It’s a law of physics. You know. Like apples falling on Newton’s head. The more I really want something, the more I can count on getting it -- exactly when I don’t want it.
Susie from down the road pulls the elastic from her pony tail and shakes loose her honey blond curls. “Hey, Sophie. I’m going over to Polly’s to watch American Bandstand. Wanna come?”
Her invitation is for me, but her eyes are on my older brother. Like a cowboy in one of those Westerns he watches, Marek hooks his thumbs into the pockets of his chinos and leans against Dad’s wood-paneled station wagon. He’s trying to look cool, but he’s lapping up Susie’s adoration as avidly as our dog licks the trickle of ice cream from a melting cone.
A longing spreads across my chest with a hunger worse than three months of starvation hiding from the Polish Policja. After a year in the US, I still don’t have many friends.
Of course, Susie’s invitation comes at exactly the wrong time. I foolishly spent the morning clothes-pinning playing cards to the fat wheels of my little sister Viola’s red Schwinn bike, which she’s rolling back and forth. The tsking click accelerates like a Geiger counter measuring her worry.
As if I’d forget.
So starts an early version of my YA Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty. In my last blog post I talked about using childhood memories to add texture to a novel. This week's post is how it looks in action.
First, it's a way to clearly set the time and place -- in this case, a Long Island suburb in the 1950's.
Dick Clark's TV show American Bandstand, which ran from 1952 to 1989 (!!!) in various versions, was a teen icon. Top teen pop stars appeared live on the show, singing their latest hits. The show also introduced the concept of the Top 40, which has survived to today.
The show's original name was Bandstand, which is what it was called in 1956, but since most people knew it asAmerican Bandstand , I used that name. It ran in the afternoons, and rolling back the rug and dancing along with the music was almost an obsession among teens in the fifties and early sixties. So when Sophie is invited to watch it with friends, its a way into the "in" crowd at her new school.
I can't believe how big tv was back then, as big as it is now. By the mid 1950's most homes had a black and white tv and kids talked about the shows and the plots like they do today. American Bandstand came on around 4 or 4:30 -- scheduled to catch the teen audience -- and kids rushed home to catch it on tv.
Color started coming in in the early 1960's, but people made attempts to colorize their tv screens before that. I remember being really excited about one product and bugging my partents to buy a thick sheet of clear plastic that stuck to your screen through static electricity and promised to add color to the program. When light hit the plastic, some kind of coating on it would add hues of mostly red and green to the image. But the color came from the coated spots on the plastic, not from the image on the screen, so there was no coordination between the real color of an object and what you saw. You can imagine my disappointment at a green face or a red glass of milk. Needless to say, that fad didn't last long.
Rolling back the rug was another feature of the fifties. Back in those days, wall to wall carpeting was a luxury that only the rich could afford. Most people had homes with wooden floors (linoleum in the kitchen). Area rugs covered the center of the room. When exposed, the wooden planking made a great dance floor.
My parents (and many families) had two sets of rugs -- gray wool ones for winter, and gray straw mats for summer. The rugs were fairly large and covered most of the floor, leaving about two feet around the edge of the room. It was a big annual project to shift furniture and change rugs. I can't remember where the kept the set that wasn't being used. Changing rugs made them last longer, though. My parents, when they built a retirement home out on eastern Long Island in the late 60's, actually brought the wool rugs, still in great condition, with them. By that time the rugs were 20 years old.
To be continued next week...
Showing posts with label 1950s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1950s. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2012
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Draconian Divorce -- New York in the 1950's
A big part of the plot of Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty circles around Sophie’s parents’ divorce. Exiled takes place in the 1950’s in an imaginary version of my Long Island hometown. Back in those days, divorce was very different from the no-fault, bye-it-was-nice-knowing-you system prevalent throughout the US today. And New York State had the most draconian of all divorce laws.
For those of you who don’t live in the United States and didn’t have to sit through an interminable term of what our high school teachers called “Government”, laws concerning marriage, divorce, birth control, driving, education and a lot of other things differ from state to state. That’s thanks to a quirk of the US Constitution that reserves to state governments everything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
In 1956, the year Exiled takes place, every state was different. Laws ranged from Nevada, where you merely had to establish six weeks residence, file a petition and get a divorce, to New York, which restricted divorce to only those who could prove the adultery of their spouse. Even then it took ages to go through the complete process to the final “Decree Nisi”, which said the marriage was officially ended and the parties could remarry.
Early New York divorce law had an interesting quirk. Until the state constitution was modified in the early 20th century, there were two routes to divorce. The one was a judicial route, in which a party could be granted divorce upon proving the infidelity of the spouse. When the law permitting this was originally proposed in 1787, it also stipulated that the adulterous party would not be permitted to remarry, but when it was actually passed two years later, that provision was dropped as too onerous.
The other route was called a parliamentary divorce. It allowed the parties to apply to the state legislature, who could then pass a special law permitting the divorce. This allowed a much broader range of grounds, but was very hard to get.
As a result, even as early as the 19th century, a large number of New Yorkers sought divorces outside the state, in what is known as “migratory” divorce. This was the route my own father took in 1946 when he split from his first wife (who was not my mother). The states preferred for divorce were those with very short residency requirements, chiefly Alabama, Nevada, Florida, Idaho and Wyoming. The wealthy often went overseas. There were divorce “mills” in Paris, Havana and Mexico.
There were domestic scandals, as well. Several times in the state’s history, divorce “rings” were exposed, in which professional “co-respondents” were paid to attest to having sex with one or the other of the parties in order to provide the necessary grounds.
Of course, in Exiled, Marta’s adultery is a proven fact. Even so, Jan needs hard evidence for court, which is why he appears to stalk her. Courts were not favorable towards women caught in adultery, by the way. Happy Murphy, who divorced her doctor husband to marry Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1963, was forced to give up her four children by Murphy.
By 1956, citizens were clamoring for reform and a commission was created to study the divorce laws, but its limited mandate prevented it from accomplishing anything. In fact, reform was strongly blocked by the Catholic Church, which had a strong hold on the lower and more populous half of New York State. It took another ten years before the 1966 Divorce Reform Law was adopted. This law allowed for a wider range of grounds, including desertion, imprisonment, “deviant” sexual behavior and “cruel and inhuman treatment”. It also permitted “no-fault” divorce based on legal separation, which was carefully defined.
The reforms, while an improvement, were by no means equitable. In the 1960’s, the majority of women were still economically dependent on their husbands, and legislation did not guarantee a divorced woman sufficient means of support. It wasn’t until the feminist movement and further reform in 1980 that this was addressed.
Source: http://www.brandeslaw.com/grounds_for_divorce/history.htm accessed 22/8/08
For those of you who don’t live in the United States and didn’t have to sit through an interminable term of what our high school teachers called “Government”, laws concerning marriage, divorce, birth control, driving, education and a lot of other things differ from state to state. That’s thanks to a quirk of the US Constitution that reserves to state governments everything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
In 1956, the year Exiled takes place, every state was different. Laws ranged from Nevada, where you merely had to establish six weeks residence, file a petition and get a divorce, to New York, which restricted divorce to only those who could prove the adultery of their spouse. Even then it took ages to go through the complete process to the final “Decree Nisi”, which said the marriage was officially ended and the parties could remarry.
Early New York divorce law had an interesting quirk. Until the state constitution was modified in the early 20th century, there were two routes to divorce. The one was a judicial route, in which a party could be granted divorce upon proving the infidelity of the spouse. When the law permitting this was originally proposed in 1787, it also stipulated that the adulterous party would not be permitted to remarry, but when it was actually passed two years later, that provision was dropped as too onerous.
The other route was called a parliamentary divorce. It allowed the parties to apply to the state legislature, who could then pass a special law permitting the divorce. This allowed a much broader range of grounds, but was very hard to get.
As a result, even as early as the 19th century, a large number of New Yorkers sought divorces outside the state, in what is known as “migratory” divorce. This was the route my own father took in 1946 when he split from his first wife (who was not my mother). The states preferred for divorce were those with very short residency requirements, chiefly Alabama, Nevada, Florida, Idaho and Wyoming. The wealthy often went overseas. There were divorce “mills” in Paris, Havana and Mexico.
There were domestic scandals, as well. Several times in the state’s history, divorce “rings” were exposed, in which professional “co-respondents” were paid to attest to having sex with one or the other of the parties in order to provide the necessary grounds.
Of course, in Exiled, Marta’s adultery is a proven fact. Even so, Jan needs hard evidence for court, which is why he appears to stalk her. Courts were not favorable towards women caught in adultery, by the way. Happy Murphy, who divorced her doctor husband to marry Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1963, was forced to give up her four children by Murphy.
By 1956, citizens were clamoring for reform and a commission was created to study the divorce laws, but its limited mandate prevented it from accomplishing anything. In fact, reform was strongly blocked by the Catholic Church, which had a strong hold on the lower and more populous half of New York State. It took another ten years before the 1966 Divorce Reform Law was adopted. This law allowed for a wider range of grounds, including desertion, imprisonment, “deviant” sexual behavior and “cruel and inhuman treatment”. It also permitted “no-fault” divorce based on legal separation, which was carefully defined.
The reforms, while an improvement, were by no means equitable. In the 1960’s, the majority of women were still economically dependent on their husbands, and legislation did not guarantee a divorced woman sufficient means of support. It wasn’t until the feminist movement and further reform in 1980 that this was addressed.
Source: http://www.brandeslaw.com/grounds_for_divorce/history.htm accessed 22/8/08
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