The Fifties
By Steve Rabson
When I was 9 years old in 1952, our family of four took a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains with our friends the Parkers—George, Margaret, daughter Cynthia, 8, and son Wally, 3. George and my father were colleagues in the math department at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The trip was the Parkers’ idea. Our family had never gone camping and spent most of our vacations in upstate New York, either at our cousins’ house in Hilton or at a cottage my grandmother rented on Lake Ontario.
None of us Rabsons had traveled in the South. My parents, strong supporters of civil rights, were lifetime members of the NAACP. After finishing graduate school at the University of Michigan and before leaving for his job at Purdue, my father arranged with the local NAACP chapter to sell our house in Ann Arbor to a Black family in what had been a segregated neighborhood. While at Purdue, my father was offered a better-paying job at the University of Miami but turned it down because, he said, he didn’t want his children to grow up speaking with a Southern accent.
Of course, segregation was hardly exclusive to the South. Junior faculty at Purdue were housed in several blocks of identical two-story, tarpaper bungalows that had been built during World War II for Air Corps (later Air Force) personnel and their families. There were very few Black faculty at Purdue, if any, and none that we knew living in the bungalows. Black students were excluded from the dormitories on campus and required to live across the Wabash River in a Black neighborhood of Lafayette, a strictly segregated city. Black people were refused service at its hotels and restaurants and made to sit in the back rows of movie theaters. I found out that my elementary school was segregated when a Chinese boy came to our all-white third-grade class the first day of the semester, and the teacher told him, with a puzzled look on her face, “I’m not sure you belong here.” She sent him to the principal’s office, and we never saw him again.
The day of our departure that summer for the Smokies we packed our car with a Coleman stove and an icebox fridge that actually used ice. The Parkers loaded the tents and sleeping bags into their car. My mother looked uncomfortable when I asked her why George and Margaret had a double sleeping bag while she and my dad had singles. She answered testily, “Because they sleep together.” Several years later I learned that my father was having an affair at the time with a woman in Purdue’s music department, recently divorced, who lived in a bungalow around the corner from us. She was among faculty neighbors friendly with our family, and she had visited our home for Christmas dinner the year before. While my mother was in the kitchen preparing the meal, my father grabbed the neighbor around the waist and steered her under the mistletoe, where he pressed his body tightly against hers for what seemed like a never-ending kiss on the mouth. At the time, I thought this was just some silly game grown-ups played. My parents never seemed to argue, at least that my sister and I could hear, and they often hugged and cuddled affectionately in public. I learned later that the mistletoe woman was one in a long series of women my father had affairs with until my parents divorced in 1957.
After a few hours on the road, we stopped for lunch at Indiana’s Brown County State Park. The ground there was covered with cicada corpses, and we had to brush them off our picnic table. Back on the road, we passed signs posted in series advertising Burma-Shave, signs on barn rooftops advertising Mail Pouch chewing tobacco, and signs warning travelers to “Get right with God.”
Our first two overnights at Kentucky state parks went smoothly, but the third one at Cumberland Mountain, Tennessee, almost ended our camping adventure. Signs were posted at all the campsites warning of the presence of bears, with instructions of what to do if one showed up. Margaret, a chronic worrier about anything and everything, was especially nervous about this. The first two nights in Kentucky she had worried that little Wally would suffocate because he was lying in his sleeping bag face-down.
That first night at Cumberland Mountain passed uneventfully, the grown-ups and the Parker kids crawling into their tents at lights out, while my sister, Ann, and I climbed into our flat-back 1950 Chevy, where we preferred to sleep. Ann took the comfortable back seat while I curled up in front, legs under the steering wheel. We slept OK until very early the next morning, when I felt the car rocking up and down. I looked out the rear window and saw a huge black bear, paws on the trunk, trying to nuzzle inside to get at our food. After a while it gave up, got down off the trunk, and lumbered across our campsite, passing directly beside the tents where the rest of the families were still sound asleep. Ann and I thought this was funny, but when everyone got up and we told them about it, Margaret was panic-stricken and insisted we had to stay at motels from then on. My parents managed to talk her out of this, noting we were on very tight budgets.
On the fourth day of our camping trip, we went sightseeing at Norris Dam and headed for nearby Norris Dam State Park, but first the icebox needed replenishing, so we stopped in at a local service station with a big sign ICE next to the gas pumps. My father complained that the price of regular gas had gone up there to 32 cents a gallon when it had been only 28 cents in Kentucky. (Thankfully, we never got the premium ethyl brand. Who knows how much those Tennesseans would have charged us for that?) He speculated that local merchants were exploiting tourists.
After gassing up, he went inside the station and told the man behind the counter that he wanted to buy some ice. The man looked baffled, so my father repeated the request several times, but still the man obviously had no clue as to what he was talking about. Finally, in desperation, my father gestured vigorously at the sign outside next to the pumps, and the man finally caught on.
“Oh!” he said. “You mean ahss!”
After we got settled later that day at a campsite in the park, we went for a swim in Norris Lake. From a jukebox inside the snack bar at the beach came Rosemary Clooney singing “Come On-A My House.” It puzzled me that she kept repeating the word “you” in the song as if she were singing to me, and I wondered what she meant when she said at the end of the song, “I’m gonna give you everything.” At home my parents played classical music exclusively on our console phonograph from 33¹/₃ rpm long playing records—called vinyls nowadays, when they are mostly considered antiques. I don’t think our phonograph even had a 45 rpm option, so I never heard any popular songs of the day.
On the last leg of the trip heading home, we stopped again—overnight this time—at Brown County State Park back across the border into Indiana. I wanted to hear the White Sox game on the portable radio, but my parents insisted on listening to news about the Republican National Convention in Chicago. They were sharply critical of General Douglas MacArthur, who was running for president and gave the convention’s keynote speech. They explained that he was responsible for prolonging the Korean War by threatening to invade China, bringing the Chinese into the war. Besides, they didn’t like the idea of a military man as president. In any case, his speech was poorly received at the convention, and his presidential campaign soon fizzled out. They were disappointed, however, when Dwight D. Eisenhower, another military man, got the nomination and was later elected to two terms as president.
Indiana, though geographically a northern state, was (and maybe still is) what some call “up-South.” Seven years later, in 1959, I went back on what turned out to be an involuntary camping trip, driving several hours to get there with two classmates—Phil, who was Black, and Doug, who was white—to a jazz festival in a town with the mildly risqué name of French Lick, later renowned as the home of Boston Celtics star Larry Bird. We’d followed the instructions in a newspaper ad and sent our hotel reservation by telegram to the local Sheraton that was booking festival attendees. Arriving around 9 the night before the festival opened, we went to the front desk to check in. But as soon as the clerk saw Phil, he said, “We don’t have your reservation.” He didn’t bother to check the boxes of telegrammed reservations on the counter behind him as the clerks were doing for other arriving guests, all of whom were white.
By now exhausted and starved, we drove to a greasy spoon restaurant on the main street for some dinner. There were few customers at that late hour, and we easily found a table. Then we waited—10, 15, 20 minutes—but no one came to bring us menus or take our orders. Finally, a teenage boy in a white apron came out of the kitchen, walked over to our table and said to Phil very politely, “I’m sorry. We can’t serve you here.” Back on the road, Doug picked up greasy takeout hamburgers at a truck stop, and we ended up eating and trying to sleep while battling mosquitoes in the sweltering August heat.
Another sad coda likewise highlighted a clash of old and new social norms. A decade after the camping trip, Cynthia and her steady boyfriend were visiting her family for the Christmas holiday. They had been practically living together at college, but Margaret refused to let them sleep in the same room. After everyone else went to bed, Cynthia and her boyfriend left the house to spend the night in their car. To keep out the winter cold, they rolled up the windows, started the engine, and turned on the heater. They must have fallen back asleep without noticing the exhaust filling up the car. Neither survived.
As our 1952 camping trip ended with our late-night arrival at the Parkers’ house, I couldn’t know the dark times that lay ahead—for both of our families, and for the country. We were still innocents back then, though we didn’t stay innocent too much longer. While our parents were unloading the two cars, Cynthia and I went behind the house, out of sight, and tried our first kiss. It had a fresh, sweet taste that I never forgot.
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Steve Rabson moved from Providence, Rhode Island, to Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 2011 after retiring from 30 years teaching at Brown University, and now teaches part time at the University of Mary Washington. He writes books and articles about Japan and translates Japanese literature. His latest book, Training and Deployment of America’s Nuclear Cold Warriors: Keepers of Armageddon (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, U.K., 2022), is a first-person account with fellow veterans stationed at an Army nuclear weapons base in Okinawa, Japan during the 1960s.
