Pink Carnation Time

“A white sport coat and a pink carnation (do-wah)
I'm all dressed up for the dance (bom-a-bom-bom-bom)
A white sports coat and a pink carnation (do-wah)
I'm all alone in romance (bom-a-bom-bom-bom)

Once you told me long ago,
To the prom with me you'd go
Now you've changed your mind it seems,
Someone else will hold my dreams

A white sport coat and a pink carnation (do-wah)
I’m in a blue, blue mood.”

According to his son, Marty Robbins got the idea for this rock ’n roll hit as he passed an Ohio high school where a prom was going on in spring 1956. He and his group recorded it in 1957—just in time for our Junior Prom on April 26, 1957. Do you remember if Baron Elliot’s orchestra played it for us?

I thought of that dance and song yesterday as I raked leftover leaves in the front yard and witnessed an unusual sight: a skinny, young guy parked across the street, got out of a black Jeep Commander, and knocked on a neighbor’s door. He was wearing a black tux—it had baggy pants and was much too loose through the shoulders. (Have you noticed most teenage boys haven’t developed necks yet—and, of course, their grandfathers no longer have necks?) I first thought funeral or choir concert, but it was 5 in the afternoon. Then the neighbor’s son came out—in similar gear—and the two drove off. Ah yes, it was junior prom night as Ames High. Either the two were picking up their dates and going to dinner,—or maybe they were each other’s date.

Nowadays dinner before the dance is de rigueur—and not at the likes of Eberhard’s Diner (on the Wexford flat) for chicken in a basket or Delney’s (on McKnight) for a cheeseburger and fries, as our options would have neen out in the wilds of northern Allegheny County in 1957! No doubt these prom-goers were heading for Ames’ new Fuji Restaurant for sushi or something even grander 30 miles south in Des Moines.

I was impressed that they were wearing black dinner jackets and bowties. Dressing up in the 50s was a large part of the fun for me. I loved planning and sewing my own prom dresses, which began with a trip into Pittsburgh to Kaufmann’s yard goods department (half of that floor in those days was filled with bolts of wonderful fabrics). And picking out a sophisticated Vogue pattern made me feel haute couture and really hot stuff! I hadn’t yet realized that I was sewing because my folks couldn’t have afforded to buy me some frothy tulle creation off the racks at Joseph Horne’s.

My husband laughs at how I remember what I was wearing when we talk about events from our past, like Martin Luther King’s March on Washington (Summer 1963) or National Honor Society initiation (1957, which was supposed to be a surprise).

The Junior Prom dress was my all-time favorite. The Kodak photo (left) doesn’t do justice to that full-length dress, shimmery and pale blue. Of course, it required at least 3 of those highly starched, crinoline petticoats to give it the right drape. As I recall, male escorts only had to wear suits and ties to the Junior Prom but formal wear to the Senior Prom (May 9, 1958). And that dress (right) made from red satin with a flowered silk accent accompanied me to college for a year or two. (What was the photographer thinking when she posed me next to that yellow Monticello wallpaper!)

Below is a link if you’d like to see a video at You Tube while listening to Robbins’ sing about that Pink Carnation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_IH0Zw6Syo

And those dance programs (from top to bottom) are from the Senior Prom 1957, Junior Prom 1957, Senior Prom 1958, and Junior Prom 1956.

The Beep-Beep-Beep Heard Round the World

Most of the time I’m not very serious—nor so long-winded, but in this posting I want to write about the most world-altering event of a lifetime. It occurred the fall of my senior year.

On October 4, 1957, the eve of my taking SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test), the high-stakes college admission exam, the startling news broke: the Soviet Union fired off a rocket in Kazakhstan powerful enough to launch the first satellite into orbit. Sputnik I was a 184-pound shiny metal basketball that emitted beep-beep-beeps for 3 months as it circled the earth every 90 minutes. Little did we test-takers realize that in the aftermath this space shot our lives would change dramatically.

Initially, it was just an oddity when the night sky was clear. Sputnik I could be seen—or so we thought. Actually, it was the spent booster rocket’s second stage that we were watching. And the next month (November 1957), Sputnik II followed--with the first living creature in space, that poor dog Laika on board, who died from the heat within a week

I only vaguely remember Sputnik being mentioned by the carload of us high school seniors making the long drive from the North Hills to the campus of Carnegie Tech (now Mellon) where the 3-hour, multiple-choice College Boards were administered.

Sample questions from analogy section: Cat is to dog as oak is to:

a. acorn
b. beech
c. rosebush
d. none of the above

Since we were sleep-deprived after cramming vocabulary words and hitting the road so early, this phenomenal event hadn’t quite sunk in. The Cold War was at its height in the 1950s, and here was the US’s fearsome enemy, the USSR, leading us into the space race. Weren’t we invulnerable, and weren’t they backward, repressive, and technologically inferior? We seniors couldn’t quite believe it had happened, nor could we envision the huge changes in math and science education that lay just over the horizon. Some of us would change our college plans, choosing aeronautical over civil engineering or astrophysics over biochemistry. Younger siblings still at North Allegheny High would now be urged to excel in harder advanced science and math courses in Sputnik’s wake.

To mark the 50^th anniversary, the Air Force Space Command website [click on underlined name to link to it] provided a succinct explanation about why Sputnik beat Explorer, the first US satellite, and what has been the long-term significance of the launch—if you’re interested in more detail.

Actually, Sputnik didn’t change my trajectory. I managed to do well enough on SAT to get admitted to Allegheny College up in Meadville and become (sigh) an English major. Nearly 10 years later, I had my only brush with outer space. Since publishing was my field, I was a part-time editorial assistant, when my daughters were small, with the Astrophysical Journal, which had an office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. Since SAO was headquarters for the world’s satellite tracking network, I had the privilege of buying my coffee outside at the same Mr. Snack truck with one of the most eminent scientific brain trusts of the 1970s.

Fast Forward 50 Years

But here we are in 2008 and the Sputnik spurt has splashed down, according to a recent Associate Press story:

The aerospace and defense sector is bracing for a potential brain drain over the next decade as a generation of Cold War scientists and engineers hits retirement age and not enough qualified young Americans seek to take their place. The problem: almost 60% of U.S. aerospace workers in 2007 are 45 or older….

Not only did our generation (and the next) answer the call to put the US into space and onto the moon, but in the flight they provided the whole world with electronic marvels that still amaze. The impetus came in February 1958 when the US Department of Defense established its greatest success (in my opinion): ARPA (the Advanced Research Project Agency), responsible for funding the development of new technology for use by the military. In the 1960s, huge amounts of funding flowed from federal agencies to universities allowing basic science researchers to be creative. What did they produce? Computers, robotics, artificial intelligence, lasers, faxes, GPS, WiFi, etc. And the most wonderful technology of all (originally called Arpanet), which allows grandmas like me to publish our thoughts and fire them off to anyone in the world of cyberspace willing to read our blogs--the Internet superhighway leading to the World Wide Web!

How ironic. Because of the technological success of our generation, US universities are awarding 2-1/2 times more engineering, math, and now computer science degrees than they did 40 years ago. But the best and brightest young scientific graduates are taking jobs with Google, Microsoft, Dell, Apple, and Verizon. They sure aren't going into teaching math and science. So philanthropists like Bill Gates are sinking some of their largesse into improving high school science and math programs. Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest defense contractor and producer of sophisticated hardware, is sending it employees into elementary schools as volunteer tutors. What goes around comes around.

Of course, today the kinds of degrees and career paths graduates are following have mushroomed, which reminds me of the nuclear cloud that was the specter on that 1958 horizon of ours. I’m not sure there is any propellant in 2008 as powerful as that was.

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I intend to blog on a weekly basis about My Senior Moments from the 1950s with the hope of jogging some memories. Please! Chime in with your thoughts by clicking below on “Comments.” Did Sputnik change your plans? Do you have computer fixation, too?

Welcome, especially Class of 1958

The first time I heard someone say, “I guess I’m having a senior moment,” was about 10 years ago. My cool sister-in-law uttered it when she had someone’s name on the tip of her tongue but couldn’t quite remember it. Since then, I have had countless senior moments over names, misplaced glasses and keys, and trips to the pantry where I stare at the shelves trying to remember what I came for. People tell me to write things down, and I now have several lists, 3 appointment calendars strategically placed around the house, and post-its on my computer desktop. Of course, they often get lost, too—except for the post-its, which I must log-on to see.

But even if memory too often fails me nowadays, it also manages to store odd detritus from the past (some quite useless). For example, I remember where my high school locker was, do you? I know all the words to musical jingles, such as “We are the men of Texaco, we work from Maine to Mexico… ” from the commercial at the beginning of Milton Berle’s 1950’s TV show. Now why is that?

Sometimes in the midst of daily activities, I’ll have moments of remembering pleasant things from the past. Writing about that Texaco jingle, sung by that quartet of guys dressed in service station attendant uniforms, reminds me of the time when not only was gasoline cheap, but the guy who pumped it for you also washed your windshield and asked, “Shall I check the oil?”

I started this blog to remember some of these things, moments when we were high school seniors (or at least during that decade of the 1950s) as my contribution to the Class of 1958’s golden reunion year. Next week I plan to blog about Sputnik, which also celebrated a 50^th anniversary this past fall.

I welcome your comments, and I’ll try to add a new posting at least weekly. So please bookmark me and check back. To add comments, click on “Comments,” which will take you to the "Leave Your Comment" page. That way I can read and even comment on your comment before posting it on the blog. (Or if you just want to comment and not have it posted, I’ll honor that, too.) Everything goes to my e-mail account first.