The State Historical Society of Missouri
This is the year sugar rationing ended, when mothers tossed their recipes for apple pandowdy or wartime custards flavored with Postum and honey. It’s the year utility dresses gave way to Dior’s New Look, with its swooshy skirts that looked like they’d been sewn from the drapes. People stopped patching shoes, darning socks, reusing bacon drippings; they planted rosebushes in their victory plots. These kids, who look totally copacetic as they ride the Whip at the Forest Park Highlands, are dressed simply, but are already more bang-up ’50s than spartan ’40s. The boy’s jeans are dark and new; his soles are hardly worn. The little girl’s satin hair ribbon perfectly matches both her dress and her ankle socks. Later that year, in December, they’d see Howdy Doody for the first time on NBC’s Puppet Playhouse. Soon they’d beg for Wonder Bread because Howdy swore it was the best bread, the kind that builds bodies eight ways. Their mothers would open the door to Tupperware’s “carrot ladies,” who sold the containers on the fact that burping lids preserved leftovers so much better than the plastic shower caps they’d been using. And this failed barbecue joint, McDonald’s, would rise from the ashes after rejiggering its business plan, making hamburgers like the Ford plant made Custom Tudors.
In the summer of 1963, the Highlands burned—it was mostly wood, so it went fast. It also burned so hot it buckled the asphalt on Highway 40 and sent overheated firemen to jump into the park’s swimming pool. By then, the kids on the Whip would’ve been in college. Maybe they cried when they heard the news; rumor is, people did. Five years later, whole cities would be on fire, the simple nuclear family a thing of the past, and yellow fallout-shelter signs posted over the doorways of libraries and schools. And this fragile, postwar America, eager to ditch one-egg wonder cakes and make-do-and-mend for just a bit of hope and unrationed meat and sugar, would hardly seem to have existed at all.
