Perhaps one of the things which most characterizes the 1950s was the strong element of conservatism and anti-communist feeling which ran throughout much of society. Religion and family values were seen as an indicator of anti-communism. Families worked together, played together and vacationed together and this was reflected in the fad recreational activities of the decade, like model train sets, frizbees and trmpolines, where the whole family joined in.
Gender roles were strongly held, girls played with hula hoops, dolls (Kewpie dolls made a comeback in the 1950s, and were one of the first toys to be made of hard plastic) and Dale Evans gear, boys with Zorro, Roy Rogers and Davy Crockett toys, Hopalong Cassidy guns and western gear. Fad toys and games with kids included drinking bird toys, Popeye figures, Indian Joe toy drummers, farmyard figures, cowboys and indians figures, toy car garages, doll's houses, rubber band powered toy planes, Mother Goose toys, View-Masters, B-B Guns, Sandbox Jeeps, Tinker Toys, Matchbox cars, marbles, spinning tops, Meccano building kits, Hornby and Triang model train sets, Tiny Tears dolls, Dennis The Menace dolls, Golliwog rag dolls, Yo-Yo's, Pedal cars, scooters, tie-pin water pistols, Jack ‘N Jill TV-Radios and silly putty. After the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the trend in boys' toys moved away from western gear to things relating to space and outer space travel.

Tinker Toys	Gollywog rag doll	Pedal car

UFO Sighting: UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) sightings can be traced back to at least 173 B.C. Glowing or shiny objects have appeared in drawings and paintings during the middle ages and into the mid-19th century. With the coming of the camera and camcorder, sightings are now able to be documented easily and this explains the fad of sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects.
In the early part of the 20th century, authors such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells wrote about space travel and visitors from other planets. Orson Welles brought one H.G. Wells novel to the masses in his radio production "War of the Worlds." Millions of listeners throughout the United States fell into a full-scale panic, believing that aliens had landed on Earth and were now attacking the planet.
Just when it seemed that the world had put away its obsession with extraterrestrial beings, the Roswell Incident occurred. As the story goes, a UFO crashed into the desert in New Mexico in 1947. Although a ranch manager named Mac Brazel claimed to have found the wreckage, he did not report it until days later when he went into town. Before the United States Air Force could respond and go to the scene, other local residents investigated the crash scene. They claimed that the craft was made of a thin, aluminum foil-like substance that was pliable and could be wrinkled, but could not be dented by even the hardest of blows. They also reported that part of the structure of the craft included beams of wood that included strange markings resembling hieroglyphics. After taking the remnants of the crash to Wright Air Force base, the Air Force declared that the wreckage was simply a weather balloon with a tin foil attachment used for radar.
Over the years, conspiracy-theorists have claimed that alien bodies were discovered in the wreckage and that Air Force doctors have conducted autopsies on the bodies. In the 1970s, UFO sightings began occurring again, but this time they were not accompanied by the fear and hysteria that accompanied sightings and stories years before. Much of this is thought to have been precipitated by Hollywood depictions of alien activity in movies such as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T. - the Extraterrestrial" and television shows such as "Star Trek" and "Lost In Space".

Alleged Roswell crash site	Drive-in Theatre	Model Railway

Model trains: Around the turn of the 20th century, Joshua L. Cowen, founder of the Lionel Corporation, built the first toy train. The Lionel Corporation owned the market for these train sets and it became an obsession to enthusiasts. With World War II affecting the economy in 1941, Cowen stopped making model trains and signed a contract with the government to build gun mounts and various other war materials. It wasn't until 1945, when the atom bomb hit Hiroshima, that his contracts were cancelled and he began making model trains again. Their popularity went from strength to strength in 1950s and other manufacturers climbed aboard. In Australia, as in England, the HO and OO gauge became the standard for domestic model railroaders, and two English toy companies, Triang and Hosnsby, managed to get the lion's share of the business. The passion began to fade around 1963 with the introduction of slot cars, which enjoyed a decade of popularity - the best christmas present a boy could wish to find under the tree was a scalectrix set rather than a model train set. These days, there are still plenty of model railway enthusiasts about, usually among older men, who keep alive their boyhood passsion for model railwaying.

Drive-In Theatres: The first drive-in movie was shown in the driveway of the home of Richard Hollingshead in Camden, New Jersey, USA. Hollingshead sat in his car while his 16 millimetre projector displayed a movie onto a screen attached to his garage door. He took this concept and expanded it with the idea of allowing hundreds of people to watch a movie from the privacy of their cars. On 7th June 1933, Hollingshead opened the world's first drive-in movie theatre in Camden, New Jersey. Within a fan shaped, tiered car park and inclined ramps, more than 400 cars in eight rows came to watch a movie on a 9 x 12 metre screen. The theatre was an immediate success and Hollingshead and his cousin created a drive-in movie theatre franchise throughout the United States. The up-and-coming generation of young Baby Boomers particular liked the idea of being able to go out without having to dress up, nor did they mind getting out of their cars to get food, wash their cars, play miniature golf or many of the other activities that theatre owners devised for them. The Drive-In theatre became very much a Baby Boomer phenomenon. Drive-in theatres did have some problems early on, including obstructed views and poor audio. These were remedied by tiering and spacing the grounds and placing individual speakers on each car.
Australia's first Drive-In theatre opened in a natural valley on the Burwood Hwy in the Melbourne suburb of Burwood on 18th February 1954. It was surrounded by paddocks, but new housing was spreading throughout the area rapidly. The Skyline Burwood opened to the public after a preview screening to an invited audience of “The Conquest Of Everest” the night before. The opening film starred Danny Kaye and Gene Tierney in “On the Riviera”, a three year old film from Fox.
The success of drive-in theatres gradually tailed off in the 1980s, in part because of rising real estate costs and competition from video cassette rentals, but also because Drive-Ins did not have the same appeal with the next generation (Generation-X) as it had with Baby Boomers. More ...
Photo: Port Denison Drive-In Theatre, Port Denison, WA, one of many in regional Western Australia that are still operational.

Panty Raids: Legend has it that the tradition of the Panty Raid began on the night of 21st March 1952 at the University of Michigan, USA, when about 600 male students stormed the women's dormitory, confiscating their lingerie. Soon male college students across America began to participate in this custom (as it was 1952, the oldest Baby Boomer would have been 6 years old, so they weren't Baby Boomers!). There are many recorded incidents in other countries like Australia, though here they were less frequent. After achieving their goal, the raiders would parade around the entrance of the dormitory boastfully holding up the "stolen goods." Some students went to extremes to accomplish their mission. One group, from the University of Miami, actually tore down a large wire fence to access the women's dormitory. It was not uncommon for women to exact their revenge. 500 women from the University of Michigan snuck into the men's dormitory and stole the boxer shorts and "tighty whities" of their enemy on one occasion. Although the panty raids were seemingly harmless, the more serious students felt it disrupted their studies. Others felt that their privacy had been invaded, and the police were called in on several occasions. Despite complaints, panty raids continued throughout the 1950s. The practice finally seemed to die out in the 1960s. It has been speculated that panty raids lost their thrill with the onset of the sexual revolution. The Great Panty Raid of '61

Trampoline	The Frisbee	Silly Putty

The Trampoline: First used in the 18th century by circus tumblers, the trampoline became an international domestic craze in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Used initially as an exercise apparatus in high school gym classes, trampolines quickly began to appeal to members of the general public who wanted to be able to jump, bounce, somersault, backflip and at least temporarily defy the bounds of gravity at home. The manufactured trampoline, as we know it today, was created by two men, George Nissen and Larry Griswold around 1935. Griswold as then the assistant gymnastics coach at the University of Iowa, and Nissen, a tumbler on the University of Iowa gymnastics team. One day, with the help of the wrestling coach at the University of Iowa, Griswold and Nissen bolted together an angle iron frame. A piece of canvas, in which they had inserted grommets along each side, was then attached to the frame by using springs. This was the first trampoline.
Bill Sorenson developed the first domestic model in the basement of his father-in-law’s hardware store in Jefferson, Iowa, in 1954. Some people bought kits for as little as $50.00 and assembled their own in their backyards while others visited trampoline parks. The trampoline craze cooled off during the summer of 1960 due in part to safety concerns following numerous neck and back injuries. Every now and then, however, trampolines stage a minor comeback, most recently as an exercise tool for aerobic workouts.

The Frisbee: One of the longest running fads (and certainly among the most popular) is the Frisbee. A Frisbee is a plastic disk about the size of a dinner plate thrown between players by a flip of the wrist. Frisbees have become a staple on beaches and in parks since their invention. Although tossing discs for fun was part of ancient Greek culture, the activity as a craze hit the world in the 1950s. It is debatable who first invented the model day Frisbee. Legend has it that pie pans used at the Frisbie Baking Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut had been tossed around by employees since the late 1930s. During their during breaks, workers would toss the pans back and forth in different manners. The company reported customers began doing the same, and that more than 5,000 pans were not returned by customers during the 1940s. Others stories focus on a Yale University student named Elihu Frisbie who helped to introduce pie pan flinging contests to US University campuses. Either way, the game soon began appearing on other US college campuses in the spring of 1957.

Silly Putty: In 1944, chemists at General Electric announced the invention of silicone, a sand-based product that could be used to make synthetic rubber and a host of other fascinating items. One derivative of this class of silicone was dubbed by them as "bouncing putty" as it could bounce like a ball when rolled up, stretch like toffee when pulled, and if left to sit in one place, would flatten out like a pancake. As interesting and amazing as it seemed, the scientists could not find any uses for it and basically tossed it aside and forgot about it for five years. As the saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure and for Peter Hodgson, the bouncing putty would become a goldmine.
Hodgson was a 36 year old advertising copy writer from New Haven, Connecticut, who happened upon a sample of the substance and thought it made a great novelty item with marketing potential. He obtained legal rights to the name Silly Putty™, purchased $150.00 worth of the substance, placed one-ounce pieces of it in plastic "egg" containers and began selling them through retail stores. His efforts caught the eye of a writer for the New Yorker magazine who wrote an article about the product. This publicity triggered an explosion in sales - by Christmas Hodgson had sold more than one million units. Along with its aforementioned properties, Hodgson also discovered that the putty, when pressed against a newspaper, would "pick up" a copy of the print on its surface. Children across the world began pressing Silly Putty against pictures from the comic section and took the resulting copy and stretched it to make the images distorted and even more comical. After the US government placed controls on the use and sale of silicone during the Korean War, Hodgson became a man without a product to sell. After the war, he had to start from scratch, and rebuilt the business to a point where he was again selling over $5 million worth each year.

Think Pink: Formerly considered a "girlish" color, pink appeared everywhere in the 1950s and became that decade's "in" colour. Even real tough men were donning pink ties, shirts and bathrobes. Serious corporate types could be seen wearing pink under their grey flannel suits. This display of sartorial splendour was a radical departure from the drab neutral colours that once limited men's clothing choices, but the atraction of pink it didn't stop at clothing. There were pink bathrooms (many in homes built in the 1950s survive today) with accessories to match, pink leather lounges, pink shoes, pink lipstick, and of course, the ubiquitous pink poodle. The classic 1950s skirt for young women, the poodle skirt, was traditionally pink. And who started the craze? Many credit the King himself, Elvis Presley - when he bought himself a 1955 Pink Cadillac Fleetwood 40 Special, the first of many Caddys he owned - but the truth is, pink was well in vogue by then. It was for that reason he bought his first pink Caddy!

Pink Cadillac Elvis-style	Pink poodle	Hula Hoop

Hula Hoops: One of the greatest fads of all - the Hula Hoop - was developed in 1957 by the American company Wham-O (the company that first manufactured the Frisbee). The round cylinder tube was modelled after a wooden toy that was utilised in Australian gym classes. Made of polyurethane, the hoops were placed over a person's head and then spun around their waist. In order to keep the hoop aloft, the users had to gyrate and wiggle their hips much like hula dancers in Hawaii. Wham-O marketed the toys in California and through word of mouth, interest in them quickly spread like wildfire.
In 1958, after only four months on the market, Wham-O sold a staggering 25 million units. Sales of the Hula Hoop and the knockoff clones ended up exceeding more than 100 million units in the United States alone. Within 12 months, sales in the US had died, but marketing in Europe, the Middle East, Japan and Australasia kept international sales on an upward climb. Remarkable is the fact that the fad lasted less than a year in the United States yet sold such an incredible volume of units. Never before or since has anything approached such a level of huge popularity.

Bug Deflectors: An accessory for one's car that took off in Australia in a big way was the bug deflector, which often took the form of a bonnet-mounted chrome swan with spread Perspex wings. Its stated function was to deflect oncoming insects from the windscreen. Whether it worked or not remains an unanswered question, but there is no doubt that these deflector did add a little class to one's wheels.

The Yo Yo: The yo-yo has existed for thousands of years. Ancient Greek artwork displayed the spool-like toy and over the years, the yo-yo has been found in various forms in many cultures. The early versions were made of wood, metal or terra cotta and were often decorated with painting of people or scenes. The two discs were connected by a small rod in the middle and had a piece of string tied to the rod. As well as a toy, the yo-yo had been used for hundreds of years as a weapon, often with blades attached. The attacker would hide in a tree and sling it down to strike an unsuspecting victim walking below. As it passed from culture to culture, it went by many names: "bandalore" and "quiz" in Great Britain, "incroyable", "l'emigrette" and "coblentz" in France, and "disc" in Greece. In the Philippines, however, it was labeled "yo-yo" which means "comeback" and the name was adopted universally.
Pedro Flores began manufacturing an improved version of the yo-yo in The Philippines in the late 1920s. His version used a slip string which accommodated the up and down movement as well as permitting the toy to "spin" suspended at the end of the string (often referred to as "sleeping" or "sticking"). In 1929, Donald F. Duncan purchased the rights to the toy from Flores. Duncan was certainly no stranger to successful marketing of a product, having invented the Eskimo Pie ice cream and the parking meter among other things. Duncan imported a number of teenagers from the Philippines to demonstrate the toy and numerous tricks and stunts to the American public. His marketing worked and quickly his toy, which he originally called the "O-Boy Yo-yo Top", was a bestseller. It sold three million units in his home stater of Philadelphia alone during a single month in 1931.
After the war, Duncan faced a number of competitors and saw his market share dwindle. In the late 1950s/early 1960s, however, his fortunes charged. Along with the standard version (which was called the "Imperial"), Duncan introduced another called the Butterfly. In 1962, 45 million units were sold followed by 56 million more in 1963. Unfortunately, the costs of producing and marketing the toys exceeded the enormous revenues they brought in and Duncan was forced to declare bankruptcy two years later. The toy has continued to go in and out of popularity with each generation since.

Fifties dances: Though the 60s was a decade in which dance crazes came and went at a frenetic pace, the 50s had a number of dance crazes of its own. More ...