I wonder if there was ever a better, more optimistic time for Americans than the 1950s.

[caption id="attachment_1395" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Downtown"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Downtown-America-1950.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1395" title="Downtown America-1950" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Downtown-America-1950-300x216.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="216" /></a>[/caption]

I'm not saying things were perfect -- Joe McCarthy and Jim Crow come to mind, not to mention the threat of nuclear war -- but I don't know if there was ever a better time to be an American as compared to a citizen of any other country.

Europe was being rebuilt, while Asia, Africa and South America were still emerging.

Americans had it all.

And what we had, more than anything else, was the confidence that we could do anything. There was an old saying that an Englishman walked the world as though he owned it, but an American walked the world as if he didn't give a damn who owned it.

Our parents told us to eat our vegetables because children in Europe were starving, even though they were probably 5-10 years late on that. Everybody who could afford one drove a big American car, and everybody's dad -- even some who hadn't finished high school -- had at least a good blue-collar job.

Of course it wasn't that simple. In parts of the country, we had every bit as effective a system of apartheid as South Africa. Gay people were still firmly hidden in that closet, and women who didn't want to stay at home, keep house and raise a family were still waiting for Betty Friedan to tell them about the feminine mystique. In the '50s, all they had was Simone de Beauvoir telling them they were the<em> Other</em> in her book "The Second Sex."

So yeah, not so perfect.

But for kids, especially the ones who had been born after World War II, it was pretty special. Children of the 21st Century, who are guarded like the treasure they are and over-activitied and over-organized to the max, would be surprised to learn that in the '50s, kids pretty much had the run of the neighborhood.

I couldn't have been much older than 9 or 10 -- right at the end of the decade -- when I would visit my grandparents in the tiny city of Crestline, Ohio, for a couple of weeks in the summer. I walked all over town by myself, looking for pop bottles that could be turned into baseball cards and comic books or going to the public library and checking out four or five books at a time.

My own son was that age in 1995, and I'm not sure there was a place left in the world where I would have felt comfortable letting him just goof around all day.

The world <em>has</em> changed, and it's not changing back.

It's ironic. When I was 15 or 16, I used to dismiss Crestline as boring, as Hicksville USA. Now I think of my grandparents' home, which was sold 20 years ago after my grandmother died, as a wonderful place that I sort of appreciated but probably didn't appreciate enough. I've written before about the conversation my cousin Peter Kindinger and I had the day we buried my grandmother, about all the wonderful times we had enjoyed in that house and how we would probably never set foot in it again.

Of course that's the way it worked out.

I'm very happy living with my wife Nicole in our lovely home in Georgia, but there is a part of me -- not the serious part -- that thinks if I ever found myself a widower, I might see if I could buy that old house in Crestline. There is something fascinating about the first home I ever remember, from when I was 3 0r 4 years old, being the place where I spent the final years of my life.

It'll never happen. I know I could get back to the place, but not the time, and both are equally important.

Still ...

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