I was born in 1941 and remember VJ Day.
Also remember orange Nehi...cream on the top of milk bottles delivered on a cold morning...shaking the furnace grate to get down the clinkers (the height of luxury was having an automatic hopper that fed small coal chunks to the furnace, so you didn't have to worry about it going out at night).
There was no air conditioning but there were fans, and when the rotating fan completed its arc and swept back across you, it was wonderous.
There was no tv, there was radio and it was better; and when tv did come along and we discovered Captain Video, we were semi-hooked but still only had a couple hours of black and white programming available...but we'd watch the test pattern. Too bad tv got so important, so intrusive, so consuming of our lives.
Riding bikes was a central activity. I had a full-dress Columbia but aspired to a Schwinn with knee-action; my bike had a battery horn in the tank and a generator that powered the lights. Decorating your bike, creating stunts, Keeping It Nice ("never ever leave your bike out in the rain") was the axis of kid activity if we weren't playing Guns or, with more complexity, War. There were war souvenirs available and the lucky kids had their dads gear or German helmets.
We wore military surplus clothes that our mothers shortened or took in. Made push carts out of drop tanks. Hated singing in school. Had talent days with great regularity, when the musically inclined kids played their clarinet or flute or marimba.
Dipped a girls pigtail in my ink well and got in major trouble. Yes, an ink well; in the 40s and early 50s we still learned cursive handwriting with dip pens; all school kids bore ink smudges with a permanent smudge on the first joint of the index finger.
Meals were eaten at home, except occasionally you got a trip to the neighborhood restaurant where a hamburger and malt invariably was ordered (nobody had blenders, so a restaurant malt was special). You could get hand packed ice cream at the variety store...and 5 flavors of fountain cokes (the Topaz "coke" was a squirt of vanilla, cherry, lime, chocolate and rootbeer and I cannot imagine why anybody ordered one as they were awful).
The yo-yo man came around to the drugstore about every six months, from Duncan, and would show us tricks; the really good yo-yo men would carve a picture on our new yo-yos and some of these carvings were superb. Yo-yos were confiscated on sight at school. As were pea shooters, though we learned to cut them down for greater concealability. Squirt guns were verbotten, too.
At school we had paper drives a couple times each year to raise money. Huge mounds of old newspapers and magazines would be brought from home during a designated week; we would bring them in parents cars and by our wagons. Nobody had a pickup truck. The papers would be dumped into huge piles for the pulp services to take away.
The spectre of polio was everywhere. Parents made kids avoid crowds. Rather than go to a public pool (there were few) or the beach, you stayed home and ran through the hose on a hot day. And there were many hot days. We played outside until dark, sometimes later, playing with toy cars, digging elaborate tunnels and roads in the dirt, getting impossibly dirty (showers were still new and the bathtub was a standard fixture, as was the ring around it, crud left when we dirty kids were done)...playing with our cap guns...playing kick the can.
We were innocents. There was wickedness in the world, as there has ever been, but we were more insulated from it.
(Then when I was 14 I read a book called "The Theory and Practice of Hell" about the death camps, and became forever mystified about the depths of human evil.)
