Post #399063 by Thomas on Tue, Aug 5, 2008 12:30 PM

1959 seems to have been some sort of "power year," like 1968 was, in different ways, later. Certainly with regard to the sorts of things we are interested in here, it seems to mark a kind of apex and turning point. Denny's "Exotica" album reached #1 on the Billboard charts in 1959.

Here is a wonderful poem entitled, "Summers, About 1959," by Alberto Rios, read by Garrison Keillor on his show, "The Writer's Almanac."
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2002/05/06
To anyone interested, I would recommend listening to the audio.
**
Poem: "Summers, About 1959," by Alberto Rios from The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Copper Canyon Press).

Summers, About 1959

Women wore those sleeveless blouses
Where, if you tried, you could peek in
And try to get a look.

But it was always the wrong angle.
Contact lenses got invented in those years, too.
I remember the first boy who got some:

He had big white lines
From his nose to his ears
As if he were wearing invisible glasses.

That's how someone explained them to me
And I believed it: invisible glasses.
But they were really just the tan lines

From so many years of big, standard-issue
Black frames, glasses a little like
Plymouths for the face.

This was when summers were all the X-15,
Mickey Mantle and Roberto Clemente,
TV dinners and the drive-in.

Summers had a smell then. When you inhaled
You got the sound of crickets and cicadas
As well in your nose, and Sputnik too-

A word that rolled around in our mouths
Then spat itself out. Sputnik. We said it
All the time. Things were changing.

**

[Edited to add text of poem]

[ Edited by: Thomas 2008-08-05 12:57 ]