for family dinner, and usually for family
breakfast as well. In the evenings, in the 1890s or 1920s, they sat together on
the front porch, perhaps with some of the children playing nearby in the yard
or the street. In the 1930s they gathered around the radio. And in the 1950s
the whole family sat down together after dinner to watch Gunsmoke or the The Ed
Sullivan Show. The home was not just a place where people slept, grabbed
something to eat, or dropped their books as they came from school and headed
straight for the mall. It was a place where people really lived together, spent
time together, talked together.
• Family activities, and often family life
at home as well, involved more than mom, dad, and the kids. Almost as important
were grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Holidays and birthdays were
events for the extended family to celebrate together, as of course were such
special times as weddings. There was lots of visiting back and
forth; remember how grandma and grandpa always came to your house Christmas
Eve, then went to your cousins for Christmas Day, making the regular rounds
year by year? Vacations often revolved around visits to aunts and uncles,
especially those who still lived in the country if you were in town. These
activities kept people in touch closely enough that they really knew each other
as individuals, not just as names on cards or letters. Grandparents, uncles,
and aunts could and did play important roles in family crises. When mother got
sick, the family sent to Pennsylvania for Aunt Lula, the family saint (most
families back then had at least one) who always came and knew just what to do.
If one of the children was having a rough time at home, he or she went off to
visit the aunts for some release and recuperation. If in tough economic times
mom and dad both had to work, grandma, not some stranger in a day care center,
took care of the children. Especially through grandparents and great aunts and
uncles, children developed an important sense of who their family was over the
generations —and knew what kinds of things just "weren't done" in
their family. This was a useful anchor and helpful guide in the difficult times
of adolescence and early adulthood.
• The family was the primary school. It
was understood that a child's learning, manners and morals reflected on his
family, and the family, not the public school system, was every child's first
and most important school. Schooling was done in many ways. Lots of homes, not
just those of the wealthy, had good libraries of serious books. The noted
author Russell Kirk speaks of how his grandfather, the owner of a small
restaurant in a Michigan railroad town, introduced him to good reading as a
young boy in the 1920s:
Frank Pierce was the only member of his family ever to have attended a
liberal-arts college — and that for a few months, to study music. But he was a
wise man, self-educated: his bookcases were crammed with sets of Dickens, Mark
Twain, Hugo. He was well read in history, Macaulay particularly. Ridpath's
four-volume Encyclopedia of Universal History, bound in calf, profusely
illustrated, became Russell's introduction to historical consciousness.
Presently his grandfather gave him a copy of Van Loon's Story of Mankind, and
later H.G. Well's Outline of History. Russell would come to sense that the
latter, though so interesting, was quite wrong-headed.
Morals and manners were both subjects for early
and careful education. Children were expected to learn how to behave at the
dinner table, in company with adults, and in public at an early age: the
spoiled, demanding, obnoxious child was not considered "cute" in
those days. Moral instruction was woven into bedtime stories, and was also part
of basic family life: children learned early how to share, to consider the
needs of others (remember, most houses had only one bathroom), and to be
responsible. Regular chores were an early part of family life, and the young
boy's paper route or other job brought welcome income for the whole family; the
money thus earned was not just his. Much of the literature about child-raising
from the Victorian era through the inter-war years emphasized the need for the
home to be the place where children learn the basics of successful life:
self-discipline, modesty, hard work, saving, and the ability to sacrifice
present pleasures for future needs. The home was the school of good citizenship.
From your own memories, you will undoubtedly be
able to add to this list. And it may well be that your family still does many
of these traditional things. But as you reflect on what families used to do,
the ways they grew Strong as families, you may come to realize how much we have
lost. The television — the Devil's babysitter —the computer and cellphone, and
pressure from the modern world to grow up too quickly have undermined family
life, drawing children away from their families long before they are ready to
make sound decisions on their own.
Suppose you want to go Retro in your family life,
to rediscover some of the ways families used to live and thus recover the
strength they used to have. Where can you begin?
The easiest place is with some of the activities
families used to do together. Family dinner is a good place to start. With some
planning, it is not impossible to arrange everyone's schedule so that, at a
certain hour, they are home together for dinner. Allow enough time so everyone
can pitch in and help make dinner, especially if mom works, and so that dinner
is not just a "pit stop" but an hour out of the day for everyone to
catch up on what others are doing. You'll be surprised how much more the days
events mean when you have a regular chance to share them with the rest of the
family in dinner-table conversation. Problems that seemed overwhelming when you
faced them alone become much more manageable once you've shared them with the
rest of the family and gotten their advice and help.
Another good starting place is family activities.
Take the whole family to the beach or the show or on a picnic. Doing things
together that are fun for all allows everyone to relax with each other.
Tensions in the home tend to disappear. Make family activities a regular event,
and watch how the children begin to think in terms of the familfs life instead
of just their own lives.
It is usually up to parents to take the lead in
sharing problems and hardships. But once the kids hear mom and dad doing it,
they will become comfortable with it also. Too often, children nowadays seem to
fear bringing problems to their parents, and it shouldn't be that way. A
supportive, caring family makes the very real problems of growing up much more
bearable. And mom and dad, in turn, can often find the children willing and
able to pitch in and help when they are under too much stress from the job or
the growing mountain of bills. Sharing difficulties builds strong families at
least as much as sharing pleasures.
In fact, the notion of sharing burdens was
fundamental in old-fashioned families. Ifs still a good idea. Right from the
time they were toddlers, kids used to have chores. Maybe it was nothing more
than slicing the bread before dinner, but the child still came to understand
early that a family is a joint enterprise. Children respond well to this,
because it gives them importance in their own eyes. As they grow, they take on
ever-greater responsibilities — and learn personal responsibility in the
process. Because their family is something in which they have a personal
investment, it means more to them. And because it is a place where their labor
and voice are needed and respected, they do not have to "find
themselves" among their peers.
These are all Retro things families can do to
begin coming together again. But Retroculture offers more than that. It is
itself something families can do together. Taking your home and your family
life Retro can be a shared enterprise.
Kids like to be on the cutting edge of fashion,
and in the 21st century, that's Retroculture. They can and will take
pleasure in being the first on their block to go Retro. There are lots of ways
you can involve them. Some kids may share their parents' interest in taking the
house Retro. If one of the children is approaching driving age and you are
looking for a car, get a Retro "project car" and make its restoration
a family project (an air-cooled VW Beetle is a good choice, or perhaps
something from the 1950s; if you look in the "Antiques and Classics"
column of your local paper's classified ads, you will find some cars from the
50s can be bought inexpensively).
The key to making Retroculture a shared family
activity is to let each person take the lead in what he or she is most
interested in. Perhaps a son is interested in architecture: let him research
the architectural history of the house and take the lead in determining what is
needed to restore it. Or maybe a daughter is interested in clothes and sewing:
let her be in charge of taking the family's sense of clothing style Retro. If
mom's interest is local history, she can anchor the house and the family's life
in "how the town used to be." If each member of the family can be the
leader in his or her particular favorite part of Retroculture, each comes to depend
on the other while at the same time being the "recognized authority"
in his or her own special field. For children, an opportunity to serve as a
leader in the family is especially important; it is another example of the
family's role as the prime educator.
Two areas of study are especially helpful and
interesting in enabling a family to go Retro. first, which we have touched on,
is local history. If you live in an older community, your neighborhood and town
have a history all their own. The more you learn of it, the more interesting
your local life will be. Why was your community founded, and what was its
original role for the people who lived there? Why has it developed as it has?
What was that old house down at the crossroads — an inn, perhaps, with a turnpike
tollhouse across from it where you can still find remains of a foundation?
Where did the interurban electric trolley line run, and how did it change your
town when it arrived in the 1890s? Just learning what your town, neighborhood
and street looked like in various times past can make your present life there
more meaningful. Perhaps your community already has a local historical society,
maybe with a small museum; if so, joining it is an excellent way to learn about
"your" history. If not, why not start one?
Similarly, a great way to get in touch with your
past is family history. You might start with genealogy: who were your
ancestors, where did they come from and what did they do? Oral history is also
useful here: ask your older family members to recall their childhoods, their
parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and record their answers for future
generations. The furniture and other heirlooms you may possess all have their
histories: find out who owned them and see what their stories are. Some of the
houses your family used to live in may still be standing; go see them, and take
the kids. Often, the people who live there now are happy to let you tour the
house and share your knowledge and memories of it with them.
Discovering your family’s own history makes
Retroculture personal. Your children will find the Victorian era all the more
interesting when they look at it through the lens of their great or
great-great-grandparents' lives. As those ancestors become real to them through
family history, they will knit the family together across time. The way those
earlier members of your family lived, their values, beliefs, religious faith,
hard work, and even eccentricities, all offer useful lessons and often models
for the Retro-family today. They provide a stabilizing influence, one that can
contest against the message of instant gratification preached by social media
and today's materialist culture.
Recovering the past in your family's life is the
heart of Retroculture for the family. These ideas offer some ways to help start
that process. Now, let's take a look at some of the specific ideas the past
suggests about the things families do: about life in a Retroculture family.
STARTING A RETROCULTURE FAMILY: DATING
Many young people who are dating do not seem to
think of it in terms of starting a family. Since the "sexual
revolution" of the 1960s, dating has looked, not toward the future family,
but to immediate gratification: sex. Dating has become a game of conquest,
"hooking up," with a "successful" date (at least from the
male's perspective) being one where the couple "went all the way."
The result has been an attack on men and the sad degradation (especially of
women) from the gentle art of courtship and wooing to something little
different from animals in rut.
Retroculture people look at dating differently.
In the past we seek to recapture, dating was part of an unhurried, innocent and
entertaining process in which young people gradually got to know those of the
opposite sex as people, and, in the process, grew in maturity and refinement
into adults. They key to this process of growth and maturation was a simple but
firm rule, of the sort our grandparents called "morals:" you don't
"go all the way" on a date.
The old moral rule is even more important in our
time. The nasty fact is, in the face of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs),
there is no such thing as "safe sex" outside marriage. The various
devices that supposedly promise safety don't: they fail much too often. The
only real safety lies in returning to the old rule against casual sex.
To Retroculture people, STDs are a frightening
argument against "free love," as our forefathers called it, but by no
means the only argument. As the sad wreckage around us argues plaintively,
casual sex, sex outside a long-term, loving relationship sanctified by
marriage, leads not to happiness but to lonely, self-centered misery. The
children of the sexual revolution, those who came to see sex as the purpose of
a relationship, are now finding themselves in a dreary old age, the victims of
failed marriages and unhappy liaisons. They never went through the process of
growth and maturation dating used to bring: it all happened too fast. The
"triumphs" of sexual conquest they celebrated as college students left
them unable to see the opposite sex as people, only as objects. With no
commitment to marriage as an institution, it too became a temporary
arrangement, leaving only divorce and loneliness in its wake. Not for them the
stable, contented later life they saw their grandparents live: the bright fire
of desire easily requited has left only ashes.
Those old-fashioned morals our grandparents
believed in reflected what men and women had learned about themselves and each
other over countless generations. Retroculture seeks to recapture that wisdom
and its fruits of enduring, emotionally satisfying relationships, by starting
right. Dating, in Retroculture life, is not about "quickie" sex. It
is about getting to know people of the opposite sex as people. That takes time
and experience. It takes the kinds of innocent entertainments our parents and
their parents enjoyed: dances and parties (chaperoned), picnics and
Sunday-school outings, going to dinner at the boyfriend's or girlfriend's
house, (family involvement, not family exclusion, should be the rule), rides in
the country and days on a sailboat. It also takes rules, firmly enforced:
Retro-people do not allow "sleeping over," and if a young lady comes
home late, she can expect momma and poppa waiting at the door for an
explanation.
If, by returning to the old rules and the old
ways, we can give young people today some time, if we can take some of the
pressure off them, they can grow and mature just as their forebears did. As
they do so, as they learn to understand Other people in ways more than
skin-deep, they too will be able to find someone who can mean much more to them
than a one-night stand. They too can experience that magic moment when they
realize, "This is someone with whom I would like to spend the rest of my
life."
MARRYING
In the past, marriage was usually the most
important voluntary event in a person's life. Why? Because life forever after
was irrevocably different. Just as with the involuntary events of birth and
death, there was no going back; marriage was indeed '"til death do us
part." Divorce was legally difficult and also a great scandal; a divorced
person was simply "not received" in good society.
Now, of course, divorce is legally easy in most
places and seldom carries a social stigma. But that need not keep Retroculture
people from sharing our ancestors' deep commitment to the institution of
marriage. Like them, we may regard marriage as a lifetime commitment, something
entered into carefully and solemnly, and, once done, done for life. A number of
modern studies of marriage have all come to the same conclusion: marriages
succeed when both the husband and the wife have a strong commitment, not only
to each other, but to the institution of marriage as well.
A personal resolution to regard marriage as
sacred and indissoluble, as all society regarded it in our great-grandparents'
day, leads us to see wisdom in another of their practices: long engagements. To
select wisely in choosing a partner for life, you need to know the party in
question very, very well. That takes time, time offered by a long engagement.
Here as elsewhere, modern society emphasizes speed, pressure, and getting it
done. Retroculture, looking to the past, counsels patience, restraint, and
taking the long view. By the time you reach your Golden Anniversary, those
extra months or even years you put into getting to know each other before you
married will look like a very good investment, one that has paid many happy
dividends.
Part of the reason people used to have long
engagements was to help them look beyond "being in love." Fiery
passions burn bright, but as our ancestors were warned in many of the novels
that used to be popular, they may also burn briefly. An enduring marriage is
built on more than romantic passion; it takes shared interests, compatible
personalities, a mutually agreeable division of duties, and all the other
things that only time discovers. The Amish, those Ur-practitioners of
Retroculture, have a saying, "Kissing fades, cooking don't." When was
the last time you heard of an Amish divorce?
Most Retroculture people will want a church
wedding. Nowadays, with many churches, you can pretty much just walk in and get
married. In the old days, it wasn't quite like that. The church required that
those who wanted to get married spend some time studying marriage and coming to
understand the awesome commitment it entails. Churches had regular programs to
prepare people for marriage, involving reading, discussions with the minister,
and prayerful consideration of just what it was they were about to do. Some
churches have kept this practice, or would be happy to revive it on request. It
is something Retroculture people will want to consider. Like a long engagement,
it is a small investment with potentially great returns. And it brings into the
marriage from the outset someone who will later be needed to make it a happy
and lasting one: God.
When, finally, after due and careful preparation,
the great day of the wedding arrives, Retroculture says: do it right. Life's
greatest moment deserves pulling out all the stops. Make it a great Victorian
wedding, with a dress future generations will treasure, bridesmaids and flower
girls, "The Wedding March" from Tannhaüser— the works. After all,
you're only going to do it once. Make it truly a day to remember. More than any
other, it is the first day of the rest of your life.
Today as in the past, most married couples are
going to want children. But when they come, the new family faces a question
most families did not face in the recent past: should mom stay home with the
kids or continue to work? The question is not an easy one. Economic and social
pressures combine to keep mom at work, with the kids farmed out to daycare.
But Retroculture has an important message here:
you simply can't "do it all." Those countless past generations who
understood that the kids needed mom at home were right. They reflected once
again the wisdom of the ages, what people have learned about themselves over
time. Children deprived of a mother's constant care too often grow up badly,
and a mother who tries to be both an adequate mom and a career woman stretches
herself beyond what mortal flesh can bear. Nature's law is writ in stone: dad
is the provider, and mom is mom. The price of any other arrangement is usually
high, for all concerned.
It may surprise some people to learn that this is
not the first time we have faced a society and an economy that pressured
mothers to join the workforce. When the industrial revolution began in the
late-18th century, whole families—children as well as mother and
father — were often pressed by economic need to go into the factories. The
Victorians, people of sound morals and high purpose, came to see that this was
wrong. It wrecked families, destroyed childhood and fed widespread social problems.
One of the most important social movements of the Victorian age was the crusade
for a "family wage" — a wage adequate for the man of the house to
support his family. By the latter part of the 19th century, the
family wage was general, and the pattern we know from our own families' history
was the norm: father went to work and the mother and children stayed home.
In recent decades, we have lost much of what the
Victorians achieved (and not only the family wage). But the basic fact they
understood remains true: kids need mom at home and, in turn, mom needs to be
home with the kids. Just as they need her constant attention and instruction to
grow into useful, productive citizens, she needs time to attend and instruct
them, so as to be the mother she wants to be. So the matter comes down to this:
how can we live as a family should on one income?
Fortunately, Retroculture also has an answer to
this question, an answer from the past: make do with fewer things. Americans
used to take pride in "making do," in having a good, solid family life
even when there was little money. Everyone contributed to the effort to
economize, and all the little efforts added up. A family can make do with a
small house, as we noted in the last chapter. It can make do with one car in
most cases, if pop will take public transportation to work (just like granddad
took the streetcar). Clothes can be passed from one child to the next as they
grow. Not every dinner must include expensive meat (and some meatless meals
will help the family's health). One phone, one
television (or perhaps better none with children in the house), are enough.
Kids do not need smartphones or videogames. After all, most people lived like
this until the great boom after World War Il, and it doesn't seem to have hurt
them. In fact, since "making do" was a shared family enterprise, it
helped make families stronger and taught children responsibility. It can do the
same today.
A Congregational minister, Charlie Luckey, used
to say, "We are commanded to love people and use things, not the other way
around." In the last few decades, too many people have come to love
things. The family is the best place to start setting our priorities straight
again. If we love people and use things, we will find that a family can get by
with fewer things while providing the time for love, especially the love of a
mother for her children. Far better for a family that there be only one car in
the garage, and that perhaps an old one, but that mother be home with and for
her children. Our grandparents managed that on less income than most of us,
even in the straightened middle class, have today. By living with the same
sense of economy and making do they had, we can too.
RETROCULTURE AND SCHOOL
As we have said before, from a Retroculture standpoint,
the first and most important school for all children is their family. From the
child's earliest months on, he or she is learning. In the past, parents were
careful about what their young children learned. They saw to it that stories
taught sound morals; that good conduct was rewarded and bad swiftly though
fairly punished; and that manners were inculcated right from the outset. They
were careful to exclude bad influences on their children — then other children
with bad behavior, now more the television, internet, videogames and other
degraded forms of "entertainment." At the same time, they labored to
provide good influences: toys that encouraged creativity (remember Erector Sets
and Lincoln Logs?)7, helped establish gender identity (dollhouses for girls, toy trains for
boys) and taught reasoning (games and puzzles); playmates whose families also
taught good manners and morals; and, very importantly, the regular company of
adults, not just other kids. Often, grandmothers, aunts, or even family friends
became what we might now call "mentors"
to young children, taking them along on adult activities like shopping or
eating out, letting them help in the kitchen, and confronting them, lovingly,
with expectations of adult-like behavior. The understanding was common in times
past that children could play and have fun like children, yet at the same time
demonstrate "grown up" behavior in the company of adults. As, indeed,
they can.
7 These were both toy sets made from metal and wood respectively, with which one
could construct various miniature buildings, forts, etc. Both were
invented between 1912 and 1920.
Education in the family did not stop when the
child began formal schooling. The family continued to encourage development of
the mind, through such acts as subscribing to good magazines, buying good
books, and taking family outings to places like the art museum and local
historical sites. Equally, it continued to help form the child's character,
through work that contributed to the family, attendance at church and Sunday
School, and an insistence on observing such values as honesty, self-sacrifice,
and respect for elders within the family. Retroculture families will want to
consider doing these or similar kinds of things today. As Retroculture always
reminds us, what worked then can work now. By seeing the family as the first
and most important school, we can help our own children grow into the solid
citizens we want them to be— and that our country needs, now more than ever.
But when we talk about education, we must also
face an unhappy difference between our situation today and that our parents and
grandparents faced. Then, when children reached school age, we could send them
off to the public schools with confidence that the sound lessons and values
they learned at home would be built upon by the school. Sadly, that is no
longer true. Over the past fifty years, many public school systems have
virtually collapsed. In 1960, the main problems in schools were talking in
class and running in the hall; in the early 21st century, they may well
be drugs, guns, and murder. Even in schools without outright crime, discipline
has often broken down, effective teaching has been sacrificed to the latest
educational theories, and students face the prospect of graduating without
knowing how to read, reason, or do mathematics competently. If values are
taught at all, they are not the solid, old values our grandparents learned from
their McGuffy readers, but values like "diversity," that do little to
teach children how to behave. Conduct and character are not considered to be
part of a "modern" education.
What is a Retro parent to do? The answer is, look
for a Retro school. Look for a school that teaches reading through phonics and
math without calculators, that grades on conduct and character development, and
that promptly expels students who disrupt school discipline. In other words,
look for a good 1950s school.
Sometimes, you may have to move to a new school
district. Or, you may be able to work with other parents to move your school
board in the Retro direction. In some states, like Minnesota, you can send your
child to whatever public school you choose, regardless of where you live. This
"choice in education" policy is spreading; you might want to help it
along in your state and city.
Another option is schools run by churches. Often,
the most Retro schools are the local Catholic schools, and many parents who
aren't Catholic or even religious send their children there because of the
discipline, the dedicated teachers, and the solid, old-fashioned instruction. Protestant churches too sometimes have good schools attached
to them. And some communities have private day or boarding schools not
connected with churches that maintain the old standards. All these schools cost
money, of course. But from a Retroculture standpoint, nothing is more important
than your children's future. Do what many of our grandparents did, especially
those who came to this country as poor immigrants: tighten the family's belt an extra
notch and use the money to give the kids the best possible education. That
old-fashioned family attitude toward education is what got many of our nation's
most successful men and women their start in life.
Increasingly, there is another option of special
interest to Retroculture people: home schooling. More and more mothers are
teaching their children at home. It didn't used to be legal, but now it is in a
growing number of states. A regular homeschooling movement has grown up, with
special courses and textbooks that teach mothers how to instruct their children
along traditional lines. Through homeschooling, the Retro family can be sure
that its values and standards continue to shape their children as they learn
academic subjects. The home school can actually use the old textbooks, like
McGuffy readers. It can introduce children to classic literature for kids, from
Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit through Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff Courier of
the Tsar, instead of the insipid "readers" used in most public
schools. Home schooling is another benefit made possible if mom stays home with
the children instead of going into the workplace—an extra dividend that makes
the economic sacrifice involved all the more worthwhile.
As Retroculture grows and spreads and old
standards are revived, the public schools may be able to become again what they
once were, good, sound schools where parents can send their children without
fear. In the meantime, Retro-families do face a challenge when it comes to
finding a good school. But here as elsewhere, families grow stronger when they
face and master challenges together. The sacrifices involved help the family
become closer, as mother, father and children all work together in the same
cause, the cause of recovering the good things we used to have.
THE RETRO-FAMILY AND CHURCH
Generally, Retro-families will want to go to
church or synagogue. Of course, you don't have to be religious to adopt a
Retroculture lifestyle. But it is a fact that religious belief and regular
worship played large roles in the lives of most Americans through most of our
history. It is difficult to understand the Victorians, for example, without
realizing how important the church was for them. The strength of their
families, their high moral purpose and their reforming zeal were intimately
bound up with their religious beliefs and observances.
Even if you are not personally religious, you may
want to give some thought to attending church. Church provides a time when we
can renew our moral purpose, reflect seriously on our lives, and get some sound
ideas on self-improvement. It brings the family together on a regular basis,
week by week, in an atmosphere conducive to love, commitment, and the spirit of
service to others families need to be strong. It ties us together with our
forefathers in ways nothing else can. As we sing the same hymns they sang,
experience the same emotions, and remember them praying perhaps in the very
same church, we truly share a portion of their lives. We are engaging in what
was, for many of them, the most important and meaningful action they took. It
is easy to imagine them right there beside us... as, perhaps, they are.
Retroculture urges us not to be afraid of
religious feelings. Often, the modern world presents religion almost as
something evil or dangerous, a force that will make us narrow and mean. But if
we just think of our own grandparents, who were probably believers and
churchgoers, we see that is not so. They and their friends and neighbors,
church members all, were kind, decent people. And they would have been the
first to tell us that they owed many of their good qualities to what they heard
in church. So even if you are not yourself religious, don't be afraid to go to
church. It won't hurt you. And if, as you attend, you find your own religious
feelings growing, let them.
If you are already a religious believer,
Retroculture also has a message from the past for you. Go to church regularly,
every Sunday, not just now and then. Many modern church members go on
Christmas, Easter, and perhaps now and then the rest of the year. Our ancestors
took their religious faith more seriously. They made their church a major part
of their lives. They went every Sunday, they involved themselves in other
church activities, they often made heavy financial sacrifices for their church
(just look at the churches they built in your community; they weren't cheap!),
and they often had home religious observances, morning or evening prayer and
grace before meals, as well.
As the Bible says, "Go thou and do
likewise." Church can only play the same role in our lives and in the
lives of our families that it played for our forefathers if our commitment to
it matches theirs.
The church can also help strengthen the
Retro-family because a church is a family. It is a gathering of people who
share some very important views. That gives members of a church a wide common
ground, a basis on which they can comfortably interact with each other. Sunday
school, the church Women's League, Bible study groups, altar guilds, church
suppers and picnics all offer your family a chance to get together with other
families with whom you have a lot in common. Part of that common belief in
almost all churches is a strong belief in the family itself. When your family
is in trouble, the other families in your church are there to help. When your
family wants to celebrate, they are happy to join in. And when you want a safe,
healthy environment for your children to play and learn in, you can find it in
your church, because the other families there share your beliefs and moral
values.
As a Retro-family, you may want to go beyond
belonging to just any church; you may want to find a Retro-church. In recent
years, many churches have drifted away from traditional theology and rites of
worship. In the process, they have lost much of the old beauty of worship
services and the power of traditional belief to help troubled souls.
Fortunately, Retro-churches are not too hard to find. Some churches, such as
those of Protestant Evangelicals, emphasize the "old time religion"
just as it was preached to our grandparents and great-grandparents. In
denominations like the Episcopalians that have jettisoned much of their
beautiful traditional liturgy in recent years, along with traditional Christian
theology, "continuing Churches" such as the Anglican Catholic Church
still offer the old truths and church services. Some Catholic churches are
again offering a Latin mass, with the Vatican's approval, and Eastern Orthodox
churches have remained almost unchanged in belief and worship for a thousand
years and more. If you are looking for a church where you can believe and
worship the same way your ancestors did, you will probably be able to find one
somewhere in your community.
In these troubled times, church is the first line
of defense for the Retro-family. It is dedicated to the things families most
need and want: sound moral values, good personal behavior, and strong belief in
the importance of the family itself. If offers a place of refuge and shelter
from the stress, rudeness, immorality and even danger that now beset our lives.
Through the church, you can find a safe and wholesome setting for your family
to grow, a community you can feel comfortable in. Take the advice your grandparents
would certainly give you, and take your family to church.
LIVING THE RETRO LIFE ALONE
You don't have to have a family to live a
Retroculture life. Just as the past offers useful patterns for a family to
follow, so it offers the same to the single person. The Victorian bachelor, the
maiden aunt, the spinster schoolteacher, all have something to say to today's
single person.
The lives of single people in
the past differed in some important ways from the single lifestyle that has
become fashionable since the mid-1960s. In recent times, the single life has
become identified with the "swinger," a person who lives largely for
immediate pleasure. The advantages of being single are usually presented in
terms of materialism, consumerism, and sexual "liberation." The
single man or woman is seen to have more money to spend on themselves— fancy
sports cars (no need for a van to haul the kids around), a luxurious apartment
(no need for a yard for kids to play in), and vacations at Club Med (no need to
save to put kids through college). They are also seen as free from the moral
bonds of family, so they can "play around" with casual liaisons,
cruise singles bars and "enjoy" an endless series of short-term
relationships.
When this vision of single living was put forward
in the 1960s as the "Playboy philosophy," many people found it
attractive. And for a short time, it was. But as a philosophy of life, it left
out one important fact: the aging process. As the playboys and playgirls of the
1960s hit their forties, then their fifties, they discovered that what works
when you're young doesn't work well at all when you get old. Now, they find
those short-term relationships hard to come by; it seems the other people in
the singles bars want someone in their twenties, not their sixties. The sports
car feels increasingly uncomfortable, the "bachelor pad" silently
mocks the lonely nights, and wandering around the beach in a bathing suit
brings more pitying than admiring looks.
When we think back to the single people of our grandparents'
generation that we knew, we remember something different. Middle and old age
seemed to sit comfortably on them. weren't washed up at fifty. Their lives seem
to have been built on something more solid than the foxfire of "eternal
youth." What did they do differently that enabled them to live satisfying
single lives?
One of the most important differences is that
single people in the past usually dedicated their lives to service, not to
personal pleasure. The Victorian bachelor was often dedicated to public
service, in the diplomatic corps, the military, or as a political reformer.
Many also built their lives around service as educators; university professors
and serious writers were often bachelors. Others were artists, or explorers, or
inventors. There were bachelor farmers, dedicated to their land, and bachelor craftsmen,
their lives devoted to excellence in their craft.
The same was true of single women. One of the
images of the past that most readily comes to mind is of the spinster
schoolteacher. Much of our traditional (and now lost) excellence in public education
was due to single women who as teachers devoted their lives to their pupils.
And what splendid teachers they often were! Living on but small salary, they
had little to spend but themselves. But of that they gave freely and
bounteously. How many Americans now in their middle and later years remember
their "Miss Canfield,"8 to whom they owe their ability to read easily and with
pleasure or figure more quickly in their head than their grandchildren can on a
calculator. Nor was schoolteacher the only position in which single women
served importantly. The school or town nurse everyone depended on, the
librarian who personally knew the merits of each book in her library, the woman
who for decades ran the excellent local hotel dining room, all these were important
members of their community.
8 A fictional character from the US sitcom Leave it to Beaver, which ran from
1957 to 1963, Miss Canfield was a young, pretty schoolteacher, whose name
became a by-word for the archetypal caring teacher.
Unlike a life built on pleasure, a life built on
service gets richer, not poorer, with age. Gradually the gratifying results of
labor become evident: pupils return as well-educated men and women, leaders of
the town; books are written that revolutionize their field and make their
author famous; battles are won, treaties are written, a farm's land grows lush
from tender care. The years bring the satisfaction of purposes accomplished and
well-earned honors bestowed.
This, then, is the first word
Retroculture speaks to single men and women today: service. Service, not self,
is the basis of a full, satisfying single life. The Victorians were right and
Hugh Hefner was wrong. The playboy becomes the sad and lonely aging man, a
figure of pity or of fun. The faithful servant, of his or her nation,
community, workplace, or family, grows in stature and honor and satisfaction
with the years. On such is a solid and rewarding single life built.
Through service, the Retroculture single person
does not live alone. He or she may have their own dwelling, but their lives are
closely enmeshed with the lives of their family, colleagues and neighbors.
Often, as aunts and uncles, single people in the past were important, active
members of their family. They helped out when brothers or sisters were sick.
They took care of nieces and nephews who needed care their homes could not
offer. They paid the bills of family thrown out of work and put other family
members through college. They regularly and frequently visited and were visited
by their extended family.
Similarly, their service in their workplace and
community ensured they did not live alone. Honored where they worked, their
colleagues and others in their profession sought their company. They were busy
in evenings on church and neighborhood committees. They were the backbone of
community volunteer efforts. They served, because they had the time, as
aldermen and vestrymen and Red Cross chairwomen.
Retroculture recommends single people today
revive that old tradition of service to family and
community. There are lots of people out there who need your help. Far better
and more rewarding an evening with the hospital volunteers or the neighborhood
association than one spent cruising bars. In return, you will find your life
filled with the lives of others.
Retroculture's suggestion that the single person
orient their life toward service, rather than self, points to another major
difference between the playboy and the single person of the past. The playboy follows very different morals from the family man. In contrast, the single
man or woman of the past followed the same moral code as married people. That
made them acceptable, compatible members of their family and community. They didn't
live much differently from other people.
By living a life similar to that of married
people, the Retroculture single person today can integrate himself or herself
into family and community. One possibility to think about that is helpful in
doing this is owning a house. A house anchors a person. Working in the garden,
keeping the house up (or restoring a neglected older house), cooperating
actively with the neighbors to keep the community safe and orderly, all provide
healthy and rewarding alternatives to the life of the "swinger." They
tie the single person in with other people who are living solid, moral lives.
(And, of course, involvement in the church is especially helpful.) All these
provide an active social life that is not focused on youth, beauty and sex, the
false lures of the single life. They tie the single man or woman into the
shared values of the community, instead of cutting them off.
And Retroculture itself has a great deal of value
to offer the single person. The Retroculture life is oriented not toward what
can appear a bleak future, where age is the unbeatable foe, but toward a rich
past that never loses its richness. Family history allows the family to grow
rather than shrink with time. The greater resources which often accompany being
single can create real wealth when devoted to restoration and preservation.
Local history anchors the single person in the community and makes them a
sought-after resource. Single people are well positioned to be pioneers of
Retroculture, helping those around them to see the good in looking toward the
past for guidance and also showing them where and how to find it.
RETROCULTURE AND YOUR LIFE
As this chapter suggests, whether you are single
or married, Retroculture offers you more than just outward appearances. The
past Retroculture seeks to recapture was not made simply out of Victorian
houses and hats. The morals, values, and ways of living our forefathers
followed, not just things, were what gave them solid, rewarding, happy lives.
Retroculture seeks to recapture those old-fashioned ways of believing and
behaving just as much as it seeks Victorian homes or safe, well-ordered 1950s
suburbs. In fact, it is the need to get back to these basics of the good life
that is the real reason Retroculture is growing.
FIGURE 4. Gibson Girls.
(Source: Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson, c. 1900)
CHAPTER VI
Retro-Clothing
THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT IN THE PAST, people
dressed better than they do today. What could be more elegant than men's dress
of the 18th century, with richly colored waistcoats, knee-breeches
and high silk stockings, all topped off with a powdered wig? Or, for women,
what could surpass the "Gibson Girl"9 of the late-19th and
early-20th centuries, the time of tiny waists and enormous hats,
flowing dresses and flowing tresses?
9 A "Gibson Girl" was a personification of the fashion ideals from
the late-19th and early-20th centuries, created by artist
Charles Dana Gibson. She would be dressed in the latest fashions, and was
depicted as calm, independent and beautiful. Such was her popularity that she
appeared on numerous pieces of merchandise. She fell from favor with the
arrival of more practical fashions during World War I, rather than the dresses,
bustle gowns and shirtwaists favored by the Gibson Girl. — Editor.
But recognizing the beauty of earlier clothing
styles is one thing; wanting to wear them is something else again. Let's face
it, clothing of earlier eras was not overly convenient. Powdered wigs and high
neckstocks, corsets and bustles, veils and petticoats, top hats and spats all
took a considerable amount of time to dress in and were not always comfortable.
Few ladies will look forward to being laced so tightly into stays that they are
prone to fainting, and few gentlemen will have the time to make a proper
Edwardian toilette every morning.
Therefore, Retro-clothing is
something of a specialized interest even among Retro-people.
At the same time, many people would like to be
able to recapture some of the elegance, style, and panache of dress in earlier
times. We look at a picture of the way "downtown" looked in the 1930s
and we notice what a difference clothing made. The men are mostly in stylish
suits, often double-breasted, and every one of them is wearing a hat of some
sort; no jogging suits or cut-off jeans here. Women are in dresses, pumps,
hats, and often gloves. They make the whole town look better, and they look
better themselves — better, we must admit, than we often look when we go
downtown. Nowadays people even wear blue jeans and tee shirts to church, for
Heaven’s sake! Surely, there must be a way to dress ourselves and our
communities up a bit without being uncomfortable, taking hours to dress or
spending a fortune on our wardrobes.
Well, there is. In fact, there are several ways.
They do not go to extremes, they do not make you stand out in ways you’d rather
not, and they don't cost a fortune either. They do draw on the past, like all
Retroculture, to give a "feel" of style, of care with how one
appears, and a bit of the grace we wistfully admire in those wonderful old
photos.
DRESSING UP
An easy place to start in dressing Retro is with the
old-fashioned notion of "dressing up." It is perfectly all right to
wear grubby old things, sweatshirts and cut-offs and tennis shoes and the like,
to work in the garden, clean the house, wash the car, and even run down to the
7—11 for a quart of milk when you've run out. But when ifs time to go downtown,
or out to lunch, or even down to the mall to shop, perhaps it's time to stop a
moment and take a quick look in the mirror. If you had to ask someone for
directions, would they think they were being approached by a street person
looking for a handout? If so, ask yourself another question: Is this one of
those cases where mom or dad or nana would have dressed up a bit before leaving
the house? If the answer is yes, you may want to do likewise. Dressing up need
not involve suits or pumps or dresses; just do as most Europeans do and slip on
a jacket if you're a man, or perhaps, if you're a woman, a skirt and sandals
instead of sweat pants and jogging shoes.
Dressing up, which really just means dressing for
the occasion, is one of those nice old notions we somehow lost in the last
sixty years. It doesn't take special clothes or a great deal of time, just a
bit of forethought about where you are going and how you yourself, by the way
you dress, might brighten that place up a bit. Our grandparents too wore their
grubbies around the house; remember how granddad always took his white shirt
off when he got home and, at least on hot summer evenings, sat on the porch in
his undershirt? The difference is, he would not have gone into town that way.
That's really all dressing up means. It's one of the easiest ways to revive old
ideas about style.
THE RETRO LOOK
As we've said before, there is no
"correct" period for Retroculture; any time before the 1960s, when
everything fell apart, counts as Retro. When it comes to clothing, however,
most people who want to dress Retro will probably look toward the 1930s, 40s
and 50s. This may apply even to Retro people whose own period is earlier than
those years. Finding or making clothes that reflect the Edwardian, Victorian,
or Colonial eras is a highly-specialized interest—one, to be sure, some folks
will want to pursue, and we'll talk about it a bit further on. But clothes from
those eras do require a special effort to find, they are not always terribly
practical (Gibson Girls did not have to fit in Honda Civics), and they may make
you stand out in the crowd more than you really care to.
Yet at the same time, you would like to distance
yourself from the general modern slovenliness. You would like to look Retro
without going to extremes and without being impractical. How to do it? The clothes from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s offer a perfect answer. They are not
that different from what people are wearing today— in fact some are rapidly coming
back into fashion. They are practical and comfortable. And no one is likely to
think you are on your way to a costume ball. You can wear them to the office,
to church, on a picnic or to school. Wherever you do wear them, you will let
people know, in a subtle and gracious way, that you are one of those happy
souls who look to the past for their future.
In clothing as in everything, Retroculture people
are not spend- thrifts. Dressing Retro does not mean throwing away your current
wardrobe and spending a bundle on lots of new expensive clothes. Rather, the
goal is the general look and feel of older times, particularly the years
stretching from the 1930s through the 50s. If you think of clothing from those
years as a generalized "Retro Look," you will see there's a great
deal you can do to create that look without spending a fortune. Lees examine
some of them.
NEW OLD CLOTHES
Every now and then, we all have to buy some new
clothes. (If we're men, we usually hate it, but we're getting that "get
away from me you bum" look on the Metro and it's time.) From the
Retroculture view-point, the nice news is that more and more new clothes look
like they were made in the 1930s, 40s or 50s. Just look through some of the
style magazines: the ads show men in brown or tan double-breasted suits,
sometimes with two-toned shoes, floral ties, and, yes, even hats again (that
hole in the ozone layer is getting quite a few people thinking about hats).
Women —when discussing Retroculture, we may speak of Ladies—are also wearing
hats, nice big straw hats for summer, and they are carrying small purses too
("the ladylike handbag," says Vogue). The "Spring Ensemble"
is back, especially for young women. Lanz advertises the floral print dress as
"An American Classic."
When you have to get new clothes anyway, why not
get these new old clothes? 'Ihey don't cost more than any other new clothes and
they put you at the leading edge of fashion at the same time they are old
fashioned. What more could a Retro-person ask for?
That's fine for when we want to dress up, you
might say, but what about casual clothes? Are those going Retro too? Here,
Retroculture has a little trick to play, one that serves the fine old
Retro-virtue of frugality. In the past, people didn't dress as casually as they
do today. In the 1930s, for example, casual dress meant a sport coat, perhaps
worn with a turtleneck instead of a shirt and tie, or a blouse and skirt
instead of a dress. You can save some pennies for your old-fashioned piggy bank
if you do the same, simply by taking dress clothes that are a bit too far past
their best for church or work and making them your casual clothes.
Men's sport coats and slacks, or even jackets and
pants from a suit (depending on the suit, of course) that aren't quite good
enough for the office any more will make you look dressed up indeed (and very
Retro) for a walk in the country or a trip into town to shop. You needn't worry
about getting your "good" clothes dirty, because they aren't your
good clothes any more. What was a sports jacket is now a "walking
coat," a light jacket for those chilly mornings at the cabin in the
mountains or on the beach. And, they're free! If you had bought casual clothes
instead, the old good clothes would have gone to the Salvation Army or the rag
man.
Ladies may have less opportunity to recycle their
dress clothes this way; they are, and should be, more particular about their
clothes than men. But they too may find ways to reuse clothes. Remember how
many uses grandma got from what was originally her "Christmas dress?"
(The last time we saw it, it had been transformed into curtains for the back
windows on the third floor.)
If you want to buy new casual clothes that are
Retro, you can. In Chapter One we pointed to the catalogue of the J. Peterman
Company as one source for them; the Vermont Country Store catalogue is another.
But "waste not, want not" is a good old Retro saying; why waste those
past-their-best dress clothes when they make perfectly good casual clothes at
no extra charge—and make you look nicely old-fashioned in the bargain?
RETRO ACCESSORIES
Modern dress clothes are not all that different
from those of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. You can use the clothes you have to create
a Retro look simply by accompanying them with some Retro accessories.
One of the easiest, least expensive and most
effective is a hat. Hats have an almost magic touch; put one on with your usual
suit and presto! You've gone back in time. No lady or gentleman would have gone
out without a hat until the 1960s, which means that simply by wearing one, you
have gone back before that slum of a decade. Nor have hat styles changed much.
In fact, in the family attic or the used clothing shop you may easily find a
hat from earlier years that works just as well today. Hats are not terribly
expensive; less than $100 will get a man a good fedora or trilby he can wear
with any suit or jacket. And hats look good. If you wear one, you will find you
get admiring glances from the yet-hatless, glances that recognize a touch of class.
In the summer, you will find that our ancestors were no fools; you are cooler
with a light straw hat than you are going hatless. And there is that talk about
the ozone layer...
For a slightly greater investment, you can build
a modest inventory of headgear that permits some finer touches. Going to an
important meeting at the bank in your best dark three-piece suit? Add a homburg
and your fellows will think you're with J.P. Morgan. Getting out your best
ensemble for church on Easter Sunday? Wear a hat with a veil. Taking that
slightly worn camels' hair jacket on a ramble in the country? Top it off with a
matching cap. In each instance, you will be at the top of fashion, simply by
wearing just what your grandmother or grandfather wore on their heads for similar
occasions.
Ladies have a special advantage when comes to
taking their current wardrobes Retro with Retro accessories, simply because they
have more of them. The small purse, especially if it is white, sends a message.
So even more do gloves. Cosmetics should not be forgotten, either; that red Red
RED lipstick of the 1940s has come around again (as most things do). Mother's
or Grandmother's watch adds another Retro touch, and wouldn't she be glad to
know you are wearing it. Jewelry from the past is very fashionable, and the
family jewelry box may offer a good supply gratis. Older hair styles do wonders
to create a Retro feeling, and they are coming back.
But there are Retro accessories for men, too,
beyond just hats. Antique watches and new ones made to 1930s styles are now the
height of fashion. Or you can go fashion one better by wearing granddad's
pocket watch and watch-chain with that three-piece suit. Wear a sweater vest
with a two-piece suit and welcome Fall in warmth as well as style. Bow ties are
especially nice in Summer; try one with your Panama hat and Haspell summer suit
(something that hasn't changed in eons). Comfortable walking shoes with soft
cushioned soles now come in very traditional styles, so you can walk around
town or country in comfort yet Retro-shod. Glasses frames from the 30s and 40s
are very "in," and your local frame shop probably stocks them. Men's
haircuts haven't changed much over the years (except when they simply got
sloppy in the 60s and 70s), and a pleasant way to get a good old-fashioned
haircut is to go to a real barber shop instead of a "hair boutique."
A few survived in most places check an old-fashioned strip shopping center or
nearby small town — and they Il also save you money. Add some Brylcream
("A Little Dab'll Do Ya")10 for a really Retro look.
And what about the classic breast-pocket handkerchief or even a boutonniere?
They will turn even the most modern suit Retro at a stroke.
10 This was the classic advertising slogan of the brand in their 1950s
television adverts. — Editor.
Just as when you furnish your house Retro, when
you dress Retro you should not fear to mix and match. You are not creating a
museum exhibit, but a look: a look that says FDR or Ike is in the White House,11 the world is still in good order, and you're
part of it. It's not a strange look. In fact, it's quite stylish, and it
doesn't require anything really out of the ordinary. You can find it all in
most good shops. You can wear it proudly anywhere, and be among the setters of
fashion. It makes you look good, it makes wherever you are look better, and by
mixing Retro accessories with your present wardrobe, you can do it with but a
modest investment. In other words, it has all the Retro virtues.
11 The author is referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt (US president from 1933—
1945) and David "Ike" Eisenhower (US president from 1953— 1961),
respectively. — Editor.
There is one thing you can add to your Retro
clothes and accessories, something that costs nothing at all but does make a
difference: we might call it Retro-deportment. In times past, like the 18th
century, there was an elaborate art of deportment for both men and women. As a
young lady or gentleman, you learned just how to sit, stand, walk, reach and
move. Every gesture was carefully controlled, to lend grace, style, and beauty,
and to send a message that you were indeed a lady or gentleman, not Flossy the
goat-herd or Jack the rag-man. Most of this has been lost, and few people today
would have the time to revive it in its colonial-era elaboration.
But some of it was still with us until recently,
up through our grandparents' generation at least. And that more modest, simpler
version is worth considering. Remember how grandma told you to sit up straight
and not sprawl, or, when you were a young lady, that young ladies crossed their
ankles, not their legs? Or the slight bow a gentleman was to make as he held a
door for a lady? Or at least not to chew gum or tend to itches in public? These modest and not
overly burdensome rules of deportment are a nice accompaniment to
Retro-clothing. They add a subtle message about the person who is wearing the
clothes, a suggestion that the elegance of dress is at least skin deep.
RETRO-SHOPPING, OR MAKING A CHORE A PLEASURE
Some people like to shop, and some (enlightened)
shops make shop- ping a pleasure even for those who normally don't like it. But
let's face it, in recent decades clothes shopping has tended to become a chore.
It used to be you went to nice small shops where your family had gone for
years, maybe generations. The people there knew their stock, liked their work,
and also knew you. They took pride in fitting you out nicely in quality clothes
and helping you enjoy the time you were with them: though you left some money
behind, you knew you had gotten good value. They smiled with satisfaction when
they met you on the street, still wearing the suit they sold you twenty-five
years before.
Thanks to the evil twins that have afflicted
haberdashery and millinery, the discount store and the boutique, shopping for
clothes has become drudgery for most of us. The discount store is cheap, but
shopping there is depressing and frustrating: the help is ignorant (if you can
find any), the quality uncertain at best, and let's face it, most discount
stores have an, ahem, aroma. The boutique is cute and the help usually eager
(though here too often ignorant), but the prices are through the ceiling. Truth
be told, the quality is often suspect as well: junk with small quadrupeds or
kumquats or whatever on it as a "designer label" is still junk.
What is a Retro-shopper to do? Again, our
ancestors offer us a suggestion: buy fewer but better things. Just as previous
generations lived quite comfortably in smaller houses, so they generally also
had smaller wardrobes. They got top-quality clothes, then made them last, often
for a lifetime. One student at Princeton told how his father, also a Princeton
man, went to London's Savile Row upon his graduation in 1929 and bought six
suits. They were the only suits he ever bought, and they served him quite
nicely through his whole career in the Foreign Service.
Retro before his time, this diplomat discovered
something that can help all Retroculture people escape the expense and
irritation of frequent clothes-buying: Retro styles never change. If you buy
clothes that reflect the classic Retro look, you can happily ignore all the
minor perturbations of fashion. Lapels shrink and grow, shoulders fatten and
slim, and the fashion trade tries to make a big deal of it all. In fact, its
piffle. When the Princeton man wore one of his 1929 suits to a diplomatic
function in the 1960s, he looked distinguished, because the quality of his
clothes was superb. He knew that wearing something too old to be quite
fashionable is a mark of a gentleman, just as gentlemen tend to drive old cars
and have old dogs. The same is true for ladies: that suit bought by Nana in
Paris in 1935 and kept in perfect condition will make Madame the envy of the
garden party today. Retro is forever.
By needing fewer things, you can also frequent
better shops when you buy, thus avoiding the degradation of the discount house
and the silliness of the boutique. Better does not mean slicker: the slick
places, where everything is just-too-perfect and the help keep their noses in
the air, are where the nouveau riche go to throw money around. In contrast, a
really good clothing store tells you it's been there a while. It looks echt—that
wonderful if untranslatable German word that rolls together real, genuine,
unpretentious, established, the difference between the corner tavern and the
fern-bar. Most cities and a good number of towns have at least one such
clothing establishment. It's been there forever. The linoleum on the floor is a
bit worn and the tin ceiling is original. The help is often elderly—the last of
the real professionals in their trade. The hat department held on through the
hatless late-20th century. They have three-button suits and bow
ties. The prices are not cheap, but you get real value, good American and
British stuff, not some wog creation that makes you look like a pimp on the Via
Veneto. Your grandfather may have shopped there, and he may have had the same
salesman. He would, without blinking, have bought the same suit.
Retro-shopping for the classic Retro-look at
least minimizes the discomfort many gentleman face when it is time for new
clothes. Buying them under these circumstances, if not a giddy pleasure, at
least feels right. And because the Retro-look is eternal, shopping is not
something you must face often. Once you have the basics of your Retro-wardrobe,
you are pretty much set for life. You can happily ignore changes in fashion:
you're in the style you want for the rest of your days.
Ladies, or some of them, actually like to shop,
we know. That is one of those mysteries of the feminine life that a gentleman
can do nothing but pass over in silence and in awe.
PERIOD CLOTHING: GOING ALL THE WAY
Just as some Retro people will have no interest
in Retro-clothing, others will have a great deal. They will want to go beyond
the generalized Retro look, the styles of the 30s, 40s and 50s, and get
clothing like that worn in their particular period. They may want to wear it
for special events at home, like the Victorian family we met in Chapter I; for
gatherings like reenactments of historic events; for club meetings with others
who share an interest in their era; or just for the fun of it. A few brave
souls may even wear it everywhere, and bully for them! They can serve as a silent
reproach to all those people jogging in their underwear.
It may surprise some to discover that there are
already whole cottage industries supplying a wide variety of period clothing
and, even more, patterns from which such clothing can be sewn. They tend to
fall into three general periods: late Victorian/Edwardian, War of 1861 Era, and
colonial. Most sales are through catalogues, though you can also find a few
stores (usually a catalogue headquarters).
A good example of what is available is the
catalogue of "Amazon Vinegar & Pickling Works Drygoods (Purveyors of
Items for the 19th-Century Impressions)," of Davenport Iowa.
The offer a pattern catalogue: "Over 700 historic and ethnic clothing
patterns are shown in an illustrated catalogue for the seamstress and tailor—
for men, women and children. The years 1390—1950+ are covered with most
emphasis on the 1800s (19th century). Everything from outer-garments (coats and
cloaks), to undergarments (corsets and lingerie, underwear); from top (hats and
bonnets) to toe (dancing slippers)." They also offer an extensive
catalogue of ready-to-order items, including reproductions of period fashion
books (Fashions and Costumes from Godey's Lady's Book), modern books on old
fashions (Victorians Unbuttoned!) ladies high-buttoned shoes, corsets, yard
goods made to antique styles (tulle with silver glitter: "In 1865 Empress
Elizabeth of Austria was painted by Winterhalter wearing a Ball Gown of Glitter
Tulle"), hoopskirts, a wide variety of wonderful hats including an Abe Lincoln
Stovepipe, men's shirts with paper collars, books of etiquette (a family
favorite, not offered here, is the 1870s Don't book, e.g., "Don't spit out
of the train window; those riding behind you will wish you were under the
wheels"), Civil-war era games and toys—in short, everything you need for a
proper Victorian life.
The introduction to the catalogue by the woman
who runs Amazon Drygoods offers an insight into the larger Retroculture life.
Janet Burgess writes:
I would like to introduce myself to you. My profession has been fabric and
color as an Interior Designer for 24 years and as an Associate Member of the
American Society of Interior Designers. Prior to entering the design field time
was spent as a clothing designer, theatrical producer and freelance artist. I
am listed in seven editions of 'Who's Who of American Women,' 'Who's Who in
Finance and Industry,' and 'Who's Who in the Midwest.'
I have a strong background in historic costume and am both a seamstress and
tailor by avocation and education. I am restoring a house built in 1854 and
have been active in the Village of East Davenport, Iowa's largest historic
district, both as a charter Board Member and Past President for 12 years.
Memberships include the Victorian Society of America and Iowa, the Costume
Society of America, 16th Iowa War of 1861 Unit, the Midwest Open-air
Museums Coordinating Council, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and
a number of other historic preservation groups.
The products of Amazon Drygoods are intended for a discriminating clientele
who appreciate service & craftsmanship 100 years behind the times...
Similar sources can provide a wide variety of
18th-century clothing for those whose Retro-era is colonial. In areas like that
around Washington, D.C., where interest in the colonial period is strong, there
are local seamstresses who specialize in 18th-century clothing. You can also
find clothing sources for the colonial era through places like Colonial
Williamsburg and Plimouth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Those who want to go all the way with Retro-clothing
are pioneering, but not in a barren landscape. You won't be alone. Like most
hobbies, it is not inexpensive, but what you buy will be well made (most
reproductions are sewn with fanatical attention to detail) and, of course, you
need not concern yourself with changes of fashion. The future lies wholly,
and securely, in the past.
AMAZING GRACE...
Whether you choose to go Retro a lot or only a
little in the way you dress, you will find it the most personal way to set
yourself apart from the crudeness of the early-21st century. You
will bring into your own life, and the lives of all you meet, a hint of the
grace, style, and propriety of earlier times. Even if you do nothing more than
wear a proper hat, you will quietly, inoffensively signal your departure from
the rampant ugliness of our time. There is, of course, no requirement that any
of your clothing be Retro in order to live the Retro life. But Retro-clothing
is one of the many gentle pleasures Retroculture offers. So, lie back in your
hammock on a lazy afternoon, and think of how you might appear in a
three-button suit with high paper collar and straw boater, or tight-wasted
shirt, long flowing skirt and great Edwardian hat, and let your imagination
lead you where it will.
FIGURE 5. Formal dinner party.
(Source: Sketch by Marguerite Martyn, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1920)
CHAPTER VII
Retro-Entertainment
You HAVE PROBABLY VISITED AN OLD HOUSE, from the
17th, 18th or 19th century, that is now a
museum. Perhaps you remember looking in the kitchen where museum staff were
cooking old-fashioned dishes in front of an open fire or on a big black
cast-iron stove. You saw the dining room, elegantly set for the kind of
elaborate dinner our ancestors used to enjoy. You may have thought, "I
wonder what it really would have been like to cook that way and sit down to
such a dinner?"
A few years ago, a visitor to Colonial
Williamsburg asked himself that question. And he decided to answer it. He found
a colonial home, now a museum, that agreed to let him and a group of friends
spend a day cooking 18th-century recipes in the original kitchen, in
front of the open fire. He found a cooking teacher who had studied Colonial
cooking and agreed to lead the group. They started at nine o’clock one Saturday
morning, putting soup to boil over the open fire, shaping marzipan for a
"hedgehog," and gathering herbs from the garden. At five that
afternoon, they sat down to a three-course, twenty-three-dish 18th-century
dinner in the elegant dining room of Belle Grove, a colonial plantation house
near Winchester, Virginia. As they watched the daylight slowly fade over the
beautiful Virginia countryside (every window in Belle Grove offers a glorious
view) and the dining room take on the soft glow of candlelight, they realized
they had come very close to spending a day in the 18th century.
The moral of this tale is that Retroculture
offers an immense variety of entertaining things to do. It may require a bit of
initiative on your part—Belle Grove had never done anything quite like this
before — but if you push it a bit, the door to the past will swing open to
reveal a wondrous landscape, filled with activities that are great fun. The
Retroculture life is not one bit dull; on the contrary, it offers a much wider
variety of entertainment than our own jaded age.
Of course, Retro-entertainment differs in some
important ways from modern entertainment. Perhaps the most important difference
is that it offers innocent rather than guilty pleasures. Modern entertainment
is usually built around "shock effect," produced by degradation, sex
and violence. We are supposed to be "entertained" by seeing and
hearing things that, in real life, we would rather not hear or see and know we
should not hear or see. Because this sort of entertainment quickly pales, the
intensity of the shock must constantly be increased. So, television and video games
grow ever more violent, movies and songs ever more prurient, until we finally
gag — and thus, supposedly, are "entertained."
That is not how our ancestors sought entertainment.
Of course, theater and music have always included some sex and some violence
—just think of Macbeth, or Electra, or The Marriage of Figaro. But people did
not go to see Shakespeare's Macbeth just to be shocked. They went for the depth
of understanding of human nature Shakespeare presented, for what tragic theater
said to all people about the nature of life, and for the
magnificent artistry in the language and the portrayal, the arts of both
playwright and actors.
For the most part, entertainment in the past was
intended to be both pleasant and uplifting. People enjoyed splendid dinners,
accompanied by serious and artful conversation; think of Dr. Johnson at the
Literary Club in 18th-century London, or the table Jefferson presided
over at Monticello. They enjoyed real music with wonderful tunes, music you
could sing or dance to, or that called forth the highest talent of the greatest
singers of their day. They read masterfully written novels, like those of Jane
Austin, that also taught lessons about human nature. All these entertainments
lifted people up above themselves, to see life in a new and clearer light.
Recovering uplifting entertainment may take some
creativity and initiative on your part. The person who invited his friends to
that 18th-century day in the kitchen and dining room at Belle Grove
had the idea himself, then figured out how to make it happen. Once you start
giving Retro-entertainment some thought, you too will find ways to make it
happen. More and more people are doing so, in everything from amateur music
groups that specialize in baroque music through model train clubs that have
layouts for the old Lionel 0-gauge and standard gauge
"tinplate" trains. Old books, old films, old-fashioned
dinner parties and picnics, are all coming back. It's part of the Retroculture
trend, and it is making Retro-entertainment easier and easier to find.
Like other aspects of Retroculture,
Retro-entertainment need not be terribly expensive. Some things are, of course;
a week at the very Retro Homestead hotel in Virginia is not cheap. But a week
at the even more Retro Chalfont Hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, is quite
reasonable. You will easily be able to find or create Retro-entertainment to
fit your budget.
Remember, Retroculture is itself entertainment.
When you devote part of your life (or all of it) to recapturing the past, you
will quickly find it entertaining. Furnishing your house Retro, dressing Retro,
traveling Retro, are all fun. So are even such serious things as developing a
strong, Retroculture family life. Going back to the past, wherever you choose
to do it, is not a chore but a pleasure, even when it involves some work. It is
the best kind of pleasure, one that calls for creativity, imagination, and
involvement, instead of merely being a passive spectator holding some sort of
electronic device.
Does that mean Retroculture forswears television,
DVDs and the other electronic impedimenta of the present age? No. But it does
mean Retroculture people approach them somewhat differently. Generally, we do
not allow them to become substitutes for active, creative pleasures, as they
have in the lives of those emblems of the early 21st century, the
"couch potatoes." To see what we mean, and how Retroculture
integrates modern devices with our desire to recapture the good things from the
past, let us take a look at a common entertainment device, the television.
RETRO-TELEVISION
Reflecting Americans' growing interest in the
past, some television networks are showing old programs. But even when the show
is Retro, Retroculture people approach television with a degree of caution. The
unfortunate fact is, television is not so much real entertainment as it is a
sort of pacifier. It fills time, but instead of enlivening—as good
entertainment always does—it deadens. The reason is simple: the television
viewer's mind is inert. When you read a book or watch a play or engage in
dinner table conversation, your mind has to be active. You must imagine the
scenes in the book, or think about the plays message, or consider what to say
next. In contrast, the television does it all for you, leaving you sitting
there like a bowl of warm blancmange. In fact, you cannot Stop and think or
reflect, because the program moves relentlessly onward.
Retroculture people know that for something
really to entertain, it has to spur activity, not halt it. So they resist
becoming television addicts. They may watch television, but they select what
they are going to watch. Life for them is more than plunking down after dinner
and turning on the tube.
This is especially true of Retroculture families
with children. Children are easily absorbed by television, but what does it do
for them? Does it stimulate their imaginations, teach them how to think and be
creative, how to talk or write to express themselves? The answer, for the most
part, is no. Far better for them are coloring books, paint sets, board games
and puzzles, books and sports and trips to the museum or the country. So, most
Retroculture families limit television watching, and a growing number are
giving up television entirely, at least while children are small. This helps
create a truly old-fashioned home, where children have all the stimulation and
interaction kids routinely got before television.
If you do decide to have a television, there are
a growing number of Retroculture shows and programs you can watch. Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS) generally offers the best. Recent examples include
Victoria and Albert and Downton Abbey.
In cable television, the Retro influence is
strong. With cable, we have in effect individualized television, to the point
where Retroculture people may be able to integrate it with "their"
era. The American Movie Channel, as one example, shows only old movies, from
the 1920s through the 1950s. A number of cable networks, including Nickelodeon
and The Family Channel, are broadcasting TV series from the 1950s and early
1960s. Bravo offers high culture, including the plays and operas many Retro
people enjoy. And new cable channels are being created, some of which may be
partly or wholly Retro.
Could we in the future see a channel that simply
recreates 1950s TV, ads and all? It's quite possible. What about a channel for
"Victorian Television" — TV as it might have been had the Victorians
invented it, it could dramatize the novels of Henry James or non-fiction works
like Nicolay's and Hay's biography of Lincoln: have a show devoted to the
latest Victorian inventions like the trolley car and the phonograph and perhaps
include The Century Magazine, a talk show devoted to the "hot" topics
of the 1880s and 1890s. After all, someone has written a novel, The Difference
Engine, that imagines the Victorians inventing the computer (steam-driven of
course); why not television?
Before television, radio provided good family
entertainment, and it can do so again. Unlike TV, radio requires an active mind
on the part of the listener; it evokes images rather than providing them. And
that can be powerful: the pictures we create in our own imaginations as we hear
a radio show unfold may be more vivid than anything a television screen can
provide.
Already, radio is offering more than just news
and music. The Prairie Home Companion was a great success, offering a type of
program, the variety show, that tends to be dull on TV. American Radio Theater
does the same. Some of the old radio dramas from the 1930s and 40s, like The
Shadow and The Green Hornet, are turning up again on local stations. Some
stations offer "Old Fashioned Saturday Nights," with shows and music
from the great days of radio.
Just as TV offers new opportunities for
Retro-entertainment, so does radio. What about stations devoted in toto to re-creating
the past, including news, ads, everything, so when you tune in you take a trip
in your Retro time machine? It's not too far-fetched to imagine. In today's
highly segmented market, a station can succeed by being the only one that
caters to a certain specific market, and Retroculture people offer that kind of
market. Think of being able to turn on your big RCA radio made in 1935, the
kind with tubes and lots of knobs and dials, and hear exactly what you might
have heard in 1935. Now that would be entertainment!
Film, television, the DVD, all were supposed to
kill legitimate theater. It hasn't happened. On the contrary, live theater is
gaining strength. More and more places have live theaters, and more and more
people are going. They are finding that the immediacy of live theater is more
powerful than even the best special effects in movies. While television is a
"cool" medium, theater is a "hot" one. It conveys emotional
intensity and involvement much better than television does. And people who have
grown blasé in front of the tube find a play gripping and entrancing.
The live stage is also seeing period revivals, of both plays and musical
productions. One very Retro young gentleman in Chicago writes: There is a
wonderful troupe here that puts on light opera, the sort of stuff which took
Broadway by storm seventy years ago and which is not on videotape. I've seen
Romberg’s 'New Moon' with some wonderful tunes, Victor Herbert's 'The Red
Mill,' Strauss's 'Fledermaus' and Gilbert and Sullivan. The ticket prices are
very reasonable, and it is amazing to see how the old folks come out in droves
to pack the auditorium for the performances. There are no empty seats at the
beginning and few dry eyes at the end of the evening.
Sometimes, not only is a historic play or opera
revived, it is presented as it would have been when it was first staged. A
small opera company in Alexandria, Virginia, put on the famous 18th-century
Beggar's Opera in historic Gadsby's Tavern, exactly as it might have been
staged in Washington's time, including using candles for lighting. It was a
great success. In London, Shakespeare's Globe Theater has been built just as it
was in the 16th century to perform his plays exactly as they were
offered then. These truly Retro entertainments are popular with a wide variety
of people, and are a good introduction for "newcomers" to the
pleasures Retroculture offers.
MAY I HAVE THIS DANCE?
What has happened to dancing in the last sixty
years must make Fred Astaire glad he's dead. The grace, the art, the style,
have all vanished; people just go out onto the dance floor and shake as if they
had some regrettable nerve disorder or a particularly nasty insect in their
underwear. The "music" suggests a New York subway train passing close
at hand, with the addition of a monotonous heavy beat: the village idiot
hammering on a washtub. The average "dance" makes a good
approximation of Hell.
It used to be otherwise. Dancing required both
grace and skill. You had to put some effort into it, learning steps which were
often quite intricate. (Remember dancing classes? They were the first occasion
where a young gentleman met a young lady without slipping a frog down her
back.) And music for dancing was often splendid: think of Strauss's Blue Danube
and Vienna Woods. When fine music and good dancers came together in a grand
formal ball, a bit of Heaven was brought down to earth. Even in small towns,
the hotels gave balls with good orchestras; grandmother wore her tiara, and
grandfather a top hat and tails. The 1930s were the era of the great swing
dance bands and evenings at the Avalon: Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and the
jitterbug.
How sad it is that most young people today have
no idea what a real dance is like. But with the growth of Retroculture, some
are learning. Real dancing, with set steps, recognizable music and partners, is
making a comeback. Square dancing and folk dancing are both real dancing, and
they have already gained large followings. Ballroom dancing is gaining interest
among college students, and all ages are enjoying a revival of big band
"swing" music and the dances that go with it.
Can Retro-dance really recapture the glories of
the grand ball? Ifs already happening. At Cincinnati's Flying Cloud Academy,
students spend a week intensively studying period dance, including etiquette,
fashions and even hairstyles appropriate to the grand ball. Victoria magazine
writes:
In a short time, dancers are transported back to an era when ballroom
etiquette and strict decorum were de rigueur. As they perfect their mazurkas
and quadrilles, they enjoy taking to heart Victorian admonishments that 'a
gentleman should exercise the utmost delicacy in touching the waist of his
partner' and 'a lady should consider herself engaged to her partner, and therefore not at
liberty to hold flirtation, between figures, with other gentlemen.' Above all,
students keenly await the climax of all their efforts —the Grand Ball, their
chance to claim dance cards bearing this Victorian verse: 'Each was so
happy/And All was so fair/That night stole away/And the dawn found them there.'
SHALL WE HAVE A MUSICALE?
The musicale was a nice Victorian entertainment
from the days before the Victrola made music readily available in the home. It
was simply a matinee or soiree where someone added live music to the usual
entertainments of food, drink and conversation. Can you imagine holding a
musicale in your home today, with the latest rock band providing the tunes? No?
You’d rather not be sued by your close friends and dear relatives for costing
them their hearing? We understand.
What has happened to music? Permit us a short,
serious digression into musicology to answer that question. Music has two basic
elements: structure (how the notes are put together) and dynamics (how much the
volume changes). If we listen to music from the 17th and 18th
centuries, we find that the emphasis is on structure, not dynamics. The
structure is often very complex, requiring an educated and discerning ear to
appreciate all that is going on — the sort of ear a nobleman might have
possessed. That tied music and audience together nicely, since both composers
and performers usually worked for noblemen. The composers were also tied to the
instruments on which their music would be played: most baroque instruments had
only a limited dynamic range.
Then, around the beginning of the 19th
century, two changes took place. The composers and performers began to derive
their incomes from performing for the public, not serving as members of a
nobleman's household. And, new instruments were developed that had a much
greater dynamic range. Think of the piano: its proper name is the
"pianoforte," or the "soft-loud." That is because, unlike
the harpsichord, when you hit the piano's keys softly, the resulting sounds are
soft, and when you really bang on them, the sounds are loud. 19th-century
composers put the mass audience together with the new instruments to produce a
new musical style, the romantic, that simplified structure and emphasized
dynamics. And that trend, continued, has given us the hideous noise that kids
listen to at rock concerts. Are we saying that Wagner leads directly to Slayer?
Well, yes.
The reason for this short lesson in music history
is that it points out a happy Retro-fact: the only place for music to go is
back. The emphasis on dynamics over structure has gone as far as it can go; any
further leads to music indistinguishable from passing trains. Future music is
going to have to swing the pendulum back toward structure. And guess what? That
means we may again hear music that is actually pleasant to listen to.
Of course, you can already have such music simply
by listening to old music. Every Retro era offers good music, from the great
choral singing of the War of 1861 era through ragtime and jazz to the Beach
Boys and the tuneful "soul" of the early 1960s. Some are very
serious: amateur groups like Washington's "Wondrous Machine" go to
great lengths to play Baroque music as it would originally have been heard, on
period instruments. And from that height, good music may range right down to
getting out grandmother's old Victrola and playing her 78's.
Nor is good music only to be found in the past.
One glorious source of it remains alive, well, and productive: Broadway. Steven
Sondheim is right up there with Victor Herbert when it comes to writing songs
people can hum, whistle, sing, and enjoy. Broadway song writers and producers
know that their audiences want enjoyable music, and that a show that fails to
offer it will bomb. The same good burgerlich12 audience that kept the Romantic composers in wine and cheese has its
limits, and atonality or the "wall of sound" exceeds them. That
audience may have released the devil of dynamics, but it also wants him kept in
check, so even in the musical desert of the 21st century a few flowers bloom, on Broadway of all
places.
12 A German expression meaning middle-class or bourgeois. —Editor.
But Retroculture seeks more than seeing (or
hearing) the past and enjoying the few remnants that remain alive. It wants to
bring it back. And nowhere more than in music can Retroculture do that, with a
bit of imagination. We have great compositions from past musical eras, like the
baroque or the classic. But why should we think that no more great pieces can
be written in those styles? What might we hear if a rich patron, or a great
university, or a grand orchestra held a contest to see who could write the best
new symphony in the style of Haydn or cantata in the style of Bach? Or if
Broadway put on a new musical written in the style of the 1920s? Or if someone
put together a new big band of the sort Benny Goodman used to lead and offered
new as well as old music written in the style of the 1930s?
There is no reason to believe the old styles have
played themselves out. All that is needed is some Retro-imagination to crank
them up again. How would people react? Well, Retro-people would react with
great enthusiasm. And so, we predict, would many others who may not yet know
that at least in music, they are Retro-people too.
ENTERTAINING AT HOME
Before "home entertainment centers" the
home was an entertainment center. After all, what's the point in having a home
if you're not going to use it as a place to entertain and be entertained? You
may sleep and eat just as well in a boarding house (for you youngsters, that's
where people who couldn't afford an apartment lived before we turned over our
park benches and subway stations to them).
A proper Retro-home offers a thousand
entertainments, from gardening and reading good books to simply enjoying the
swing on the front porch on a languid summer evening. Junior may be playing
with his Lionel electric trains in the basement while Mother does needlepoint
in the parlor and Father enjoys a good Havana cigar in his den. Furthermore, if
we look back to the happy years before television (and even radio), we find our
ancestors had a great many entertaining home activities that, through
Retroculture, we may care to revive.
One is the dinner party. The cocktail party,
where people surreptitiously try to make a meal of hors d'oeuvres while
pretending to enjoy superficial conversation with persons they've never met, is
a regrettable modern invention. In the good old days, a party usually meant
sitting down around a meal. And while the dinner party has not totally died
out, it is useful to remind ourselves of its superiority. It allows for, and
indeed requires, conversations both serious and amusing — that is an obligation
on guests. It permits the hostess to use her best china and silver and trot out
her family’s favorite recipes. It provides a leisurely dinner —a great and
welcome rarity these days. It permits people new to each other to do more than
exchange views about the weather; through the course of a dinner party, you can
usually tell whether you're dealing with a prospective friend or a hopeless
bore. Old friendships renew easily, stimulated by the twin lubricants of mind
and tongue, good food and good wine. If the cocktail party suggests sleazy
Hollywood agents "networking" with one another, the dinner party
brings to mind Masterpiece Theater.
Retroculture people can do more than give dinner
parties; they can give Retro-dinner parties. Why not give the sort of 18th-century
dinner mentioned at the outset of this chapter? You need not cook it in front
of the fire; just use 18th-century recipes (a number of colonial cookbooks have
been published) and serve å la francaise. where each course includes a number
of dishes, rather than la russe, where you get the soup, then the salad, then
the main course, etc. Or you can serve a Victorian dinner, again with period
recipes; if your guests are also into things Victorian, you may add Victorian
dress and table manners. A bit of research will quickly show what was served
and done at dinner parties in your era, whatever that may happen to be. What
nicer way is there to go Retro?
Another pre-TV home entertainment was
houseguests. Those who live in the country know how entertaining it can be to
have someone from town for the weekend, to catch up on all the latest
goings-on. These days, people seem to have the idea that, as host and hostess,
they must devote themselves to their guests' every waking moment. Retro people
know better. In the old days, guests were generally left to amuse themselves
through the day, and everyone gathered at breakfast, at dinner, and in the
evening. This makes visits easier on both hosts and guests, who in truth would
usually prefer some time to themselves to relax. It also helps the guest
fulfill his obligation, which is to be entertaining, something few people can
manage every hour of the day. Approached Retro-style, having houseguests can
again be the pleasure it once was, for all concerned.
Germans have an enjoyable Old institution called
the Stammtisch that we might with advantage import. Once a week or once a
fortnight, a set group gathers at a certain restaurant or tavern, always at the
same table. There, they eat, drink some good German beer, talk, and maybe play
cards. This can as readily be done at home as at a restaurant, and is
especially nice for single people. By providing a regular gathering—say, for
brunch after church —such an informal ' 'club" cuts through the isolation
the single life can bring. Because the people are the same week by week, the
Stammtisch becomes an on-going conversation, a chance for all to share their
amusing or difficult experiences of the previous week with interested and
sympathetic listeners. And the regularity of it offers just the sort of order
and predictability Retro people like.
For families, one of the best home entertainments
is the extended family gathering. Here all the family—parents, grandparents,
aunts, uncles, cousins, and often family friends as well— come together for the
sort of gargantuan meal that leaves everyone bloated, glassy-eyed and
blissfully content. Holidays provide a good excuse, and it is easy to develop a
regular round of holiday gatherings: aunt Emma's for Easter, cousin Bob's place
in the country for the Fourth of July, your house for Thanksgiving and
Grandma's for Christmas. Everyone brings enough food for themselves and at
least a dozen other people, ensuring mounds of leftovers to be exchanged so no
one has to cook for a week. All talk of diets is rigidly excluded, and for the
day no such thing as cholesterol exists. By their very nature, such gatherings
become Retro: everyone tells the old family stories, like about the time Cousin
John, long deceased, suggested the finicky bishop suck a raw egg. The food is
all the old favorites, and after dinner there may be slides or home movies that
bring those family members now gone back to life. Seldom does a house become a
home so much as when the whole extended family gathers in it to enjoy and
reminisce.
Not all entertainments before television revolved
around food (though it is true—and not a bad thing—that in many houses, the
social center was the kitchen). Surprising as it may be to the video game
generation, there were many entertaining games that did not and do not require
electricity. There is a wide variety of board games and puzzles for all ages.
Many, like Scrabble, are educational as well as entertaining. Some, such as backgammon,
are making a comeback. And whatever happened to bridge club? All across
America, as late as the 1950s and 60s, people gathered regularly to play
bridge. If the club included gentlemen it usually met in the evenings; ladies
gathered for bridge in the afternoon. The game moved house-to-house as each
member of the club took their turn as host or hostess. A revival of bridge
clubs would be the perfect symbol of Retro-entertainment; while the modern Home
Entertainment Center caters to the passive mind, bridge requires a very active
mind indeed — woe to the partner who misses a chance to trump!
The Retro-home is a lively home. There is always
a lot going on there, and that is the secret of Retro home entertainment. Our
ancestors looked for things to do that were entertaining; they did not just
plunk down passively and wait to "be entertained." Once you Start to
look for the same thing, you will find your home offers a wide variety of
interesting things you can do. Many of them are just what people used to do
before life was supposed to come to us out of some electronic box. So, ditch
the phone and discover how entertaining an active home life can be. Once the
television, phone and computer have been silenced, you will discover your home
has another, nonelectronic window on the world: the front door. Outside that
door lies a neighborhood where you may find a great many entertaining things to
do. A good start is just walking to see your neighbors. If you know your
neighbors, you will know which ones will welcome you just dropping in and which
ones would prefer an arrangement in advance, if only a telephone call. If you
don't know them, walking through the neighborhood is a good way to meet them.
You'll often find them out cutting the grass or working in the garden or
walking the dog, and quite happy to stop for a moment and make your acquaintance.
In the good old days, it was easier to walk
around the neighborhood and socialize informally because in the evenings you
would find most people sitting on the front porch. A modern-day event in one
neighborhood re-created that situation, when an evening thunderstorm knocked
out the electric power for a few hours. With the house dark, once the rain was
over almost everybody came out and sat on their front porch or front steps, or
walked around to chat with other families that were sitting out enjoying the
unaccustomed quiet. For that one evening, the whole neighborhood went Retro, as
people amused themselves in pre-electronic ways. And despite the worries about
thawing freezers, everybody rather enjoyed it.
A good way to introduce neighbors to each other
and pave the way for informal visits is to hold a block party. Usually it just
takes one family that is willing to offer its back yard for the gathering and
invite people; everyone is happy to come and bring food, chairs, tables etc. It
can easily become an annual affair to which everyone looks forward as a chance
to meet new neighbors and renew old acquaintances, and to get a taste of
everyone else's prize casserole or cake.
In real neighborhoods, where people know each
other and interact as they used to, individuals often develop a particular
neighborhood "function." If you are retired and usually home, you may
keep an eye on houses where the people are gone through the day, putting the
paper in the front door when it comes late, signing for packages, and letting
others know if some suspicious characters have been hanging around. If you have
some teenage children, they may become the neighborhood lawn mowers. There is
often a "green thumb" on the street everyone else can turn to for
advice on gardening, and also a local mechanic who is happy to help when your
car won't start. Sometimes you have the luck to have in residence one of those
wonderful women who love to bake more than they can possibly eat and happily
distribute the surplus to their neighbors. Younger people often are gladly
willing to offer a helping hand to the elderly, especially those who are living
alone. These functions or specialties not only benefit the whole neighborhood,
they give you your particular place in it. And that is part of what makes a
real neighborhood a fun place to live.
Beyond such informal neighborhood functions lie
regular neighborhood organizations, block watches, neighborhood associations,
historic districts and the like. More and more neighborhoods have such organizations,
and while their work is serious, being involved in them is also entertaining in
that their work is interesting and rewarding. They offer many opportunities for
you to involve yourself in ways you find of interest: researching your
neighborhood's history, representing its interests with town government,
working with the police, even getting active in town politics. Remember,
Retro-entertainment recognizes that serious pursuits can also be entertaining;
in fact, they are often the best entertainment (just look at how seriously some
people take their hobbies). Our forefathers were often heavily involved on a
volunteer basis in building up their communities and neighborhoods, and they
found much more personal pleasure in such work than we get from renting a
movie.
From a Retrocultural standpoint, the greatest
value in seeking entertainment in your neighborhood is that it helps make it a
genuine neighborhood. Community is one of the most important Retro-values,
because it is something our ancestors had and we have largely lost. It is one
of the main reasons their lives seem so much fuller and more rewarding than our
own. We can have it again, but only if we invest something of ourselves in
re-creating it. Calling on the neighbors, getting up block parties, organizing
a neighborhood watch — all these things help people in a neighborhood get to
know each other and become a community. And life in a genuine community is entertaining,
in many profound and meaningful ways.
"JOHNNY, YOU MUST LEARN TO ENTERTAIN YOURSELF"
In the old days, that was the speech children got
when they complained they were bored. (Nowadays, too often they just get driven
to the mall.) It was good advice. One of the things we often envy in our
grandparents was that they were never bored, because they could always find
something entertaining to do on their own. They had hobbies, they had gardens,
they liked to bake or do needlework or build model ships that actually sailed
(that was a big hobby in the 1930s; just look through some old Popular
Mechanics magazines). Retroculture advises us, young or not so young, to
recapture that ability to entertain ourselves.
There are as many ways to do it as there are
human interests. But there are two that stand out in terms of what they offer
the Retroculture life. The first is reading old books. When you read the books
the people who lived in your favorite era read, you enter into their lives. You
gain a pure, undiluted insight into their world. That is not to say that the
books themselves (we are generally speaking of fiction here) offer an accurate
portrait of life in that era, but rather that by reading what they read and
being entertained by what entertained them, you enter into their lives. For
example, let's say your first love is the Edwardian era. When you collect and
read popular fiction of that time, books such as The Prisoner of Zenda or C.N.
and A.M. Williamson's The Lightning Conductor, you gain a marvelous sense of the lightness,
grace, and innocence of those years, the years immediately preceding the First
World War. You enter into a world so confident that it could relax and laugh a
bit at itself and accept a fabulous kingdom like Ruritania, as children are
secure enough to accept the world of Peter Pan or Mary Poppins. Perhaps only
thus, by returning to an age of innocence, can innocence be recaptured in lives
long past childhood.
The next time you're out for a walk stop into a
bookstore that specializes in old books and take one in hand, one from the time
that means most to you. Gain the powerful sense of the past that comes just
from opening it. Let the music of its antique phrases draw you into that lost
world. Puzzle at first over what seem strange references to clean collars and
Pullman tickets and baggage smashers and jockey-pulley levers on motor cars.
Smile at the Princess Flavia just as your great-grandmother smiled at her. And
find yourself quickly and totally lost in that bygone world.
There is only one thing that
compares as Retro-entertainment with sitting back in your favorite chair in the
most Retro room in your house on a rainy afternoon and reading a book from the
past, and that is writing. Our ancestors read for entertainment, but they also
wrote for entertainment. Just read some of their letters, letters from great
men or women of the past collected in volumes and published, or letters from
members of your own family now long departed. What a difference from a phone
call or "email"! Letter writing was an art, and as all arts was done
with practice and care. The result was pleasure for both parties, the writer
and the reader.
Here Retroculture is winning at least a small
victory, because in the face of all the hideous noise generated by electronic
"communication," letter writing is staging a modest comeback. Sick of
all the gadgets that beep and chime, a growing number of people, including
young people, are again writing letters and even taking some time and care to
make them entertaining and enlightening to read. And that, they are
discovering, also makes them entertaining to write. Like most
Retro-entertainments, letter writing takes some effort and demands mental
activity, but Retroculture people recognize those as advantages, not drawbacks.
Next time you are bored, instead of flipping through the channels, give letter
writing a try. Take some nice paper and a fountain pen.
My dearest Jane,
It has been ever so long since I last wrote, but I have some thoughts I would
like to share especially with you
Nor is it only in letters that the entertainment
of writing is being re-discovered. Diaries and journals are also making a comeback.
Lucky the person today who can in later years bring youth back to life by
reading his or her diary. Luckier still the person who has his
great-grandfather's War of 1861 diary or grandmother's journal of life in the
country. But it is not only reading diaries and journals that is entertaining;
writing in them can also be a pleasure. When we keep a diary or journal, we
take time to reflect each day on where we have been and where we are going. We
have a brief time of communion with ourselves and our inmost thoughts. We put
the days events in a larger perspective, and thereby bring them into order.
With thought of those who in future years may read our words, we consider how
we may best express our ideas on paper so that we give to them, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren we may never meet in this life, some insight into who we
really were.
Just as with sewing or playing the piano, as we
do more writing we get better at it. And that is part of the essence of
Retro-entertainment: self-improvement. Real entertainment is watching ourselves
grow. Writing about ourselves, not just the events in our lives but our
thoughts and our emotions, is a powerful tool for growth. It was not for
nothing that our Victorian forebears believed so strongly in self-improvement,
and worked at it. It was through ceaseless personal growth they became the
strong, wise and contented people we look back on with admiration. Much of that
growth came from putting pen to paper.
PERIOD ENTERTAINMENTS
Nothing offers better entertainment for
Retroculture people than an opportunity to step back into the past.
Fortunately, such opportunities are becoming more numerous. With a bit of
creativity and initiative, you may be able to create your very own "time
machine." That is what the people mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter did when they approached Belle Grove plantation with a proposal to
prepare and then sit down to a genuine 18th-century dinner.
The fact that Belle Grove accepted their proposal
illustrates a change in the way many museums operate. Instead of just being
places to see, they are becoming places to do things. As a visitor, you may be
invited to help cook in an antique kitchen, throw a switch on a steam railroad,
work the bellows in a smithy or feed the chickens on a colonial farm. Visitors'
participation in such routine, on-going museum activities is limited and
carefully supervised, but it still offers more access to the past than mere
watching. Some museums are doing still more, offering special events such as
dances, dinners, harvest festivals and the like that replicate past events and
that invite participation by outsiders.
Retroculture people may wish to go still further
and join in museum activities on a regular basis as volunteers. This can be one
of the most entertaining and rewarding ways of "living in the past."
A wide variety of museums need and eagerly welcome volunteers: retired
streetcar motormen and conductors run heritage trolley lines, housewives lead
tours and run demonstration kitchens and gardens on colonial plantations,
mechanics help fix up historic aircraft so they can fly again, and students
assist in restoring Victorian resort hotels. Often, roles as volunteers include
wearing period clothing, operating antique equipment, and even speaking old-fashioned
English. Not only is all this great fun, it also offers an opportunity to meet
other Retroculture people who share an interest in your particular era.
If you want to see just how far back volunteering
can take you, pay a visit to Fort Henry in Canada, near Kingston, Ontario. Fort
Henry was built in the early 19th century to defend Canada against a
feared American attack Today, it is garrisoned by a 19th-century
British Army unit. The troops wear 19th-century uniforms perfect in
every detail, right down to getting the same cloth made at the same factories
in England. They walk, stand, march, and salute exactly as they would have more
than 100 years ago—off duty as well as on. They even talk as they would have
then. Every soldier virtually lives in the 19th-century British
Army— and every one of them is a student volunteer.
You may also find people recreating the past
without being connected to a specific museum or historic site. The best example
is the many War of 1861 military units. Throughout the East, volunteers have
re-formed historic units from the War of 1861, Union and Confederate. They wear
Civil war uniforms, practice War of 1861 military drill and tactics, and gather
regularly to reenact battles and stage encampments. Often, whole families have
gotten involved, with wives and children also joining in the encampments,
dressed as they would have been in the 1860s and camping as they would have at
that time. Many of them are fanatical about being historically correct in every
detail of their clothing, equipment, and actions, right down to reading only
books and magazines of the 1860s. You can easily find and visit one of their
encampments or battle re-creations if you live east of the Mississippi, and
there are a few units in the west as well. There are also some Revolutionary
War units that do the same things.
Nor are military units the only volunteer groups
devoted to living in the past. You may find antique car clubs where people
dress in the styles popular when their car was manufactured and go on
"motor tours" as they might have back then. There are groups that
gather to re-create pioneer wagon trains. You can find clubs devoted to antique
dance, music, and theater.
The possibilities are endless. All it takes is a
bit of imagination and willingness to invest some time and effort. Think, for
example, of what might be done at Colonial Williamsburg. It is a lovely place
to visit, but when one is surrounded by tourists dressed in sneakers and shorts
one does not really get the feeling of living in the 18th century.
Suppose a group or club of people who really wanted to experience 18th-century
life went to Williamsburg with this proposal: For two weeks, in the winter when
few tourists come, close Williamsburg to the general public. Fill it instead
with people who want to personally experience colonial life. They will all wear
18th-century dress. They will live in the restored houses and inns,
exactly as they would have 200 years ago, sleeping on corn husk mattresses,
using candles for light, cooking in front of open fires, and bathing in tin
tubs set before the hearth. Compromises with modernity would be kept to the
absolute minimum, e.g., emergency medical care. The group might even go so far
as to restrict conversations to 18th-century topics, including the
politics of the time, philosophical ideas then current, and the
"latest" fashions from London. They might choose a specific two week
period to re-create, say, two weeks in January of 1776, with the newspaper and
debate in the House of Burgesses and around the dinner tables in the taverns
centering on the events of those two weeks. It would be a "total
immersion" program, just as when you study a language in classes where no
English may be spoken.
Or what about doing a six week
"internship" at Plimoth Plantation13 in Massachusetts? Plimoth already goes to
great lengths to reproduce 17th-century life, including using the
language and discussing only the topics of that time. Perhaps a few houses
could be set aside for interns, houses with no modern conveniences whatsoever,
where a docent would provide a "total immersion" program in early-17th-century
colonial life.
The only limits on what can be done in
Retro-entertainment are those you set on yourself. Remember, you will be best
entertained not by what is done for you, but by what you do. The more you
pioneer, the more you create, the more you not just take the ball but make the
ball and run with it, the more you will find your life entertaining, enriching,
and rewarding.
13 This is a living history museum founded in 1947, replicating the original 17th-
century Plymouth colony founded by the "Pilgrims." — Editor.
CHAPTER VIII
Retro-Manners
As THE FLOOD OF ALL THAT IS HIDEOUS and awful
begins to recede, whom should we see emerging from amongst the wreckage, dry,
prim, and proper, but Miss Manners? And a welcome sight she is. In the national
survey mentioned earlier, 92% of those polled said we should turn back toward
past manners — the highest percentage for any item surveyed.
It's no wonder. Manners, public and private, have
become atrocious. People blare "their" music at everyone around them
from "boom boxes," car radios or earphones turned up to the max, with
no regard as to whether others share their musical taste. With their cellphones
they hold private conversations in public places. They make engagements, then
don't show up and neither explain nor apologize for the inconvenience they have
caused. Men harass women, and women try to be "one of the boys" by
using vocabularies that would embarrass a longshoreman. People in
"service" industries routinely insult their customers; in fact, a
whole industry — telemarketing — has been built around the rudeness of
telephoning strangers in their homes (usually at the dinner hour) to sell
things to them. Children behave like the young savages they naturally are with
no rebuke from their parents and no instruction in better behavior. Anyone who
objects to this ill- mannered assault is himself thought rude; it is as if
etiquette's only commandment were to take whatever mud is thrown in your face
silently and without complaint.
It used to be otherwise. People were expected to
show consideration for others, whether around the family breakfast table or at
a football game. Those who failed to do so, who did not "mind their
manners," were politely but firmly reproved. If they persisted in vile
behavior, they were excluded from good society.
When did we go wrong? As usual, the answer is in
the cultural revolution of the 1960s. That revolution entailed a wholesale
rejection of etiquette and manners, of all rules for behavior, on the grounds
that they were "repressive." The revolutionaries preached that if
only people were allowed to "do their own thing" instead of following
common social conventions, all men would become brothers in the great
"family of man." Life would be hippyishly sweet, gentle, and loving
as we all hugged our neighbors and danced around the Maypole.
It didn't work out that way. As our ancestors
knew well, people don't naturally behave nicely. In fact, they naturally behave
very much like pigs around the trough at feeding time. Manners arose to
restrain natural, which is to say utterly self-centered, human behavior. Far
from isolating people from one another, manners make normal social intercourse
possible. They offer safe, convenient and pleasant ways for strangers to meet,
for families to maintain harmonious relations, for offices to be both efficient
and nice places to work They make life easier, not harder.
Consider this vignette from Mrs. Oliver
Harriman's Book of Etiquette, published in 1942:
I remember a prominent woman's saying to me once,
'Oh, how much pleasure I get out of remembering the breakfasts of my childhood!
There was a rule that all members of the family had to come to the table. We
had to be neat. We greeted our parents and each other. We were allowed to take
part in the conversation and express our opinions. We never thought of complaining
about the food, and of course a cross word or look was out of the question. If
such a thing happened, it was flatly declared that we were ill and could be
excused from the table. Everything looked so pretty, too —the colored china,
the shining silver, and always a little flower. Because Mother said pretty surroundings
made a great difference in how we faced the day. It was like starting out in
the morning with everything rosy and beautiful. And if ever any of us had to
miss breakfast, if we were really ill, we felt cheated. On Sunday mornings,
there was the nice custom of letting each child have a favorite breakfast dish.
All through my life I think of my father and mother and brothers and sisters
sitting around a table, eating and laughing and talking.'
Rules, the rules we call manners, made that
breakfast table possible. Compare that memory with meals in a mannerless modern
household, and you will see why so many people are attracted to Retro-manners.
THE GOLDEN RULE
What are Retro-manners? We do not propose to
write another book on etiquette; there are plenty of good ones available, new
and old. But it may be helpful to consider some general points about manners
and the whys and hows of reviving them.
The basis of good manners is the Golden Rule: do
unto others as you would have them do unto you. Mrs. Harriman writes, "All
people with kindly instincts have inherent good manners." In turn, a
person with base instincts, no matter how smooth, is a cad.
The purpose of etiquette is to apply the Golden
Rule to everyday situations. Sometimes, admittedly, it can be hard to see the
relationship between the principle, consideration for others, and the
application, say, eating ice cream with a fork (yes, there are such things as
ice cream forks). But an indirect connection is there. In Mrs. Harriman's apt
phase, the purpose of the rule is "to smooth social machinery." Just
as learning a foreign language makes communication with those who speak it
easier, so learning the language of etiquette makes social situations more
relaxed and enjoyable. If everyone knows which fork to use, how to make a
proper introduction, what to wear to a daytime wedding and the like, a common
ground is established on which everyone can meet comfortably. And that is
itself a kindness to others.
In contrast, the person who rejects manners
usually ends up imposing on others. Often, he justifies himself by saying,
"I just want to be me." But when "just being me" includes
slurping his soup, ignoring the guest on his right to lecture the guest on his
left, not writing a "bread and butter" letter after he has been a
houseguest or coming late to a dinner party, he is violating the Golden Rule.
When others do the same to him, he is not amused.
Manners, then, are grease for the gears of human interchange.
Like grease for mechanical gears, they promote smooth running, reduce friction,
and help all parts to work together without stress and strain. so, get yourself
a good etiquette book, and take your manners Retro. Do it not for yourself, but
as a service to those around you.
MUST WE THEN ACT "HOITY-TOITY?"
Quite the contrary. Miss Manners herself, aka
Judith Martin, puts that thought quickly to rest in her excellent "Guide
for the Turn-of-the-Millennium" where she notes that "hoity-toitiness
should be recognized as the irritant it is." The hoity-toity are putting
on an act, and people with manners do not do that. They are genuine. They
relate openly and honestly, without any pretense or false airs, to everyone
they meet, from the Duke of Omnium to the garbage collector. Traditionally, a
gentleman or a lady knew how to talk to people of every rank and station in a
way that made them feel comfortable. Hoity-toitiness was the mark of the
parvenu, the little shopkeeper recently jumped up from the working class,
Molieres' Bourgeois Gentlehomme. It earned then, and deserves from Retro-people
today, an amused contempt. The real opposite of hoity-toitiness, and an
essential ingredient of Retro-manners, is good taste. The very Retro Mrs.
Harriman writes:
A fundamental rule of good taste is simplicity.
Direct speech, plain dress and simple living are all forms of good taste.
Understatement is better than overstatement.... A woman of taste won't do
anything that is exaggerated. She won't speak too loudly, won't exaggerate in
her talk, and will never overdress. And she will never 'put on airs,' which is
what being hoity-toity amounts to. Any affectation of superiority is bad
manners; indeed, so is any affectation, period! A person with good manners is
marked by a desire to make the Other person comfortable, not to appear superior.
One of this century's great gentlemen, King Edward VII of England, once had the
King of Siam as his guest at a state dinner in Windsor Castle. When the
asparagus was served, the King of Siam, who was unfamiliar with all the rules
of Western table manners, proceeded to eat it with his fingers. So, promptly,
did King Edward (who thereby established a new rule of etiquette: you too may
now properly eat asparagus with your fingers).
WHERE DO RETRO-MANNERS APPLY?
They apply to far more than simply what fork to
use for oysters (an oyster fork) and where it goes at a place setting (on the
right). Mrs. Harriman includes under etiquette rules the quality of speech
("The speaking voice is our visiting card"), the art of conversation,
being a homemaker ("In recent years, chiefly because they were too busy
earning a living, women haven't done much housekeeping." Perhaps 1942 was
not as different from 2018 as we think!), table decorations, good taste
("Good taste is kindness or judgment or sophistication reduced to an
instinct. It has to be trained first, but it isn't taste until it becomes an
instinct"), the etiquette of bridge and other games, the good sport, on
being a good neighbor ("We should never entrust the family skeleton to our
neighbor unless we want it exhibited on the back fence"), manners on the
job and even on the road ("of course it goes without saying that nobody
should drive a car after drinking even so much as a couple of glasses of
beer"). Judith Martin, our modern Miss Manners, illustrates the broad
range of etiquette in a short disquisition on "The Meaningless
Exchange." She writes:
Anyone can have a meaningful exchange. Tiresome people do it all the time,
long past their and everybody else's bedtime. Meaningless exchanges, which are
actually more comforting, are the little pleasant phrases one uses to greet or
take leave of people, to signify a desire to converse, or simply to be
agreeable.
Visitors to France often remark on how pleasantly
the French interact (we are not speaking of head waiters and Americans) through
their many meaningless exchanges. One goes into a shop, and has a nice exchange
of courtesies before getting down to business: no mere "May I help
you?" or "Next!" here. In Arab countries, the meaningless
exchanges are still more developed: the shopkeeper asks about the well-being of
your family and you his, you discuss the weather a bit, often he even offers
tea or strong, sweet Turkish coffee long before any business comes up. To do
otherwise is looked upon as rude. It may not be a terribly efficient use of
time, but it makes both your day and his go more pleasantly. And that is what
etiquette is intended to do.
In the wide range of areas they cover, Mrs.
Harriman, Miss Manners and the many other writers on etiquette and manners all
make the same point: manners apply wherever people interact. And wherever you,
as a champion of Retroculture, allow the gentle rules of etiquette to operate,
you will find that the interaction goes more smoothly, more pleasantly for all
concerned.
ARE RETRO-MANNERS JUST "VICTORIAN"?
No. Though the Victorians generally had good
manners (good enough to put up with the many Victorian eccentrics who had bad
manners), etiquette and manners go back far beyond the Victorians. Some common
rules of etiquette go back to the age of chivalry, when life was sufficiently
rough that etiquette helped keep people from hewing at each other with
broadswords over minor misunderstandings (by shaking hands, you showed that
your right hand did not conceal a dagger). Some etiquette from pre-Victorian
times is now proving useful again.
In answer to the query, "How does a
comfortably married person go about making friends (I mean what I say: friends)
with an attractive member of the opposite sex?," Miss Manners replies,
"of course, there are proper ways for ladies and gentlemen to have
innocent and rewarding friendships. Such friendships went on quite naturally in
the eighteenth century (along with other interesting relationships) before the
days when attempting a harmless friendship became simply not worth the
scandal."
If your favorite Retroculture era is other than
the Victorian, you will find it has its own etiquette, which you may revive. It
was not until the mid-1960s that manners as a whole were thrown overboard.
DIFFERENCE WITHOUT DISRESPECT
You may hear some people argue against etiquette.
Usually, they say something like, "Oh, manners and etiquette were fine
back then, when people were more alike. But nowadays, we're much too diverse
for any rules like that. People today come from different ethnic backgrounds,
they have different views on almost everything, they may be feminists or
conservatives or gay rights people or who knows what. We are just too different
now to agree on any rules of conduct."
Well, it is certainly true that people are more
open about their differences than they used to be. But does that suggest a
lesser or a greater need for manners, politeness, and etiquette? What we need,
it would seem, are Retro-manners that allow us to be different without
offending others, without showing or causing disrespect, without stuffing our
difference in other people's faces to the point where they have to react to it
— and then complaining if their reaction is not what we wanted.
One of the Victorians' general rules of etiquette
was, "Don't frighten the horses." By that they meant that if you do
differ from general norms in some aspect of the way you live, don't thrust it
in people's faces. Be sufficiently discreet that other people may politely
ignore the difference if they choose to, treating you as if they simply didn't
know. Indeed, good manners dictate that they pass over such differences as
might disturb them, just as they dictate that you allow them to do so. This
permits everyone to get along together quite nicely, which is just what
etiquette is intended to do.
The rule, "In bounds, not in your
face," is a starting point for Retro-manners among people who differ. But
it is not all that old-fashioned etiquette offers to help people who differ get
along. If, for example, Ms. Braburner and General Pigge end up at the same
dinner party, they can manage quite nicely so long as they demonstrate good
manners. They are introduced, and have a polite meaningless exchange: "How
do you do?" and "How do you do?" It is time to be seated: The
General holds Ms. Braburner's chair, and she smiles and says "Thank
you" as she sits down. They restrict their table conversation to what they
can discuss pleasantly. As Mrs. Harriman writes, "one should avoid
discussion of operations, religion and politics — especially present-day
politics — unless one wants the entire party to wind up in the police
station." Through it all, General Pigge is imagining himself as Emperor at
the coliseum, grinning as he orders the lions let loose on Ms. Braburner, and
she is envisioning him served as the main course, trussed, nicely browned, with
an apple in his mouth. But by deferring not to each other so much as to the
rules etiquette lays down for all, they, and the rest of the company, enjoy
their dinner.
Unlike the law, etiquette respects the notion of
"separate but equal." Men and women deserve equally polite treatment,
but not the same treatment. In social situations (business etiquette is
different) the gentleman still holds the door for the lady, he still pulls out
her chair at the dinner table, and she still lets him lead when they dance. In
fact, Retro-manners between men and women in social situations are very much
like dancing (real dancing, not that stuff where people just get out there and
shake). It takes two people's combined efforts to make it work. It requires a
man who wishes to please, and a woman who wishes to be pleased.
A man who wishes to please is deferential and
respectful toward women. NO gentleman ever harasses a lady. Indeed, no
gentleman tolerates another man doing so. It is barbaric, and in the happy days
of yore, the offender could expect to be horsewhipped. The rules of etiquette
that apply to relations between men and women embody the deference a man should
always show. That is why it is helpful to know them.
Similarly, a lady is gracious in her reception of
a gentleman's deference. She allows him to perform the functions properly
reserved to the man; as the title of one book says, "real women don't pump
gas" (at least when a man is with them). She shows him that she is pleased
and grateful. And she looks for proper ways to return his favors, perhaps by
introducing into the conversation a topic on which she knows he will shine, or
letting him know that the gravlax on the buffet is particularly delicious and
should not be missed.
These Retro-rules are by no means hopelessly
antique. Miss Manners, who describes herself as an ardent feminist, writes,
"Are you ready yet to acknowledge that there are differences between
ladies and gentleman?" She lists a number she regards as quite up to date:
Ladies properly applaud differently from gentlemen. While a gentleman bangs
his vertically held palms together in front of him, a lady claps by holding her
left palm upward without moving it, and hitting it with downward strokes by her
right palm.
When wearing skirts, ladies sit differently from gentlemen. Gentlemen
either keep both feet on the floor, with the legs slightly parted, or less
formally, put the right ankle on the left knee. Females who are not ladies
cross their knees. Ladies cross their ankles, keeping the knees together. This is actually very comfortable when you get used to it.
Ladies do not put their names above their return addresses in social
correspondence. Ladies do not pour their own wine when gentlemen are present.
Ladies go first through doors but last down steps.
Ladies who are escorted by gentlemen begin carrying packages only when the
gentlemen are fully loaded, so to speak.
Ladies wear hats (except in their own houses) as a token of respect.
When they are walking outdoors, American ladies take the side away from the
curb. Neither these nor any other rules of etiquette imply inequality between
men and women; they simply acknowledge difference.
PUBLIC MANNERS
Public manners are the manners we show to
complete strangers, the people we sit next to on the trolley, pass on the
street, serve or are served by in shops. Here good manners have almost
vanished. The person next to you on the streetcar makes the toilette she should
have completed at home or keeps the volume on his headphones so high that you
must endure his wretched taste in music. The person passing you on the street
is wearing no shirt, confronting you inescapably with the fact that the
unclothed human body is as attractive as a plucked chicken. In the shop, the
sales people are too busy talking on their cellphones to serve you, or the
customer's first words to the clerk are given with a snarl.
How nice it is to live in a truly civil society!
Those Americans who have visited such places, in Europe or Asia, find returning
home something of a letdown. But America used to be noted for its civility, not
that many years ago. It was widely accepted that public manners were a reflection
on a person's family; to behave rudely in public was to announce that one had
been born in a barroom and reared in a stable. Mrs. Harrison writes,
"Whatever we do in public is a reflection of our home environment. If we
have consideration for others, we prove ourselves not only good citizens, but
members of a good family."
How can Retro-manners begin to return some
civility to public life? We should start by looking at our own behavior. In
dealing with people we do not know, do we remember the Golden Rule? Nowhere is
it easier to ignore than when dealing with strangers, yet nowhere is it more
necessary. Do our habits offend others? Would we be offended if someone else
did what we ourselves commonly do? Etiquette is a bit like Lent: it causes us to
reflect, perhaps somewhat painfully, on ourselves.
Once we have attempted to put our own house in
order, it is appropriate we begin to demand some adherence to standards from
those around us. We should not tolerate the intolerable, if only because we should
speak up on behalf of others. When the scummy kid on the subway has the volume
on his headphones cranked way up, it is our duty, not just our right, to tell
him (politely) to turn it down. When someone boards an airplane without a shirt
of any sort (yes, it happens, usually in California), it is appropriate to
express our disapproval. When someone throws his newspaper on the sidewalk, it
is entirely proper for us to suggest he pick it up. The modern notion that any
expression of disapproval is "intolerant" is wrong; after all, if
tolerance were the highest virtue, it would be impossible to oppose evil of any
sort. It is the duty of every good citizen to see that certain basic standards
of public behavior are maintained, and that when they are violated, there is
social sanction in the form of open disapproval. It is all that stands between
us and the monkey cage at the zoo.
It is also appropriate for us to take our
business to shops that offer polite service, and to shun those that do not. If
more of us did that, service would quickly become more mannerly, because the
establishments that practice rudeness would go out of business. Civil service
is real service. This applies doubly to government agencies that deal with the
public; there is nothing quite so rude as rudeness or neglect from people whose
salaries are paid by your taxes. Though people with good manners generally
avoid creating a scene, a bit of righteous wrath is in order when "public
servants" behave like the public's masters.
One particularly hideous custom of modern service
people deserves immediate, if polite, rebuke: calling customers by their first
names. Such familiarity is rightly reserved to family and friends, not waiters
and clerks. From the shopkeeper's standpoint, a bit of formality is good
business. People, and not only Retro-people, like being treated respectfully.
No one will be offended by being addressed as sir or ma'am (the latter, after
all, is how one addresses the Queen of England), or as Mr. or Mrs. or Miss
so-and-so when a name is required. Perhaps we should all resolve to let the tip
show our feelings the next time the waitress addresses us as "Bill"
or "Janie," because she hears us use those names in our own (properly
private) table talk.
Even Retrocultural people sometimes make
mistakes. Good public manners dictate a quick and sincere apology. (The same is
of course true in dealing with people we know; love does not mean never having
to say you're sorry!). Similarly, etiquette dictates that if we are the one in
whose soup someone else's champagne cork lands, we accept the apology (and the
new bowl of soup that should accompany it). Apologies offered and accepted do a
great deal to make life run more smoothly and keep everyone's stress level
down.
Another rule of public Retro-manners is that
noise is not nice. People whose car radios blast into the neighborhoods they
drive through, who equip their autos or motorcycles with mufflers that don't
muffle, who blast music out of their homes or stores, or who have loud outdoor
parties that last well into the night are being very impolite. The rest of us, who
have to hold our ears under the bombardment, should not suffer in silence. If
the noise is in the neighborhood, it is appropriate to call the offender and
suggest he modify his behavior. In the case of noisy vehicles, it is not too
much to shake one's umbrella angrily as the offender drives by. Of course, no
one with half-decent manners would ever wittingly inflict his preferred noise
on others. People with culture instinctively know this; it is never Bach or
Mozart one hears blasting from a passing car.
It is time we all joined in collective action to
restore the notion of public etiquette. There was a day when good public
manners were enforced quite strictly; a gentleman who appeared on the streets
in evening dress before 6 o’clock was likely to be hissed by passersby. Perhaps
we need not go quite that Retro, but Retroculture can do a great service by
making atrocious public manners subject to public censure. Such censure is not
rude (and should be expressed politely in all but the most egregious and
obviously intentional cases). It is our civic duty.
OFFICE ETIQUETTE
Retro-manners accept the idea that office
etiquette and social etiquette are different. For example, on a social
occasion, a Retro-gentleman should pick up the check for dinner unless there
has been an explicit arrangement beforehand to do otherwise. At a business
lunch, it is appropriate for a man and a woman to split the check, or for the
woman to pay if the lunch were at her request.
But the fact that social and business etiquette
differ does not mean manners cease to apply in the business world. Judith
Martin notes, "Miss Manners sees great progress in the fact that ladies
and gentlemen can pursue many different occupations, not just the traditional
ones of exploiting serfs and marrying money, but it dismays her that they have
forgotten how to act like ladies and gentlemen." An article in Tie New
York Times noted how prevalent bad manners in the office have become:
Among the most commonly voiced gripes about both managers and employees
were these: starting the day with a request (or a demand) rather than with a
good morning, viewing an open door as an invitation to walk in and sit down,
routinely leaving desks or offices without informing anyone of whereabouts,
dropping trash on the floor and leaving it for the maintenance crew to clean it
up and believing that paychecks are compensation enough and that there is no
need for pleases and thank-yous for jobs done or service requested.
In 1983, upon releasing his book 'Ike New Office
Etiquette (Poseidon Press), George Mazzei said: "There has been a
breakdown in business manners and people are realizing they can no longer deal
with the constant rudeness which became a part of the business world when crude
young people became superstars."
Smart businesses know that etiquette helps an
office run more smoothly, which means greater efficiency. It also raises office
morale, which benefits productivity. It is not accidental that Japanese
corporations lay great weight on proper office etiquette; on entering a
company, a Japanese employee is often given a lengthy manual on the company's
rules of etiquette. Several books are available on proper office manners,
including George Mazzei's, noted above, and Letitia Baldridge's Complete Guide
to Executive Manners (Rawson Associates, 1985). An office might do more to
improve its competitiveness by investing some tens of dollars in a few copies
of these than thousands of dollars in additional computers.
WHICH RETRO-MANNERS?
So far have manners disappeared that just having
manners makes you Retro; in fact, it is Retro just to try to have good manners.
Fortunately, as the poll quoted at the beginning of this chapter shows, manners
are an area where a great many people want to go Retro. The rudeness that has
become common in both public and private behavior over the last thirty years
turns most people off. And the only solution is to go back to manners and
etiquette. Retroculture rules!
But those who want to go Retro with their manners
do have a choice to make. You can go with either "updated" etiquette,
or revive period etiquette straight.
Miss Manners represents updated etiquette. She
writes,
It is true that some things have changed since Miss Manners and Queen
Victoria went to school together: Most adults are in the workforce, which
means that ladies must practice, and must be treated with, good business
manners. ... New customs much be developed for managing the domestic, social,
and community realms that ladies used to run. Divorce is widespread. Servants
have been largely replaced by household equipment. Weddings are held at what we
shall ever so gently call a later state of courtship. Society has
learned to recognize social units short of marriage and needs rules
for dealing with them.
Updated etiquette is perhaps the most practical.
It provides rules for situations that did not used to exist (or at least were
not recognized by polite people and so needed no etiquette). It is adapted to
facts like life without servants and fraternity parties without chaperons. In
the main, it is not all that different from the etiquette grandmother used to
follow. Most changes are simply adaptations. Writing of etiquette for such
modern conveniences such as answering machines, beepers and faxes, Miss Manners
notes, "There is some new stuff around since the Etiquette Council held
its last congress, some time after the Congress of Vienna. You will forgive
Miss Manners for speaking of it in old-fashioned terms. The fact is that while
ways of doing things may be new, things to be done are generally not, and
adaptation, rather than invention, is usually what is needed to cope."
The other option is to go Retro all the way and
use the etiquette from "your" era straight. This is more feasible
than it might seem (unless your era is the Middle Ages or Augustan Rome). Miss
Manners, modernizer though she is, recognizes how much old-fashioned etiquette
may still be applied:
It was on a crumbling page of a hundred-year-old etiquette book that Miss
Manners came across the solution to that enduring problem of what to say when
confronted with a person whose name you know you are expected to know but
don't. The answer comes to us from an anonymous Victorian, apparently a Hero of
Etiquette, but described merely as 'a good-natured eccentric.' Beaming a jovial
smile at a vaguely familiar face, he would inquire in a pleasant, oh-by-the-way
tone, 'You don't happen to remember your name, do you?' Miss Manners is given
to perusing aged volumes for just such forgotten devices to ease the
difficulties of life. ... Vintage etiquette holds up remarkably well. The human
body may have changed, as anyone trying to squeeze into vintage clothing may
discover, but the situations into which it manages to get itself are not all
that different.
If you take a look through a vintage etiquette
book such as Mrs. Harriman's, you will quickly see how much does still apply.
For example, writing in the early 1940s, she had this to say on business
etiquette:
Women in business should try to meet men on equal terms without making them
overly conscious of the fact that they belong to the opposite sex. And women
shouldn't expect any special consideration simply because of their sex. Imagine
how much would be accomplished if a man stood up every time his secretary
entered the office! The exceptional women who have forged ahead in their fields
in spite of all opposition (yes, there is still discrimination against women in
business, make no mistake about that) are invariably attractive and feminine.
They dress very well and their grooming is always meticulous. But they have a
certain impersonal attitude toward their work which makes men forget they are
women. They put their work before everything else, in which respect they are
akin to men and, therefore, equally successful.
A modern writer might phrase that a bit
differently, but the sentiments expressed are unexceptionable, even today. If
you adopt period etiquette, there may be some modern situations for which you
are not fully prepared, and you may find people thinking your manners a trifle
quaint on some occasions. But you can manage the former quite nicely simply by
being tactful, and in the latter case, people are more likely to be charmed
than offended. Remember, Retroculture is increasingly fashionable, so when you
do or say something old-fashioned, people are more likely to envy or emulate you
than to take exception.
Whether you choose to update your manners or not,
you will have no trouble finding materials to advise you on etiquette. Current
books on etiquette are plentiful (we will confess to preferring Miss Manners,'
perhaps because even when her advice is up-to-date, her style is pleasantly
antique). For older etiquette books, just visit a good used bookstore: they
usually have at least a few in stock.
And, of course, you can always just ask your
Grandmother.
CHAPTER IX
Retro-Travel
IN RECENT YEARS, travel, as our grandparents and
great-grandparents knew it, has almost disappeared. Its sorry replacement is
"transportation:" getting from point A to point B as quickly as
possible, never mind how miserable the journey. So, we wedge ourselves into
tiny airplanes seats, stuffed three to a row, while we pass far over what might
be the most glorious scenery on earth. Or we speed along the Interstate
highway, our eyes fixed in terror on the truck radiator that fills our
rear-view mirror, while the road does its utmost to pass around any local
points of interest — not that we could stop for them anyway ("No Stopping
on Shoulder, Next Exit 13 Miles"). We tunnel under or speed quickly above
America's great rivers, missing their scenic wonders (the Hudson valley is our
Rhine). Getting about locally, at least in our cities, has become sheer hell
thanks to gridlock, permanent rush hour and a seeming propensity of any truck
that carries hazardous waste to find the local beltway and roll over on it. 'Getting
there is half the fun"? Not anymore.
Well, you know, once upon a time, getting there
was half the fun. People weren't just "transported," like so many
sides of mutton. They travelled. They travelled in style, they travelled in
ways that allowed them to appreciate the places they passed through, and,
incredible as it may sound to us, they travelled for pleasure. Then, as now,
travel had certain inconveniences — the snowy white linen in the Pullman berth
was, come morning, grey from locomotive soot— but journeys were events,
experiences, even adventures, filled with new sights, sounds and people,
memorable quite apart from where they ended up. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote,
"There isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it is going."
What early 21st century poet would write that about seat 9E (center)
on the 12:30 PM flight out of La Guardia for LAX?
Retro-travel aims at recovering the pleasure of
the journey itself. Sometimes, as when on vacation, this requires little more
than a decision to take some extra time along the way. In other cases, it may
take some imagination. Business travel (now almost all just
"transportation") is a case in point. What business would allow its
employees to enjoy travel on business? Well, perhaps one that thought a bit.
Not only can real travel sometimes save a company money (taking a train
between, say, Washington and Boston, is cheaper), it may also raise the
efficiency of employees. Is a company best served by representatives who come
into a key meeting exhausted, their body clocks gone haywire from too many time
zones crossed too quickly, their brains addled and their nerves frazzled? Or
would the "big deal" best be clinched by someone who had been given
more time away from the office for a while, with a chance to think and reflect?
More and more companies are discovering that the straight line between two
points is not necessarily the best route if you want good performance from your
people. A well-traveled representative, not one who has just undergone the shock
of being packaged and shipped, may bring home the biggest dividends.
Similarly, local travel is often possible,
despite gridlock often, the key is simply leaving the car at home. "Public
transit" may bring to mind crowded buses and grimy subways, but in a
growing number of cities, modern rail systems offer relaxed, pleasant ways to
travel. And when you get off, you can get your daily exercise and see a bit of
the town by walking to your destination. That is how most people got around in
the years up until the 1940s, when, in a sad mistake, most cities got rid of
their streetcars (like the famous "Red Cars" in Los Angeles). You can
read your paper on the train, or just gaze at the passing scene, unworried about
traffic jams and overturned trucks, then perhaps make a quick stop at the
bakery on your walk to the office. You arrive relaxed, at peace with the world,
and with a few new ideas about the days work from the unhurried, unharried time
you had to think on the train.
Perhaps the key to really traveling, from place
to place or just in town, is simply to start doing it. Like much of
Retroculture, it begins with your decision: to start to enjoy the trip itself,
instead of just focusing on "getting there." As the saying goes, take
some time to smell the flowers. Think about how you might go a new way, or
travel by a different mode, so as to get something out of the journey. As the
rest of this chapter points out, there are a number of different ways to
travel, and they all offer something more than "transportation."
THE TRAIN
If God had meant for man to fly, He would never
have given us the railways. The airplane gets you there (most of the time,
anyway), but that’s about all that can be said for it. The train, in contrast,
is Retro- travel. If offers many of the things people pay lots of money for
when they go on cruises, and unlike a cruise, it still takes you someplace.
"Dinner in the diner, nothing could be
finer," is a line from the famous song, "Chattanooga Choo-choo."
And it's true. Where else can you enjoy a freshly prepared dinner while the
countryside goes whizzing by in a grand show? No plane or car or bus can offer
that. Nor can they offer a private room each night, with your very own bed; but
a railway sleeping car can, and does. Even in humble coach class, trains offer
space and comfort greater than most airlines manage in first class.
Unlike the plane or the car, the train is social.
You don't just meet the people who sit near you. You wander about in a train,
meeting whomever you like. The lounge car is a
"common room," where it is easy to strike up a conversation. In the
diner, tables are shared; you may sit with, say, a grandmother from Dakota's
farm country on her way to visit her grandchildren, an architecture student
returning home for vacation, and a businessman whose company knows the night
train saves "real" time — and money.
If you prefer solitude, you can usually find
that, too, in a seat by yourself or a compartment (called a
"roomette," and a remarkable tribute to efficient use of space) in a
sleeper. There, you can enjoy a panorama nothing else can offer, as the train,
unencumbered by roadside shopping centers and Vegas' strips, cuts its straight
and narrow way through America. Up the Hudson valley, through the Pennsylvania
hills, across the great plains and among the Rocky Mountains, the train gives
you our nation, displayed at its finest right in front of your nose. You have
nothing to do but relax, in the cushioned comfort of the safest form of travel,
and enjoy it.
Until about seventy-five years ago, most people
travelled by train. And most of them enjoyed it. On the whole, the trains then
were better than those we have today. But Amtrak, after some early years
plagued by worn-out cars and surly employees, now does a decent job. The
Western trains have splendid equipment, double-decker cars where you ride high
above the rails on a smooth, silent magic carpet. And they have a pleasant
Retro feel to them, suggesting the great days of the Super Chief and San
Francisco Zephyr. While Amtrak doesn't yet offer the ambiance of the 20th
Century Limited, it does provide something very like the train travel
experience our grandparents and great-grandparents knew. It isn't just
transportation; it is travel — Retro-travel.
It is also increasingly popular. More and more
people are discovering the pleasures of Retro-travel with Amtrak, with the
result that it can be hard to get tickets, especially in the summer. Sleeping
car space is often sold out months in advance on the Western trains. But prices
are moderate, and Amtrak now serves 500 towns and cities. You can probably take
the train on your next trip, no matter where you're going; just plan ahead. If
you haven't done it in years, or perhaps never, you're in for a treat. You'll
find out just how much you've been missing, crammed into seat 9E on the tin
bird.
FIGURE 6. The parlor-lounge car of the Great Northern "The
International" train.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)
FIRST CLASS "PLUS"
In the great days of the railways, a few trains
were truly grand: "First Class Plus," they were called, because they
not only required a first class ticket, but a supplementary fare on top of
that. Such were the 20th Century Limited,14 Santa Fe's
Deluxe and later its Super Chief, and a few others. The noted rail writer and
photographer Lucius Beebe wrote of the 20th Century:
14 An express passenger train on the New York Central railroad. —Editor.
Placed in service in 1902 as an all-Pullman, extra fare, de luxe conveyance
for the affluent and the powerful of a well-ordered world, it
became the stuff of folklore, the central theme of plays and motion pictures
and possessed of perhaps the most ample biography of any train in the record of
surface transportation. Great drama and momentous decisions of state and
finance rode its luxuriously upholstered cars and it was and is the only train
to arouse so fierce and enduring a loyalty that a club of gentlemen was
organized for the sole purpose of riding aboard it and holding their annual
dinner en route.
"First Class Plus" is now also making a
comeback, and in a few places, you may now travel as the élite et bon ton of
the early years of this century did. A touch of "first class plus"
may be found on one of Amtrak's most unusual trains: Autotrain. Autotrain
carries people with their automobiles from Lorton, Virginia to Florida, saving
them a dreary drive on the Interstate. For those who take it first class, in a
sleeping car, Amtrak has created something of the feel of the great trains. Not
only is the service excellent, but the separate first-class-only dining car is
a dome car. You ride high above the rest of the train under a great glass
bubble, enjoying first-rate cuisine elegantly served, dining literally under
the stars.
Quite separate from Amtrak is another bit of
Retro-travel, in this case a true rail cruise: the dinner train. Dinner trains
don't really go anywhere; you get off where you got on. But in the meantime,
you have taken a leisurely train ride through the countryside while enjoying
dinner in the diner. The food ranges from home style to gourmet dining, but in
each case, you get to experience that unique attribute of rail travel, the
ability to dine while on the move. Dinner trains may now be found in many
locations throughout the country, and they are an excellent way to introduce
yourself to the Retro-pleasure of riding the rails.
Amtrak's trains and most dinner trains are pulled
by electric or diesel locomotives. Except to rail fans, they aren't very
interesting—just big boxes than hum. In the great days of railway travel, most
of the engines were steam. A steam engine, more than any other of man's
contrivances, is alive. It hisses, it breathes, it exhibits all its workings to
the observing eye. Fortunately, Retroculture already includes a revival of
steam locomotives, for special trips. Some are run by railroads, such as
Norfolk Southern. Others are owned and run by museums and clubs of steam fans.
All offer splendid Retro travel, usually in the summer months, and often with
antique passenger cars to complement the old-fashioned locomotives. On these
trips, you can really get a feel for what train travel used to be like, right
down to the occasional cinder in your eye. For the Retro person, nothing is
quite equal to travel behind steam, with its unforgettable sights and sounds,
and in them the history of the technology that, more than any other, knitted
this country together and made of us a nation.
Special trips and steam runs by museums can now
be found in most parts of the country. Call or write your nearest railway
museum, or contact your local chapter of the National Rail Historical Society.
Trips range from runs of an hour or so over a few miles of museum-owned track to
excursions of several days covering a thousand miles of main-line railroad.
Many special trips offer limited, extra-fare first class accommodations; often,
the First Class cars are Pullmans or parlor cars from the teens or 20s. For
those looking for Retro-travel, the extra fare is worth it.
However you choose to do it, sometime, somewhere,
take a train ride. Trains aren't just part of the Retro life; they are an
essential element, because they are how most of our forefathers travelled most
of the time. To understand how they saw the world and gain a feeling for their
lives, we all need to ride a train at least once. Chances are, if you do it
once, you'll get hooked. You will find just how nice real travel — train travel
— can be.
URBAN TRAVEL: THE SECOND COMING OF THE TROLLEY CAR
In 1888, the first practical, successful electric
streetcar system began operation in Richmond, Virginia. Within a decade,
trolley systems were proliferating wildly all across the nation. Just as our
ancestors got around the country on the train, they got around town on the streetcar.
But by the 1920s Henry Ford's Model T was rolling
off the assembly lines in the millions, and soon people were leaving trolley
cars for private automobiles. By the 1930s, trolley systems were being abandoned
right and left, with buses taking over the remaining riders of public transit. The
few systems that survived World War Il (when ridership boomed, thanks to gas
rationing) were almost all closed soon thereafter.
The rise and fall of the electric streetcar was
rapid—it was the most ephemeral of all capital-intensive industries — but also
typical. One technology was replaced by another. But starting in the 1980s,
something very untypical happened: using essentially the same technology, the
streetcar began a comeback. Sometimes under the fancy new name of "Light
Rail," streetcar systems were opened in a number of cities, beginning in
1981 with San Diego. Now, new trolleys are running in Portland, Oregon;
Sacramento; San Jose; Los Angeles; Buffalo; Kansas City; Cincinnati; Edmonton
and Calgary, Canada; and in a few cities that had the wisdom never entirely to
get rid of them, including San Francisco, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Boston.
Like Lazarus, our old friend from Toonerville has risen from the dead!
The return of the streetcar
offers Americans in a growing number of cities the opportunity for urban
Retro-travel. IVs Retro because it's the way we use to get to work, go downtown
to shop, and visit our friends in town, from the 1890s into the inter-war
years. It's travel, and not mere transit, because riding a streetcar is fun! At
the height of the first trolley era, early in the century, millions of people
took pure trolley joy-rides — riding just for the pleasure of riding. Many of
the cars of that era had open sides, and on a warm summer evening, an easy way
to enjoy a cooling breeze and just relax was to spend a nickel on a trolley
ride, particularly on a line that ran out into the country as many did. There
were trolley party-cars, with Victrolas.15 One young couple even spent their
honeymoon taking the trolley from Delaware to Maine, then wrote a book about
it! "Ride a Mile and Smile the While" was the trolleys' slogan, and a
great many people did exactly that.
15 Victrola was a brand name of phonograph. — Editor.
Riding the trolley car is still fun today. It
feels entirely different from a bus. The seats are wider and more comfortable,
with more leg room. There is no vibration from the electric motors. It feels—well,
like it's riding on rails, which of course it is. It's smooth and quiet— and non-polluting.
You look down the busy street to either side and see into all the shop windows.
Then, often, the trolley right-of-way cuts off from the street at the edge of
town, and you sail through the countryside, unencumbered by the
side-of-the-road detritus of modern life. Unlike the subway, stuck in its dark
tube, the trolley usually runs on the surface where there is lots to see and
watch. Free from the need to stare into the bumper of the car in front of you,
you relax, enjoy— and travel.
In some cities, you can even travel on antique
trolley cars, with the polished wood and brushed brass of an earlier and more
gracious era. New Orleans' streetcars were built in the 1920s, and, unschlocked
by "modernization," they retain the charm of their era as they glide
down St. Charles Avenue, past many of America's most stately homes. San Jose
has a downtown Trolley Mall where antique cars, some dating to the early years
of the century, mix with modern Light Rail Vehicles. San Francisco's Market
Street line carries 20,000 people per day on antique streetcars...
The streetcar renaissance is Retroculture at its
best; the recovery of an almost-lost way of travel as an antidote to gridlock
and automobile exhaust. The next time you're in a city that has trolley cars,
take a ride. You'll quickly see why commuting was not, for our grandparents,
the hassle it has become for us. You can travel — really travel —in the city,
thanks to the miracle of 19th-century technology.
"Believe me, my young friend, there is
nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth
doing as simply messing about in boats."
— WATER RAT, The Wind in the Willows
Before the glories of train travel were given to
us by the power of steam and steel, the principal mode of travel was by boat.
Journeys overland, by horse or carriage, were rough and slow and usually an
ordeal. But by water, travel — getting from one place to another enjoyably—was
possible. As late as the 1930s, people still travelled by boat on America's
inland and coastal waterways. Great sidewheel steamships like the Seeandbee (so
large that in World War II she was converted, side wheels and all, into an
aircraft carrier to train pilots on Lake Michigan) connected the Great Lakes
ports on overnight runs, and the Hudson River Day Line still ran through
American's most gorgeous gorge with floating palaces like the Alexander
Hamilton. Up until the early 1960s you could still take the night boat down the
Potomac from Washington to Norfolk, your automobile stowed safely on the lower
deck.
Today, there are still opportunities to
Retro-travel by boat. One kind of boat, ferryboats, are even making something
of a comeback. Displaced in recent decades by bridges carrying interstates—
mere transportation — the humble but likeable ferries are reappearing, like the
trolley car, as a way around the traffic jams all that highway construction
engendered. In San Francisco, across Chesapeake Bay to Maryland's eastern shore,
and in New York City new ferry services have recently been launched to
widespread acclaim: Wrote The New York Times:
Long before dawn, commuters arrive at the dock in Weehauken, NJ., first one
by one, then in briskly moving masses. Briefcases in hand, they board a blue
and white ferry marked 'Midtown.' And for the next five minutes, until the Port
Imperial ferry docks at West 38th Street in Manhattan, serenity
seems to settle over the crowd.
'Before the overwhelming assault on my senses, I just like to have a few
Buddha-like moments,' said one woman who sat on the upper deck, her eyes closed
and her face lifted into a breeze rolling off the Hudson River...
'It's a kind of renaissance,' said David Phraner, a transportation planner
for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The idea of ferries
criss-crossing New York's rivers like bootlaces is an old idea made new...
'This is the nicest thing that ever happened to me,' said William Kremer as
be boarded a Weehawken Ferry from Manhattan. 'I drove for more than twenty-six
years and Id get stuck for at least forty-five minutes twice a week. My nerves
were totally shot.'
Richard Maxwell, an insurance broker who was boarding the afternoon ferry
to Highlands, New Jersey, is another convert. 'I used to take the train, then
the car, and it was a killer,' he said. 'This is much better. It has changed my
life.'
Before the 1960s, when the world went to pot, the
grandest boating most travelers enjoyed was "Crossing the Pond"
—taking one of the great ocean liners to Europe. Grand hotels afloat, they
offered every comfort: haute cuisine dining, dancing in the ballroom, swimming
pools and movie theaters, even skeet shooting off the fantail. They were the
epitome of travel, of pleasure found in the journey itself. It is an experience
the traveler may yet enjoy, thanks to the first and greatest of Great Britain's
trans-Atlantic steamship companies, Cunard. Cunard's Queen Mary still plies the
Atlantic fall through spring, upholding the grand tradition. She is a thoroughly
British ship, with afternoon tea and a proper sense of dignity and decorum. Nor
is she strictly for the super-rich; regular fares begin at just over and
standby tickets are even less. Make no mistake, crossing the Atlantic on the
Queen Mary, is not a mere "cruise." You are really going somewhere,
either There or Back Again. And you are doing it in style: Retrostyle. You
would not be surprised to find a Vanderbilt in the neighboring deck chair, or
meet a Windsor over dinner. If Retro-travel by boat does gain new favor, there
is an exciting possibility for resurrecting a mode of travel long gone. What is
it? Canals.
In England, for almost fifty years people have
been restoring 18th-and early 19th-century canals. There, you can charter your
own boat and run it yourself. The boats are patterned after the canal boats of
the past, "narrowboats" as the English call them (and theirs are very
narrow indeed!). Driven now by a motor instead of pulled by horses, they
nonetheless move at the same deliberate speed of a few miles per hour, allowing
a leisurely and detailed study of the English countryside. You have on board
comfortable bunks and a galley where you may cook. You may stop where you like
to explore a town, dine in a local pub, or take a walk cross country. A growing
number of Americans now take "canalling" vacations in Great Britain,
seeing that country as they might have seen it not just one, but two hundred
years ago.
In the east, America also had its canals. The
Erie canal still operates, as the modernized New York State Barge Canal. But
New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, and even the Midwest also had canals,
most built in the early 19th century and abandoned early in the
20th. Enough remains of many of them, like the C&O canal that ran from Washington,
D.C. to Cumberland, Maryland (now a national park), to permit their
restoration. Imagine taking a week-long cruise through the heart of the
Allegheny Mountains, among some of America's best scenery, stopping at historic
towns like Harper's Ferry and traveling at a pace where you would see as much
as if you walked. If it's happened in England, why not here?
MOTORING
Driving isn't traveling. For the most part, it is
a chore. In rush hour, or on crowded interstates surrounded by 18-wheelers, it
can be a nightmare. The automobile, originally a liberating device, has become
confining.
But it need not always be so. Retroculture offers
an alternative to driving: motoring. In motoring, the object is to enjoy the
journey, to travel, not merely to "get someplace." In the early days
of the automobile, if you just wanted to get someplace, you could almost always
do so faster on the train or the trolley. You went by motor-car because it was
something of an adventure. You could stop along the way to see points of
interest, explore a different road or slow down and see the countryside.
Retro-travel by automobile essays to recover the spirit of long-ago motoring.
You can do this even on some of your daily rounds, just by taking the old road
or the back road instead of the new highway. It takes a bit more time, but
provides a break instead of a tension headache. Or, you may choose to plan
motoring trips, where the goal from the outset is to take the road less
travelled. Either way, you may experience again what the automobile used to
provide before there were too many of them.
While you can use any kind of car for motoring,
there is one variety particularly suited to it: the open car, roadster or
convertible. From the first automobiles through the 1920s, most cars were open.
Today, an open car best offers the feel of old-time motoring, of the days of
linen dusters and goggles, big hats and veils. You get the sights and sounds
and smells of the country much more strongly than if you are sealed up in a
steel cocoon, the radio or CD player filling your ears while the climate
control system makes summer and winter indistinguishable. Nor is top-down
motoring just a summer sport; few motoring pleasures exceed pottering along in
an open car on a fall day, a lap robe and the car heat keeping your feet toasty
while you enjoy the crisp, clean air. Fortunately, open cars have been an early
Retro-revival. After almost disappearing in the 1970s, they have made a strong
comeback. Today, you can find them in almost any size or configuration. You
don't have to have one to motor, of course, but they do offer that extra touch
of the past Retro-travelers always seek.
Let's say you've equipped
yourself with a suitable machine and are set for some serious Retro-motoring.
Where might you start? One of the best places is an old map or atlas. Not
surprisingly, you are likely to find most of the past along the oldest roads.
Sometimes, the old roads have lost their character because too much that is
modern has been built up along them; they have become victims of the
"Vegas strip." But in a good number of places, time, in the form of
super- highways, has bypassed the old roads, leaving them with the feel of days
gone by. You go through the towns, not around them, past the farms and country
houses (built close to the road in the days before automobiles), along by the
rivers and the railways, following what are often the earliest paths the first
settlers took You may stop where you choose (no signs warning "Emergency
Stops Only"), slow to read the historical markers, and when you find an
especially pretty spot, get out and walk a bit.
You may readily combine such "shunpike"
motoring with travel on special "scenic routes." Many maps mark
highways with especially nice scenery, or AAA can route you for the best
viewing. Often, the old road and the scenic route are one and the same.
The revolt against the plastic,
everywhere-the-same chain motels has given us suitable Retro-lodging to
accompany motoring, in the growing number of country inns and Bed and Breakfast
accommodations. A number of guidebooks list such places, and many local tourist
information services can also point you toward them. B&Bs in particular are
often quite reasonably priced; even in a tourist area like the Laurel Highlands
of Maryland and Pennsylvania, pleasant accommodations can be found for $35 or
even $25 per night. In some towns, you may also find survivors from the
pre-motel era, in the form of Tourist Homes. These may offer what the
Retro-traveler seeks most: a place to stay that has not changed since the 1930s
or even 1920s. In a few places, like Cape May, New Jersey, you may even find
one of the great 19th-century summer resort hotels, still open for business and
largely or wholly unmodernized. The Hotel Chalfont in Cape May, now designated
as a national landmark, still has the original air conditioning (a set of
louvered doors on each room, to admit the sea breeze), the original
entertainment (wicker rockers on the porch and a library well stocked with
third-rate Edwardian novels), and a dining room served by the same family of
cooks for generations. Staying there, you half expect to find that your Ford or
Mazda has been transmogrified into a Packard or a Hupmobile.16
16 The Hupmobile was a popular car series built by the Hupp Motor Car Company
between 1909 and 1939. —Editor.
Motoring is also enhanced by finding Retro
establishments in which to eat. The small towns through which the old roads
pass often hold survivors from the time before the fast food deluge. These tend
to be of two types. The first is the local "nice place to have
dinner," known generically to our grandparents as the "Green
Palm." The menu is strictly American, the waitresses usually
grandmotherly, and the prices reasonable. The other type is the lunch counter,
known universally (at least in the Northeast) as "Harry the Greeks."
A close cousin to the diner, which you may also find on occasion, Harry the
Greek's is eggs over easy with real (not frozen) home fries for breakfast, or a
grilled cheese and a fountain coke for lunch. Harry is usually a bit of a
character and a good guide to the local scene; his prices are downright cheap.
Both Harry's and the Green Palm are essentially unchanged since the 1940s.
Needless to say, the Retro-traveler does not eat
in fast food joints, those gustatory cesspools of the Interstate Era. Thrown
upon his own resources, he would rather stop in the local grocery and obtain
the fixings of a picnic. In a number of states, a thoroughly Retro site for
picnicking may still be found: the roadside park. Often built by the CCC in the
1930s, the roadside park offers some picnic tables, an outhouse, and a water
pump. It also frequently presents a charming face to the old road on which you
will find it: a grove of noble trees, a small stream, some well-shaded nooks,
even a nice view over the countryside. Once, roadside parks were heavily used;
now, bypassed by the Interstates, you are likely to have plenty of privacy.
Sadly, some States, such as Ohio, have eliminated their roadside parks for that
very reason. But those that survive may take a new lease on life as
Retroculture brings a return to genuine motoring.
And if a roadside park is not available, you can
almost everywhere find a pleasant alternative: have your picnic in a cemetery.
That may seem strange to those accustomed to things modern, but it used to be
quite common. The first "garden" cemetery in the nation (as distinguished
from the simple churchyard), which opened in Boston in the 19th
century, encouraged picnicking from the start (and still does). Cemeteries are
quiet, green, and often well sited, and the people there are probably glad of
the company. Of course, here as everywhere, Retroculture people are careful to
clean up after themselves.
The combination of scenic old roads, small towns
and farms, country inns to stay in and Green Palms to dine in can resurrect the
automobile from its dreary functionality and make it again what it was in its
early days, an amusing toy— especially if it is an open car. But there is one
rule you must follow if you wish to attempt motoring: don't plan to go too far
too fast. One hundred miles in a day is probably a good point from which to
figure. In flat country, with farms and towns far-spaced, you may manage more
without descending into mere driving; in the mountains, or in places like New
England where an interesting town waits around each corner, you may find you
wish to do less. Remember, when you go motoring, your real destination is the
road itself. As a Retroculture person, if you wanted to get someplace in a
hurry, you’d simply take the train.
WALKING AND BICYCLING
Most people who have adopted a Retroculture
lifestyle are looking for a world which, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, is less
noisy and greener. One way to find such a world is to get around quietly,
without assistance from noisy motors, by walking or on a bicycle.
As we noted earlier in this volume, our ancestors
got a good bit of exercise, though none of them owned Nautilus17 machines or went
jogging. They simply walked to get where they were going. Walking remains the
best way to get around if you really want to see where you are. You can explore
where you want, stop when you want, and you never go so fast that you are
likely to miss something. You will never see a new city or town or bit of
country so well as when you walk it. And even in places you know, you will see
something different almost every time you go walking. Modern people may object
that walking is too slow, but Retroculture seeks to slow life down a bit; it
goes quite fast enough without any motorized assistance. And you may speed up
your journey by combining walking with use of public transport. If you walk to
and from your Stop on the trolley or railway line, you get your daily exercise
and take a breather from the days otherwise hectic pace.
17 A brand of home fitness machine. —Editor.
As any student of the 1880s or 1890s can tell
you, the first revolution in personal mobility— the ability to go where you
want without consulting schedules —was not the automobile but the bicycle. By
the turn of the century, people were getting around locally quite nicely—and
quietly— by bike. In some places, like Holland, they still do.
By the 1950s, bicycles in the United States were
largely relegated to children. Fortunately, in the last thirty or so years the
bicycle has made a big comeback. Millions of adults now own bicycles, and use
them. Many metropolitan areas have extensive networks of bike paths; maps are
readily available in map shops or tourist bureaus. A number of rural areas also
have bike trails, converted from abandoned railway lines. These make good
biking, because grades are gentle (for a railway, a 2% grade is steep).
Mountain bikes have opened the door to cross-country bicycling as well, at
least for the hardy.
FIGURE 7. Greyhound Bus Terminal, Cincinnati, Ohio. (Source: Boston Public
Library)
Retroculture takes full advantage of the return
of the bicycle, not just by joining in recreational bicycling, but by
reintroducing the bicycle as a regular way to get around. The bicycle need not
just be a toy; often, it may substitute for the automobile for local travel.
And it can make getting around locally really traveling, because on a bicycle
you see much more than you do from a car.
A couple modest changes to the average bicycle
can help make it a practical and pleasant way to get around. First, put a
comfortable seat on it. These are now readily available from most bicycle
shops. Second, add a basket, either one up by the handlebars or two over the
rear wheels. That way, you can carry a bag of groceries home from the store, or
even two. So modified, you may find your bicycle handier in many cases than
your car. And, as with walking, you will be getting your exercise naturally,
while doing something else. You may not need that health club membership after
all.
Retro-travel, like other aspects of Retroculture,
turns to the past to find better ways to live in the present. Trains, trolleys,
boats, motoring, bicycling and walking were the ways our ancestors got around.
offer ways we can do the same, and with less stress, less pollution, and more
of a chance to enjoy the journey itself. We may all have to take that 9E seat
in the airplane on occasion, or drive on the Interstate. But we don't have to
make either of those the norm. With a bit of foresight, we can plan our travel
so it really is travel. And, once again, getting there can be at least half the
fun.
CHAPTER X
Retro-Business
PRESIDENT COOLIDGE SAID, business of America is
business." That makes Retroculture good news for America, because
Retroculture opens the door to many new business opportunities in both products
and services. Just as businesses have always gotten ahead by thinking of
something new, now, in the Retroculture era, they can get ahead by thinking of
something old.
As we have noted throughout this book,
Retroculture people will want to get many of the things they need by making
them themselves or by finding the genuine old articles. Retroculture is not one
more cry to "Go out there and buy!" But at the same time, they will
want old-fashioned versions of the things they need to buy, and also some
Retro-services. Meeting those needs offers some interesting, and potentially
rewarding, business opportunities. That, in turn, offers Retro-people who are
in business a chance to expand their Retroculture world to include their work.
What could make work more rewarding for, say, a shop owner whose favorite era
is the 1920s than running a shop like one in the 1920s?
Let's take a look at a number of
different businesses and see what opportunities Retroculture might offer.
Imagine for a moment that you are a big executive
with one of the automobile companies in Detroit. For years, your company has
steadily been losing market share to imports. If you try to copy the imports,
you find yourself playing a game they know better than you do; their small cars
are better than your small cars. If you take a jump ahead of them with a
futuristic design, they adjust so quickly and copy you that you get only a
brief respite. You keep on asking yourself the question, what can my company
build that people will want and that the imports can't simply copy?
How about the 1957 Chevy? Or the 1956 Ford
Thunderbird? Or the 1948 Chrysler Imperial?
Retroculture might offer Detroit its desperately
needed answer to the import invasion. Wouldn't you like to be able to buy one
of America's most famous cars again? Of course, there would have to be some
changes under the hood to accommodate the new pollution and safety laws. But
why couldn't Detroit make the great old cars again, with those changes? The
cars were basically pretty simple, and should not cost a fortune to produce.
And how would the imports compete? The 1957 Toyota resembled a motorized
chamber pot and would not find many buyers here (in Japan, Japanese car
companies have made some new versions of their 1950s cars, and they have sold
like sushi). And how could, say, Toyota credibly copy an American car from the
past? Volkswagen already has its new Beetle, Britain has given us a new Minim
and Fiat offers a new 500, but with those few exceptions Detroit would own the
Retro-automobile market. And people would be lined up all the way down the
street and around the comer to buy American cars.
In other areas, we see Retroculture already
having some effects on business, but we can also identify new Retro-needs that
aren't being met. For example, we see a wide variety of reproductions of
colonial furniture, and now some Victorian furniture is being reproduced as
well. But there are still major market opportunities in Retro-furniture, such
as inexpensive "starter" furniture that reflects old styles; sets
designed to give a whole room or several rooms the "feel" of a
certain period, including appropriate accessories; and reproductions of styles
from more recent eras, from the 1930s through the 1950s. Of course, used
furniture stores, antique dealers and shops specializing in furniture
restoration may find good business in offering furniture from the recent past
as well. For young people just starting out, the 1940s or 1950s may be just as
attractive as the colonial or Victorian periods and a great deal more
affordable.
As we noted earlier, Retro-clothing is a somewhat
particularized interest; not everyone who is interested in Retroculture wants
to dress Retro. But even so, the Retro-clothing market will expand as
Retroculture become more popular. At present, that market is served largely by
a few specialized mail order catalogues and by the fact that some
"new" fashions harken strongly back to the 1940s and 1950s.
What business opportunities does Retro-clothing
offer? As Retroculture grows, the main line catalogues might find good business
in offering special Retro sections. Imagine, for example, a special section in
the Penny's catalogue that offered selections of clothing from earlier eras.
Might not many people want to order one or two things "just for fun,"
like perhaps a nice sun dress from the 1930s, or a little boy's sailor suit
from 1910, or some plus-fours for Dad for the golf course (some golf pros are wearing
them again)? Further, stores like Sears might find sufficient demand to support
Retro offerings on the store floor, perhaps in a special, easily identified
section.
Many people would want to come and browse, just
to look at the old styles and enjoy the memories they would bring. And those
who come to browse often buy, new styles as well as old. In some areas,
particularly those with large tourist populations, there might be enough of a
Retro-market to support small shops devoted solely to Retro-clothing, newly
made as well as old. After all, some shops that sell old clothing are doing
quite nicely; how could it hurt business to offer new clothes as well, made to
old patterns?
Many people are looking for some interesting
clothes to buy, at a time when everything either looks all the same or like
it's made for cabaret performers in Weimar Berlin. By mixing contemporary and
historic styles, major merchandisers might be able to give their lines a lift
while remaining relevant to middle class, middle age buyers, i.e., most people.
We predict some major retailers will try it, and find it works.
Publications are another major market where
Retroculture could be good business. Much is already happening here, with
magazines (both print and online) like Victoria, Old House Journal, Chap
Magazine, Reminisce, and the like — and of course with this book. But the
demand for Retroculture reading materials is likely to grow faster than it can
be met. It will include a demand for books on how to "go Retro" for
specific eras; for reproductions of books from earlier eras, especially works
on architecture, home decorating, landscaping, entertaining, cooking and the
like; and for reproductions of periodicals from the past, especially popular
magazines such as Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. Those magazines
filled the role now largely taken by television, providing entertainment for
leisure moments, and with many Retro homes de-emphasizing electrical devices it
is a role they can fill again.
Appliances are an area where demand for
Retro-styles is likely to be strong. Williams-Sonoma already offers a
reproduction of the classic gas stove of the 1920s and 30s, the kind high on
legs with the oven beside and above the burners (and with a nice shelf above
the burners for warming the plates). Another classic, the 1940s Electrolux
vacuum cleaner, is being offered as remanufactured originals. And, of course,
19th-century wood-fired, cast-iron kitchen stoves have made a big comeback.
But think how much more could be done. Many
single people don't need large refrigerators; if General Electric were to
re-issue its famous "monitor-top" refrigerator from the 1930s, both
the size and the style would be perfect for them. It would be easy to make
electric mixers, irons, toasters (the old side-openers do need watching, but
they are perfect for bagels), waffle irons, indeed almost any appliance to patterns
from earlier eras. Sometimes the "guts" might be modernized, and
sometimes perhaps best not—the originals were simple and lasted forever.
Appliances, especially those usually left sitting
out in the kitchen, lend a touch of authenticity to period settings that
nothing else can equal. They re-create Grandma's kitchen, that magical place of
memory that means permission for little boys and girls to eat all the things
their mothers said weren't good for them. That’s the kitchen we Retro-people
want in our houses. After all, we still are those boys and girls.
Consumables offer a Retro-market that
manufacturers have only begun to touch. Here, Retro-people most often are
looking for labels and packaging that recall the past. Some companies have been
smart enough to keep their labels unchanged over the years; look at the
typeface on a Helman's mayonnaise jar, or the little girl on the label of Morton's
salt ("When it rains, it pours." ) Several breakfast cereals,
including Rice Krispies, have put out boxes with antique labels to mark the
anniversary of the cereal's introduction.
But these only point the way to the potential
market. Retro-people will want reproduction packaging on a wide variety of
products — in fact, on everything where the product itself existed in the past.
From soap powder and toothpaste through canned food and packaged bread, revival
of historic labels and slogans (or both combined, as was brilliantly done by
"Uneeda Biscuit") is possible. And wherever it is possible, it will
be wanted. Through Retroculture, people are seeking to give their homes the
look and feel of a past era. In that attempt, details like the appearance of
the cleanser bottle by the sink or the cans in the kitchen cupboard are very
helpful. They can make the difference between a place that looks like it is
trying to feel like the past, and one that really does feel that way. And —an
important consideration — it is a very inexpensive way to get the desired
effect. Products with historic labels need not—and where they have been
manufactured, do not — cost any more than those with modern labels.
There is also a growing Retro-market for
consumables and other small items that have disappeared over the years. The
Vermont Country Store catalogue offers such items as a bread box, sleeve
garters, rubber swim shower caps, Panama hats, Florida water, and Lydia Pinkham
Herbal Compound. That market will expand as Retroculture spreads, and who can say where its
upper limit might be? We might yet see the return of the Packard automobile—or,
in keeping with concern for the environment, the Baker Electric.
People not only want to buy Retro-products; they
would like to buy them in Retro-stores. Merchandising can find potential new
markets through Retroculture. We are seeing a bit of that already in the return
of the ice cream parlor and, in a few places, the milkman. What about the
return of the great department stores of the 1920s and 1930s? A few still
survive, though as shadows of what they were. Perhaps they could lead the
revival of their breed. were wonderful places to shop, with all the variety a
mall offers but greater convenience, consistently knowledgeable service people,
beautiful displays (especially around the holidays; what boy who grew up back
then does not remember the elaborate model train layouts in the department
stores at Christmas?), and often a quiet and genteel restaurant where shoppers
could find an excellent lunch at a reasonable price.
There are other possibilities for Retro-stores.
As architects such as Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk recreate genuine
communities, the corner store might make a comeback— the little place, often
just a room in someone's home, that sold bread, milk, and pipe tobacco to
people who lived within walking distance. The country store that sells local
products, like the wonderful Amish butter and cheese you can find in Ohio,
Maryland and Pennsylvania, might start to spread again. Instead of
supermarkets, we might again find small shops specializing in meat or fish or
cheese or produce, such as you still find in Europe and once were common here.
The quality is invariably better, and the help know their products and are anxious
to please.
Quality is a powerful Retro-theme, and one that
ties in closely with what people are looking for in the 21st
century. Quality used to be better in America, quality of products (think of
American cars as late as the 1950s) and quality of service (remember the old
men who ran traditional hardware stores, who knew everything they had in stock
and gave sound, free advice on the best way to solve a hardware problem?).
Quality offers the buyer something worth waiting for and having less often, which
ties in with the growing reaction against overspending and consumer excess.
Quality gives buyers something worth keeping; good design and solid workmanship
never go out of style. A quality product will last, which saves the buyer money
over time; one Retro-person is still using the water-trap Rexair vacuum cleaner
his grandmother bought in 1938, an expensive product then and now, but one that
has easily paid for itself many times over in almost eighty years of service.
In most things, Retro equals quality, and that is one of the reasons
Retroculture is fast gaining ground.
Just as Retro-people like to buy quality
products, so they also like to spend their quality time with other
Retro-people. The need for suitable gathering places for Retro people offers
another business opportunity. Several revivals of old-fashioned gathering
places have already occurred, including amusement parks. Places like King's
Dominion, Virginia, aren't really much different from such famous old amusement
parks as Cedar Point, Ohio. They offer wholesome family entertainment, just as
their predecessors did; the main difference may be that you took the trolley to
the old amusement parks (many were actually built by the trolley lines as a way
to increase ridership), and now you drive. Maybe some enterprising
Retro-entrepreneur will reverse the historic process and build a trolley line
to reach the amusement park!
There are many other business opportunities still
to be explored in offering Retro gathering places. For starters, how about bars
and nightclubs without blasting, electronically amplified music that is so loud
it makes conversation impossible? A revival of the jazz club of the 1930s and
40s, with purely acoustic music (which sounds better anyway), might attract
quite a following. Bars could reflect different eras — perhaps the turn of the
century or the Prohibition era, the time of the "speakeasy." The
London 1940s nightclubs mentioned in the first chapter offer a model; they have
become central elements in the lives of London's Retro crowd.
The 1930s dance hall offers another business
opportunity. A few of the originals, like Cleveland's Avalon, still survive and
do a good business. Many Retro people would love to spend Friday or Saturday
night dancing the old dances to real big-band music. By offering music and
dancing from the past, without screaming amplifiers or wild rock bands,
old-fashioned dance halls would offer a safe, respectable place for people to
gather — something that has grown hard to find in many cities.
In fact, the whole area of entertainment offers
tremendous Retro-business opportunities. More and more Americans are tired of
entertainment that is violent or suggestive, and they yearn for the kind of
safe and decent entertainment our grandparents enjoyed. For example, imagine a
revival on network television of the 1950s series, I Remember Mama. Set in the
1890s, that series portrayed a good solid Victorian family confronting and
overcoming life's many challenges through sound values. Think how many
American families today could relate to a series like that, because that is the
kind of family they still want to be. Retro-themes like admiration for the
Victorians might offer network television what it needs to reverse its decline
in audience share.
As we noted in an earlier chapter, a good deal is
already happening in the area of Retro-entertainment. But many new business
opportunities are waiting to be explored, from "Retro Radio"
(stations that recreate what you might have heard had you turned on the radio in
an earlier era) through the revival of Chautaquas.18 Virtually everything people used
to enjoy is subject to revival, which gives Retro-people far more entertaining
things to choose from than modern people can enjoy.
18 "Chautauqua" was the term for an adult education movement popular
in North America between the late-19th and early-20th
centuries, noted for their mixture of entertainment, culture and education
through live speakers, musicians etc. — Editor.
In each of the areas we have touched on here, we
have only ventured to offer a few examples of possible Retro-business
opportunities, as illustrations. Any new wave of fashion offers business
opportunities. But Retroculture offers far more than most, because it includes
more aspects of people's lives, it appeals to a wide diversity of eras, each
with its own fashions, and it promises to be lasting. Enough Americans have
come to realize that the past was better than what we have now that a grand
effort to recapture the best things from the past will become our national
course. It will be the theme that guides our country into the 21st
century. Those who are first to help others grasp the theme may rightly expect
to profit from their good works.
FIGURE 8. Yale Hardware Store, Cannon Falls, Minnesota. Now the Family Salon.
(Source: McGhiever, Wikimedia Commons)
CHAPTER XI
Retro-Service
ECONOMISTS TALK A LOT THESE DAYS about how we are
becoming a "service economy." Most ordinary people find themselves
asking, "If that’s true, where is the service?" It sure seems hard to
find. No matter whom we deal with — plumbers, contractors, waiters, clerks in
stores, auto salesmen, you name it —we just can't seem to get the reliable, knowledgeable,
polite and honest service we can remember from times past. And that's a shame,
because real service doesn't cost any more to give, but it makes the world a
much nicer place for everybody. Further, just as we all look for service on
occasion, so we all also offer it at some point. Either way, we can make our
lives and the lives of others better by getting it right — by reviving what the
word "service" used to mean.
The starting point is to realize something our
ancestors knew well: service is honorable. In fact, all human achievement is
built on service, on doing something for someone else. That's how children get
reared and taught, new products are invented and built and marketed, towns are
founded and developed, religion is preached and spread —all through service.
Service may be to family, friends, neighbors, customers, employers, the public,
God — at root, it's all the same thing, doing something for someone else. Even
Christ came, as He said, "to serve, not to be served."
Good service requires putting other people first
and controlling self-gratification. That may explain why it has gotten so hard
to find. Since the mid-1960s, we have been told to put ourselves first. From
"Do your own thing" and "If it feels good, do it" through
"You are what you own" and "Whoever dies with the most toys
wins," recent times have celebrated self-centeredness. The results are all
too evident in workers who don't do a good job, managers who pay themselves
huge salaries and bonuses while their company goes bankrupt, and politicians
whose greed knows no bounds.
It didn't used to be that way. Our forefathers
believed self-centeredness was a vice. They knew real happiness came from
serving others, not from trying to satisfy the endless demands of a rapacious
self. That's why they found their lives growing richer with real achievement
and satisfaction as they grew older, while ours become emptier. We have built
on sand: they built on rock, the rock of good service honorably rendered.
You may be able to remember some of the ways in
which good service and the people who gave it were honored. Think of how folks
used to look up to missionaries (as some still do), those men and women who
have left all the comforts of home to go and bring religion to the poor and
friendless in far corners of the earth. They are people who know how to serve!
Perhaps your grandparents' and great-grandparents' families had servants (many
people back then did). If so, you may have heard stories about how those old
family "retainers" were treated as members of the family and cared
for in their later years. That was regarded as honor they had earned with their
years of service. Perhaps one of your ancestors was a small-town doctor or
storekeeper, a person highly respected for the service he gave his community.
Regardless of how people served, service was respected, honored, and regarded
as a good thing.
Retroculture seeks to brings good service back,
to make it honorable once more — much more honorable than the selfishness that
has replaced it. It means practicing many of the virtues children used to learn
in school in all our dealings with other people. It means being attentive and
helpful to others —to all others, not just the rich or the young and handsome.
In fact, the person who values service will be especially helpful to the
elderly or infirm, the handicapped, children, and others who may have no way to
return anything but their thanks.
Good service means respect—respect both ways,
whether you are the person serving or the one being served. (Mutually helpful
formality, like use of last names with Mr., Mrs., or Miss, instead of first
names is a good example of helpful formality.)
It means punctuality, which is really "being
there" for others. In the old days, this was sometimes called "the
courtesy of kings," because monarchs knew others had to wait for them no
matter how late they were. Good kings and queens weren't late.
Good service means old-fashioned diligence:
working hard. Nowadays, some people think they're being clever if they loaf on
the job as much as possible, only working when someone might be watching. Ever
go in a store and find all the clerks staring at their smartphones and
carefully ignoring you, the customer? They are giving bad service both to you
and to the store owner, the person who pays their salary. In the old days,
loafers were looked upon with contempt; in contrast, hard work was praised and
honored. Retroculture again honors diligence as a virtue, because it is
essential to good service.
There is one final thing good service requires,
and that is honesty. From sad experience, many Americans have two words come to
mind when they want to define bad service: "car salesman." Why?
Because too often, they've had car salesmen lie to them. The salesman swore the
car was solid and dependable, and instead it proved a lemon. In contrast, a
good service person is honest. If the special in the restaurant that night
isn't very tasty, the good waitress warns her customers away from it. If the
doohickey in the hardware store doesn't perform as claimed, the good clerk
tells his customers. And the good car salesman (there are some) steers
potential customers away from models he knows have serious defects. Without
honesty, good service simply isn't possible — nor is anything else good.
RETRO-SERVICE IS GOOD BUSINESS
In a time when the real economy just sputters
along and good jobs are hard to find, many people are concerned about the
company they work for. They want it to do well, because if it goes under, they
may be facing unemployment. Well, good service, Retro-service, is good
business. It offers products the customers want, it makes those products to a
high standard, it delivers them in ways the customers find both efficient and
pleasant, and it makes customers want to come back. Think of how your
grandparents often patronized the same businesses for decades, maybe even all
their lives. They did so because those establishments gave them good
old-fashioned service, service that often went beyond what most people today
would expect or even imagine. In 1949, Mr. William A. Sturgiss bought a new
Ford from the agency in Grantsville, Maryland where he had always bought his
cars. He had bought two-door models in the past, but this time he decided to
get a four-door. A few weeks after he took delivery of the car, the owner of
the dealership called to ask how he liked it. Mr. Sturgiss said it ran fine,
but he wished he had stuck with the two-door model. "I can take care of
that," said the dealer. "Just bring it back and we'll give you a
two-door instead." Which he did—at no charge. That's the kind of service
that keeps a customer for life.
OFFERING RETRO-SERVICE
Retro-service usually doesn't cost any more to
offer than typical modern slipshod service. Mostly it is a matter of
politeness, knowledge, and a genuine desire to be helpful. It begins with good
manners: calling customers "sir" or ma'am," or using their last
names with Mr., Mrs., or Miss in front of it. Then, it requires really knowing
the product or service you are offering. American automobile companies have had
to learn the hard way about how important knowledgeable salesmen are to
potential customers. For years, while foreign car companies stressed technical
information about their cars in their ads and in their salesmen’s pitches, Detroit
ran ads with pretty girls sitting on the hoods of their cars and had their
salesmen talk price. In effect, they talked down to car buyers, and the buyers
went elsewhere, to someone who talked facts. The same is true for every
business: the salesman who really knows the product shows he takes the customer
seriously. From the customers' standpoint, that is an essential part of good
service. It also used to be a maxim for salesmen: a good salesman knows his
product. Like most of the old maxims, it's still true.
The past can suggest many specific ideas for
offering good service. You may want to do some research into the history of
whatever field you work in, to see how companies similar to yours offered good
service. For example, home delivery used to be common for many businesses. Not
only did homes have the services of the milkman, the bread man, and the egg
lady, many grocery stores also delivered. Some are starting to do so again.
Another way some businesses used to offer good
service was by putting their people in uniform. Recently, a new owner of a gas
station in New England put all his people in uniforms, old-fashioned uniforms
like gas station attendants used to wear, bow ties and all. His business
soared, because to his customers the uniforms carried a message of good
service. Similarly, an old bank in New England has no tellers with windows. It
has never had them: it simply never changed from the days in the early 19th
century when you sat down at a desk with a banker when you went to a bank, the
way rich clients of big banks still do. In effect, every customer at this small
bank gets his own "investment banker" —and the bank does very well,
because people like its Retro service.
In service as in other matters, the past is an
endless treasure chest we may draw on for ideas about how to do things better.
Just as Retro-people study the past to find better ways to design and furnish
their houses, entertain themselves, travel and even dine, so you may turn to
history to discover ways to improve the service you and your business can
offer.
Your reward will be happier customers, who return
their loyalty as thanks for your service. And that means better business for
you.
SERVING THE "PUBLIC GOOD"
The "public good" is one of those nice
Victorian notions Retroculture makes fashionable again. Victorians believed not
only in self-improvement, but also in improving the community in which they
lived. They devoted substantial time and energy to public service: to helping
the poor, teaching Sunday schools, fighting drunkenness through the Temperance League,
working against "machine politics" in the Good Government movement,
and many other similar efforts. They believed that every citizen owed service
to his country and his community—to the "public good."
Retroculture seeks to revive this kind of good
service just as it does good service in business. Our modern communities have
as much or more need for service-minded volunteers as did communities in the 19th
century. Crime, broken homes, poverty and the drug problem cannot be solved
just through government programs. They need people, people who believe in
service and want to offer their service to making their community a better
place to live.
Many Americans already offer service to their communities
in a wide variety of ways. At home, they recycle and compost to keep the town's
landfill from overflowing. On their street, they participate in the local Block
Watch and offer a helping hand to their neighbors.
They volunteer at the local library or hospital.
They serve in the soup kitchen run by their church. They volunteer their time
with the Red Cross and support it with donations. They canvass their
neighborhood for one charity or another. All these are examples of service to
the public good.
By looking back toward the past for guidance,
Retroculture can add several dimensions to this ongoing effort at volunteer
service. For one thing, it can tell us how important and effective such
volunteer activities can be. Mid and late 19th-century America faced some
serious social problems, many of which were solved or at least reduced through
the efforts of volunteers. Drunkenness was a widespread public evil, a
destroyer of many a working-class family and a blight on countless communities.
Volunteers, working through churches, in politics, and through groups like the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union, greatly reduced the excessive use of alcohol. They
educated people as to its dangers, got through laws controlling the sale of
alcohol, convinced people to take the "Temperance Pledge" not to
drink, and through groups like Alcoholics Anonymous offered people a source of
treatment for alcoholism.
Similarly, volunteers established a wide network
of homes for single young women who had become pregnant, offering them places
to live while they had their child and support in building a new life with
their baby or finding a family who would adopt it. That network brought about a
substantial reduction in the incidence of abortion. These examples from the past tell us that service really is important — it
makes a measurable difference in society.
The past can also give us some lessons in how to
be effective in serving the public good. It warns us against going too far— as
the effort to curb alcohol did when it resulted in Prohibition. It also tells
us that we can do more when we unite with other people working in the same
cause. Many of today's best known public service
organizations got started when an individual went beyond working alone and
began to organize. Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, is a good
example.
Perhaps most important, the past tells us not to
wait for someone else to do it: to identify a need, find or create a group or
organization, and begin doing good work. As in so many other fields, the
Victorians were men and women of action when it came to serving the public
good. They took the initiative as individuals, locally and nationally, seeing
what needed to be done and doing it. Now as then, that is called leadership,
and it is essential to public service. Where some lead, others will follow, until,
like the Victorians, we can see our society becoming a safer, healthier, better
ordered place, for us and for our children.
If the Victorians could talk to us about serving
the public good, they would say something people today might find surprising.
They would tell us that though they were gratified by the public improvements
their service made possible, that was not the most important thing they
accomplished through it. The most important difference was the one it made in
them.
In the past, service was not seen as being only
something you did twice a week for a couple of hours on behalf on this or that
organization. Rather, it was a way of life— a way of life opposite to the
self-centeredness that has become fashionable in America. Serving was a check
people used on their own thinking and behavior, a way of escaping
self-centeredness and practicing another of those old-fashioned virtues,
humility. 19th century Boston was shocked when one of its premier
citizens, Mrs. Gardner (her home is now a splendid art museum), got down on her
hands and knees to scrub the cathedral steps on Good Friday. But she was merely
doing dramatically what many of our grandparents and great-grandparents did
with less flair: curbing her own pride through service.
Often, this service was quiet, hardly even
visible to others. It was service within the family, by taking care of the
failing parents or alcoholic brother or retarded child, and doing it
uncomplainingly and with love. Or, it was service in the church, as one of the
unsung women who kept everything going by their long hours of service behind
the scenes. Or it was service within the workplace, as the strong partner in
the firm who kept it solvent in the face of laziness or incompetence on the
part of others. "Covering for" other people who were too weak to
carry their fair share of the load was a common way countless people served.
And by this service, however it was rendered,
those who served were transformed. We may remember a favorite great aunt or
grandparent who had undergone this transformation. Their "self," the
demanding, I-want-mine part of human nature, had grown so thin the light came
right through it. 'They had a happiness and peace so deep it was comforting
just to be near them. None of life's little crises rattled them. They had grown
beyond all stress. Their shoulders were broad enough to carry lightly whatever
burdens others could not bear. And they got this way by serving, by putting
others first in everything they did — by service as a way of life.
Self or service? That is one of the most
important decisions every person makes. Which one will be first in your life?
Modern fashion tell us to put self first. The past says otherwise, and so does
Retroculture. Service, not self, is the basis of the life well lived, the race
well run.
FIGURE 9. The Neiman-Marcus Headquarters and Flagship
Store in Downtown Dallas. (Source: User 020808 at English Wikipedia)
CHAPTER XII
Retro-America
EVER SINCE THE PILGRIMS LANDED at Plymouth,
Massachusetts in 1620, Americans have looked confidently toward the future.
They have expected life in the future to be better, for them, their children,
and their children's children.
In recent years, we have lost this vision of a happier
future. In the face of crime, family breakups, falling living standards and a
host of other problems, Americans have become pessimistic. To more and more
people, it seems as if our nation's great days lie in the past.
These concerns have two messages for us. The first
is that people are not happy with the way things are or where they seem to be
going. The second is that the past offers hope for the future. People want to
recapture the good things from the past and bring them to life again. If we can
do that, if the past can become the future, then the future can be bright—as
bright and hopeful, safe and comforting as life in America used to be.
Retroculture's message is that we can do that.
What we did once, we can do again. What worked once before will work again. And
people know it.
Further, it is going to happen. In fact, it is
already happening. All across America, people are rediscovering the past and
working to bring it to life again. They are doing it on their own, in their own
lives and the lives of their families and communities. They are doing it in
millions of small steps. But put together, those millions of small steps add up
to a great leap.
Just how far can Retroculture take us? What might
a future Retro-America look like, an America where many people were consciously
working to rediscover the good things from the past and bring them back to
life? Let us allow our imagination to wander forward a bit, say about twenty
years, to the year 2038, and see what we see...
The Saturday, January 23, 2038 real estate
section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer includes an ad for homes in the new
Retro-town of Alberta, east of Cleveland:
"Ride a Mile and Smile the While," on
the fast new Light Rail line that connects Alberta with downtown Cleveland in
less than forty minutes.
That's just one of the benefits of Retro-living
in Alberta, northern Ohio's premier new-old town. Not a "development"
but a real town, Alberta offers all the comforts of life a century ago.
Victorian, Queen Anne and Craftsman homes line shady streets, all in easy
walking distance of the car-free downtown. Stores, restaurants, and offices are
just a stroll away, in a charming Victorian town center where families gather
on the green for band concerts, softball games and just socializing. Churches
and schools are part of the neighborhood too, and every house has a back yard
big enough for a good size garden. Alberta also offers apartments and
condominiums "up over the store" right downtown, and at modest
prices.
The fast, quiet Light Rail line offers easy
access to jobs in Cleveland and in nearby industrial parks. When the workday is
over, it whisks you home to a place where life is as it used to be. Every house
has a front porch, where people sit in the evening, talking with passers-by and
watching the kids play safely in the street (Alberta's residential streets are
also car-free from seven to nine o’clock every evening all through the summer).
N01se controls mean you go to sleep every evening with the windows open,
hearing nothing louder than the crickets singing. And Alberta's charter
includes town-meeting government, so the people who live there, not outsiders,
set the rules. Alberta is filling up fast, and it won't be expanded to where you’d
need to drive to get around. If you are tired of junky highways, strip shopping
centers, and developments where no one knows their neighbors, come take a look
at Alberta and see what life in a real community is like. Just take the Red
Line on the Rapid to Windermere and transfer to the Eastern Ohio Traction
interurban. You'll soon understand why we named our town for Queen Victoria's
beloved husband, Prince Albert. It's just the sort of place where Victorians
will feel at home.
The March 3, 2038 issue of
Time magazine's cover story is "The New Civility":
On the subway, no woman stands while a man sits.
Gentlemen not only readily offer a seat, they hold packages, open doors, and
tip their hats to ladies. Young people are careful not to make noise that would
disturb others. When they speak to their elders, they say "Ma'am" or
"Sir." No favor, however modest, does not receive a "thank
you." On the road, a driver needing a "break" to get into
traffic is promptly offered one, and cars stop for a pedestrian who merely
approaches a crosswalk. Shoppers are careful to leave their cart so they don't
block others coming down the aisle in the supermarket.
In a remarkable transformation, America has
become a land of civility. Visitors from overseas, even from such traditionally
polite places as Japan, are struck by the remarkably good manners they find
here. It seems as if the whole nation is taking part in a good-natured contest
to see who can be most polite. One British visitor commented, "In London,
people just shove on by you. Here, they nod, smile, and apologize for being in
your way when you are in theirs! They are wonderfully helpful to a poor visitor
trying to find her way around. It is a bit embarrassing—we English are supposed
to have good manners, but compared to you we're rude." In Tokyo, the Asahi
Shimbun ran a series on "Learning from America"; the first article
was on "Americans' Wonderful Manners."
It wasn't always like this. Twenty years ago, it
seemed that people often went out of their way to be rude to others. Cars drove
around with radios blaring. People went downtown or got on trains and airplanes
dressed in little more than their underwear. Kids prided themselves on their
threatening looks and mumbled monosyllabic answers to adults' inquires.
Aggressiveness, selfishness, and thoughtless if not calculated rudeness seemed
to govern relations with strangers and even with customers, neighbors and
friends.
Fortunately, some Americans remembered or learned
about a more distant past, those golden years in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries when ladies were honored, gentlemen were
respectful and children were discreet. By the 2020s, these Retro-Americans were
showing the rest of us how life should be lived. It didn't have to be nasty,
brutish and short; it could be quite agreeable, if only people would follow
some simple, common-sense rules. Most of the rules boiled down to the Golden
Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
So good manners became fashionable again, and
civility is now the hottest style. If you're a boor and want a date, a job or
anyone's respect, forget it. Not that there's any excuse now for not knowing
how to show good manners, since they are taught in schools, practiced on the
job and around the family dinner table, and shown in every television show,
even the soap operas. The new civility has made its mark on a new century, and
it doesn't seem likely to fade with time. It's just too nice to let go.
Amtrak's annual report for the year
2037 reveals a new world of comfortable, relaxing Retro-travel: Last year, for
the first time since World War Il, most American travel was by train. Amtrak's
22,364 daily intercity and commuter trains accounted for 50.7% of all miles
traveled in the United States by all modes of passenger transport. More
important to Amtrak was the reason most Americans now choose to travel by
train. Extensive surveys of Amtrak’s passengers revealed that 72.8% travelled
by train because they preferred it over any other mode. In other words, almost
three quarters of Amtrak's customers could have traveled by car or airplane,
but chose the train because it offered the most enjoyable journey.
Amtrak's management attributes this remarkable revival
of train travel primarily to its decision, taken in 2022, to model its future
trains on those of the "Great Days of Rail Travel," the period from
1900—1930. Beginning that year, Amtrak ordered new passenger equipment that
duplicated the cars from a century ago. of course, this new equipment
incorporated technical refinements that enhanced passenger comfort, such as air
conditioning. But Amtrak's "Retrofleet" offered the feeling of the
great trains: high clerestory ceilings with art glass windows, wood-paneled
interiors with plush seats, elegant dining cars with linen table cloths, fine
china, heavy silver and memorable food, and open-platform observation parlor
cars where:
Phoebe Snow could take the air
Without a care
While she did go
Along the Road to Buffalo.
In 2025, Amtrak launched the first of its new
Retrofleet in the now world-famous New York to San Francisco transcontinental
expresses, the eastbound Capitalist and westbound Manifest Destiny. These
all-Pullman, extra-fare trains, which offer every aspect of luxury Edwardian
travel, were immediate hits with the traveling public and significant revenue
successes for Amtrak Today each train runs in at least five sections daily and
both are sold out months in advance.
The success of the Capitalist
and the Manifest Destiny was duplicated on virtually every route that Amtrak
re-equipped with Retrofleet coaches, sleepers and diners. Public response was
overwhelming. Huge crowds attended the exhibits of the new equipment held in
major cities and welcomed the first re-equipped trains through their towns.
Politicians lined up to promote the route through their state to be next to get
the new cars.
Most important, people rode the new trains. They
rode once to satisfy their curiosity, but having tasted real travel, travel as
it used to be, they kept coming back Speed had little to do with it; while
average train speed was increased some, Amtrak offers true high-speed rail
service (over 150 miles per hour) only in a few corridors. Service was
definitely a factor. Amtrak was careful to make sure its employees offered
respectful, dependable, efficient Retro-service to go along with its Retrofleet
of cars. Increased train frequency, which offered more convenient travel, and
careful tie-in of Amtrak trains with the new trolley systems many cities have
built were both contributors.
But we would be less than honest if we did not
admit that much of the success of Amtrak's new Retro-trains is due to a change
in how Americans live their lives. People today are less in a hurry to get
somewhere and more interested in enjoying the journey of life itself. We see it
in everything: in the restoration of community in our towns and cities, in the
volunteer efforts that have greatly lessened many of our social problems, in the
general reorientation of life from having things to doing things. Inspired and
guided by a great national rediscovery of our past and determination of recover
what was best in it, Americans from every walk of life have remade the way we
live.
Amtrak is proud to offer its Retro-trains as our
contribution to this new-old America. It is a good place to live. And, relaxing
over a fine dinner in the dining car while the best show in the world, America
itself, rolls by the windows, it is also a good place to travel.
The annual Christmas catalogue of Dallas's
Neiman-Marcus department store, with its wildly luxurious and imaginative
special presents, has long been an American fixture. In the year 2038, those
special presents include:
• The "Upstairs, Downstairs" townhouse. An exact reproduction,
inside and out, of the Bellamy's townhouse as seen in the recently revived
television classic, "Upstairs, Downstairs," is the perfect setting
for Edwardian living. Built in the community and setting of your choice, it is
the ideal wedding gift or retirement present for those who "have
everything." Fully staffed including an English butler who answers to the
name of "Hudson," it offers all you need to travel back in time,
including closets already brimming with the latest turn-of-the-20th-century
clothes in your sizes. It comes with either a coach-and-four or a motor car
from the early 1900s, your choice. Price $7,500,000 plus property.
• Your own Zeppelin airship. For the man whose friends
all have private airplanes and who wants to stand out in the crowd, we offer
this year a genuine Zeppelin, built in Friedrichshafen, Germany. This 8,000,000
cubic foot airship, 840 feet long, can accommodate fifty people in absolute
comfort, cruises at 90 miles per hour, and offers a unique view of the world
through the glass floor of its smoking lounge (just like the Hindenburg). Comes
equipped with aluminum grand piano, captain and trained crew. It's filled, of
course, with non-flammable helium. Be the first to offer your family and guests
air travel in the grand manner! Price $65,000,000. Hanger extra.
• A Victorian aunt. You and your family want to live as people did
when Queen Victoria reigned, but you're not quite sure how to go about it. The
solution? Your own Victorian aunt, to serve as your preceptor, guide, and
leader through the wonderful Victorian years! A docent, fully educated in all
the subtleties of Victorian manners, morals, styles and entertainments from
giving a grand formal dinner to raising the children right, will reside with
you for a full year and serve as your "Aunt Agatha." Leading by her
own good and upright example, as aunts once did, she will gently draw your
family back into the happy ways of Victorian times. Give your children the
upbringing you wish you'd had, and give yourself the
well-ordered Victorian home money just couldn't buy—until now! Price $350,000.
• A private turn-of-the-century trolley car, just
for you! Many cities—including Dallas—now have "light rail
systems," which is the new name for a streetcar line. Streetcars are a
great way to get around any town. They are quiet, smooth riding, and
nonpolluting. But like any public conveyance, streetcars have their drawbacks,
such as schedules you may not always find convenient and the presence of people
to whom you have not been introduced. This year, Neiman Marcus offers the ideal
way to enjoy your city's light rail system with the comfort and privacy you've
come to expect —your own private streetcar! Built in Portugal to a
turn-of-the-last-century American design, the Neiman Marcus trolley car offers
a rich mahogany with inlaid rosewood interior, plush leather couches and richly
upholstered armchairs, a small kitchen and serving area, and even a bathroom.
Two 125-h.p. motors offer brisk acceleration and a top speed of fifty-five
miles per hour, while twin trolley poles and controls at each end offer the
convenience of bi-directional operation without a turntable. Hire a crew from
your local transit authority or learn to operate the car yourself! Price
$750,000, plus lead-in track from your home to the nearest trolley line.
Carbarn available for $175,000 extra. Requires 600 volt DC power.
• An 18th-century weekend.
Belle Grove plantation, in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, is yours
for a weekend of 18th-century living. You will dine on 18th-century dishes
authentically prepared before an open fire, entertain your family and friends
with a fox hunt and an 18th-century ball, sleep in a four-poster bed with corn
husk mattress and supervise "your" house servants and field hands.
You've read about how our Colonial forebears lived —now you can experience it
yourself, right down to "close stools" and a sedan chair. Your
plantation's overseer, an expert on all aspects of 18th-century life, will
guide you through a weekend you will always remember. Price $8,500 for a family
of four. One-week stay $24,500.
The CBS Evening News for May 17, 2038, included this
report:
The White House tonight hosts the first public performance of the winners
in what President Miller has announced will be an annual event, the
Presidential Contest in Retro-music Composition. Earlier today, we met with the
President in the Oval Office to get a hint about what the nation will be hearing
tonight.
Interviewer: Mr. President, you have sought during your term in office to
make the White House a center of our national cultural rival. How does this new
contest fit into that?
President Miller: Personally, I think music—good music—is one of the most
important products of any nation. We all know
how low music had sunk in the last decades of the 20th
century and the first part of the 21st. Most
of it was just noise, played at deafening volume. It was 'anti-music; if you
will. By starting this contest and playing the winning compositions here at the
White House for their premier we are marking the new era in music this century
has brought. Teddy Roosevelt said the Presidency was a 'bully pulpit.' I want
to make it a bully conductor's podium' as well, to give the good 'new Old'
music that is now being written the public attention and honor that it merits.
Interviewer: Can you give us any hints about what we will be hearing
tonight?
President Miller: As you know, the contest was for symphonic compositions,
written in one of three styles: Baroque, Classic, or Romantic. We had a number
of splendid entries in each category, and I am sure you will be hearing many of
them, not just the winners, performed by orchestras around the country. I might
give a hint by saying the romantic winner reminds me of Brahms, the classic
winner of Haydn, and the very unusual baroque winner of Biber. I confess the
baroque piece is my own favorite.
Interviewer: What led to this 'Retro-music,' to writing new music in old
styles?
President Miller: By the end of the last century, it was obvious music had
taken a 'wrong turn' somewhere along the line. Just where is a matter of
dispute, but there was no disputing the fact itself.
As early as the 1990s, a few signs appeared pointing not forwards, but
backwards— back to musical styles that had held up over time, Baroque, Classic,
Romantic. The opera The Ghosts of Versailles, premiered in 1992, is an example.
While most of its music was modern, it contained a number of pieces written in
an 18th-century style—Retro-music. Just as classic style had
returned in architecture first through decorative bits attached to
International-style glass boxes, then caught on and became general for whole
buildings, so Retro-music bits and pieces began turning up in other
compositions and repertories. People loved it and demanded more of it.
The real breakthrough, as you
probably know, was Richard Cher's Homage a la Classique symphony in 2024. Its
premier at Carnegie Hall entranced the house. It was not just that Cher wrote
in the Classic style, the style of Mozart and Haydn, that reigned from about
1760 to around 1800. Cher's achievement was to write one of the best symphonies
of that style ever heard. The audience at the premier knew within a few dozen
measures that they were hearing history being made, that this composition would
move and thrill audiences for centuries, the same way the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni moved and thrilled them. Cher had equaled Mozart. That was a
stunning achievement.
The point was not lost on other composers: it was possible to write
extraordinary new music in old styles. Those styles were in no sense played
out. And thus, the Retro-music movement was born. Tonight, we will hear how far
it has come.
Interviewer: But why hold this premier of what is, after all, only music,
here at the White House? Why should a President of the United States be
involved with music?
President Miller: Only music? I think you, and the American people, know
better than that. Is a nation nothing but figures in a ledger book, so much
money taken in, so much given out for this or that purpose? I don't think so. A
nation has a soul, and that soul is defined in its culture. If the soul is
ignored or degraded, as ours was in the late-20th and early 21st
century, the nation decays and eventually dies. The great turnaround in
America's course in this century came not from economics or politics, but from
our cultural recovery— from the return of beauty to art and architecture, from
the recovery of a sense of community in our towns and cities, from the
rediscovery of family, home, and civic duty.
When I was a young man, I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker I never forgot.
It showed a couple of angels welcoming an arriving soul into Heaven. One of the angels said, 'Oh goody! You're just in time for Mozart's symphony in
G.K. 33,678.' I thought then, if Heaven means hearing new Mozart symphonies
through all eternity, how might we bring a bit of Heaven down to earth?
Tonight, the American people will hear an answer to that question. I can't
think of a better way the White House could serve this country. Can you?
Interviewer: No, Mr. President, I can't.
An article in the October issue of Travel and
Leisure recommends a visit to a Retro-community in Pennsylvania:
The growth of Retro-communities — new or restored
towns where people live as they did in earlier times—has made travel in America
a wondrous thing. You can visit frontier towns, quaint Victorian villages, 18th-century
cities (see the article on New Philadelphia in our June issue), even Harlem in
Manhattan, now restored to its 1920s greatness.
In the beautiful country of Pennsylvania's Laurel
Highlands, you can find still more: an entire rural county that has chosen to
go back in time, to the early years of the 20th century. Pennultima,
as the "settlement" is known to those who live there, is akin to the
Shaker colonies of the 19th century. It is much more than restored
buildings and ice-cream socials in the town square on summer Saturday evenings
(though the county seat, Somerset, has those too). It is a determined effort by
a band of visionary people to recapture life as it was more than a century ago.
Pennultima began almost twenty years ago, in the
city of Pittsburgh. There, a Retro-club of people who were interested in
turn-of-the-century America decided they wanted to do more than study that era.
They wanted to recreate it. With about 250 members scattered throughout the
Pittsburgh area, they knew there was not much they could do there. But if they
all moved to one small town, there would be enough of them to re-make that town
in the image they wanted.
They chose the town of Meyersdale, in Somerset
county, not too far from Pittsburgh. They had no desire to impose their ways on
anyone else, so they started by approaching the people of Meyersdale and
explaining what they wanted to do.
The local folk were receptive. Meyersdale was a
dying town. For decades, the young people had been moving away, leaving only the
old. Once important for its coal and its location on two railroads, Meyersdale
had been bypassed by the highway era and the mines had played out. By the
1950s, decay had set in. The buildings were run down, Meyers Avenue, the town's
"rich row" of turn-of-the-century homes, grown shabby. Amtrak’s
trains no longer stopped there. One of the railroads, the Western Maryland, was
converted into a beautiful bike trail.
But the people of Meyersdale knew that in the
early 1900s, their town had been full of hope, bustle and opportunity. It had a
good hotel, the New Colonial, a number of local industries including
a Victrola factory, and even its own trolley line, the Pennsylvania and
Maryland. They looked back on those years as their best time, and they were
willing to join the outsiders from Pittsburgh in trying to recapture the
Meyersdale of 1910.
So, in 2019, the Pittsburgh folks moved in. Some
moved into town and bought old houses and restored them. Others bought farms
around the town. They brought their business with them from Pittsburgh,
commuting electronically— making new technology serve old ways of living.
Meyersdale stirred and began to come to life again. There were more children in
the schools (they fixed up the old school downtown to the way it had been early
in the century and put it back in use), church congregations grew, and, because
the newcomers shopped in town, the downtown again became a good place to
succeed in business.
As word about Pennultima spread among Retroculture
people nationwide, others began migrating in. Learning from the large local
Amish population, some became farmers using old-fashioned techniques. Others
moved into neighboring towns like Garrett and Berlin and into the county seat
of Somerset. Here as in Meyersdale, the local people welcomed them. That's one
of the nice things about Retroculture: no one feels threatened by it. It means
safe towns and good neighbors, old-fashioned schools where children really
learn, and quiet well-tended streets.
As Retroculture spread over the county, the
people, newcomers and old-timers, joined together to take everything they could
back in time. Many of them no longer owned cars. Instead, the trolley line was
restored and extended to link all the towns and hamlets, and local trains,
passenger and freight, were brought back on the railroads. Farm families were
never far from a town where they could catch a train or trolley car, and
bicycles or horses and wagons or buggies did fine for getting into town. Local,
often one-room schools kept children close to home.
If you want to visit Pennultima today, you too
will need to go back in time just to get there. You will leave your car at the
edge of the county, in a parking lot near the end of the trolley line (one is
conveniently located at Exit 10, Somerset, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike). Or,
come by train, as you probably would have in 1910; Amtrak now offers ten trains
each day stopping in Meyersdale.
For the visitor, the most impressive thing about
Pennultima is that it does not feel like a place for tourists. Of course, it
isn't. It's not a show, like Williamsburg or Plimoth Plantation. It's there for
the people who live there, and even in the height of summer, they far outnumber
the tourists. You quickly feel that this is something real.
Pennultima residents welcome visitors, in part
because they really want to share what they've discovered with you, and in part
because like most Retroculture people, they just want to be nice (that's why
they’ve gone back to a nicer time, after all). Many of them first came to
Pennultima as visitors themselves, fell in love with it and came back to stay. There's
still plenty of room for newcomers.
The trolley line will whisk you silently along
through some of the east's prettiest country. Unspoiled by the roar of traffic
or the sight of mobile homes or satellite dishes, you see America as it was:
quietly prosperous, well-tended, harmonious and at peace. You may if you choose
also use the local trains, which are pulled by steam engines whose wonderful
chuffing echoes softly from the surrounding hills.
Travel & Leisure took the trolley to where it
all began, the borough of Meyersdale, for a fall weekend. Somerset county is a
major maple sugar producer (Meyersdale hosts a Sugar Festival in the early
spring, with special trains from Pittsburgh and Washington), and in the autumn
the hills are radiant with the oranges and reds of the sugar maple leaves. We
stayed in the New Colonial hotel, which has been refurbished beautifully to its
as-new state and which also boasts an excellent dining room. The town has a
number of small, mom-and-pop restaurants where you can find a breakfast of real
buckwheat cakes, made with a sourdough starter, at very modest prices. The
local bakery sells perfect picnic lunches, packed in returnable wicker baskets;
we took ours up to the cemetery, on a hill overlooking the town, for a lunch
with an unbeatable view. Somehow, we had the feeling that earlier generations
of Meyersdale folks were glad to welcome us there to see the town they had been
so proud of.
Because there are no automobiles in Somerset
county, the roads are perfect for walking or bicycling (you can rent bicycles
in every town). Or, do as we did Saturday afternoon and rent a buggy and team
from the livery stable. The horses are docile and accustomed to inexpert hands,
and the stable offers a short driving lesson to those new to the reigns. We
drove out old route 219 towards Boynton, up and over Hunsrick mountain; the
view is one of the best in the county, and no one will be behind you beeping a
horn if you stop a while to gaze.
Our children, ages ten to twelve, had made
friends Friday evening with a few of the local children, and we had no
hesitation leaving them to play while we went for our drive. That's the kind of
place Pennultima is. The wife of the minister of the Methodist church,
which is just across and up the street from the hotel, said shed keep an eye on
them, and we knew she would.
Speaking of church, Meyersdale is full of
churches, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
in the town's first boom. You'll miss some of what Pennultima offers if you
don't go on Sunday morning, when the whole town rings with bells. lhe people
are welcoming, the choirs are large and good, and you quickly see that these
people live what they believe in. We joined the Methodists that Sunday, in a
church with a stunning barrel-vaulted ceiling and a fine pipe organ. As you would
expect, the service book was that used at the beginning of the 20th
century, with the fine old language the modern books have deleted. Somehow, it
felt like church should. We were invited to join the coffee hour afterward, and
discovered that Meyersdale women are enthusiastic bakers, with a strong
influence from the local Amish and Mennonites. The Apfelstrudel was a
gem, and the oatmeal cake with German icing, a local specialty, made for two
very happy children.
Sunday afternoon we took off around the county by
trolley to Rockwood enjoying the splendid fall colors, then by steam train back
to Somerset, where we had left our car. The Summit diner, near the car parking
lot and the turnpike, offered a halfway point between 1910 and today; it's a
classic diner from 1960, with good, home-cooked American food.
We will not soon forget Pennultima, nor the
people we met there. They were remarkably happy people. They had seen the
past, and it worked. It was, and in Somerset country is, a time of children
playing safely in the street, families all dressed up parading to church, fresh
farm produce in little corner stores, the wonderful restful quiet that comes
when machines are few, laundry flapping on backyard lines and horses clopping
on brick streets, singing trolley wires and the aroma of fresh-baked cinnamon
rolls drifting from a farmhouse kitchen. Walking in the evening up Meyers Avenue
on the slate sidewalks and under the new-old streetlamps with their corrugated
metal shades, listening to the quiet, looking in the windows at the beautifully
restored Victorian and Edwardian interiors of the homes, heading to the B&O
station to watch the westbound Capitol Limited come through, we had an
overwhelming sense of what America had been, had lost, and here has regained.
As travelers, we have been to many places and
seen many things. Most we have been happy to pass quickly by. Some have amused
us for a while. A few we would return to. But only here, in Retro-America,
would we happily have stayed.
Verweile doch! Du bist so
schön...
