Sometimes, I try to imagine life back in the world when I was born. Rows of new houses built in suburbs like the one I grew up in -- Royal Oak -- just outside Detroit, claiming land from the farmers who still worked within sight. Milk delivered by a milkman, who slid the bottles through one of those cold lockers into our house. Black sedans with running boards, men still wearing parts of their uniforms from the recently ended war, young couples starting new families.
The music of the time was still the romantic, crooning ballads of the '40s, the styles owed more to the pre-war '30s than to the as-yet undefined '50s.
By the time I was old enough to look around my environment, everything was changing. There were so many of us "baby-boom" kids that the world was, in many ways, dominated by us. Tons of kids just poured out into the streets, running here and there, almost without any purpose other than the need to expend pure energy.
The automobiles started assuming new designs, with colors and curves and jets and other affects. They lost their running boards, and picked up horsepower. A horrible, life-threatening plague swept through our communities -- polio.
The milkman started to disappear, as the corner store emerged to offer new consumption opportunities.
In music, the crooners and cover artists continued to dominate our parents' music, but something else was emerging that would challenge the status quo and ultimately topple it: Rock n Roll.
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