1955 Was a Very Good Year

What it was like in the mid fifties

1955 Was a Very Good Year

 

By Elton Camp

 

A better year in my life I have never seen

Because, back then, I was only age fifteen

Nobody I knew had, at that time, ever died

Any problems of the world I could brush aside

 

Nearly eight millions cars were sold in the USA

And never before had they been styled that way

Seven out of ten families owned a motor car

So we ranged freely about, both near and far

 

And yearly pay was nearly four thousand buck

Inflation of one-fourth percent added to the luck

Minimum wage to a dollar an hour had been raised

And gas at twenty-three cents a gallon was praised

 

Eleven thousand dollars was the cost of a new house

About a new car at two thousand, nobody’d grouse

Born that year were Whoppi Goldberg, Jobs & Gates

Nobody would have expected their eventual fates

 

Of the civil rights movement I was only vaguely aware

Dr. King, Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, though, were there

Elvis Presley was then the very latest singing rage

And appealed to screaming girls of most any age

 

James Dean in the movie, East of Eden, was the star

But he died that year and so wasn’t able to go too far

Finding his thrill on Blueberry Hill was Fats Domino

Bill Haley, Chuck Berry and the Platters on the go

 

I am not one of those old men who dotes to say

“If only it were still like back in the good old day”

Back in 1955, there many problems and great woe

But not the concern of a fifties teenager, though