Looking at issues of the New Yorker from 1958, you discover just how much you have forgotten, didn’t know, or had never even thought about. For starters:
Alaska wasn’t yet a State of the Union.
Miles Davis was 31 years old.
Cuba, before the Revolution, was - surprise! - a dictatorship. (There’s progress for you.) In 1958 they were still building big, glorious hotels in Havana, such as the Habana Hilton, much advertised in the magazine throughout that year.
Construction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R Guggenheim Museum was, at long last, under way.
The first CND Easter march took place, in London.
Iran, under the Shah, was moving full steam ahead towards “modernization”.
Russian scientists, so it was believed, were way ahead of those in the United States. Ah, the Cold War; wasn’t that a time?
The Berlin Wall didn’t yet exist, notwithstanding Moscow’s best efforts.
No human being had travelled in space.
If you went for a holiday to Russia, you would be hounded for months after your return by friends, neighbours and journalists who would try to squeeze every last morsel of information from you.
There was a fire at the Museum of Modern Art.
“The Subterraneans” was published; as were “Doctor Zhivago”, “Lolita” and “Curious George Flies A Kite”.
Jan Morris was still James Morris.
All eyes, at least those that weren't on Russia, were on Cape Canaveral and Los Alamos.
America had its first ever “lame duck” (New Yorker, 1 March 1958) President.
Maria Callas sang in New York and was roundly booed.
The island of Ceylon was feeling the exhilarating urge of independence.
Algeria continued to be a bloody mess.
Tranquillising drugs were the new thing. As were, at various times, the hula hoop, car leasing, and ripple soled shoes.
A Pakistani cricket team toured America.
“Vertigo” was released: “Hitchcock has never before indulged in such far-fetched nonsense” - John McCarten, the New Yorker, 7 June 1958.
Penn Station still existed.
The “Ed Sullivan Show” had been going for 10 years.
There was trouble for the world powers in Iraq and Lebanon. (What year are we talking about again?)
John F Kennedy was John Kennedy, a rising Democratic hopeful.
All women looked and dressed exactly like Bree Van De Kamp.
The art of solo piano was dead, while elsewhere in the firmament jazz was being saved by Charlie [sic] Mingus, Monk, Gil Evans and John Lewis.
You could buy: single-pedestal dining furniture designed by Eero Saarinen (later in the year, augmented by a single-pedestal armchair); recordings from the “Living Stereo” range of lps from RCA-Victor; a 1959 Cadillac, for which GM produced the “Autronic-Eye” automatic headlight-dimming “marvel”; a Hamilton Electric Watch; the Philco Veep, a powerful transistor radio “no bigger than a pack of cigarettes”; a 1959 Oldsmobile, “the car that conquers ‘inner’ space”; or a copy of “The Most of S J Perelman” (which, obviously, is what I would have chosen, and a copy of which I did in fact pick up during our next-to-last visit to Geelong).
