Everyday life

A great deal of American life never made the evening news, because it was too ordinary. Kitchens, errands, school days, and the small machines a household argued about replacing: that is the subject of this quiz.

Ordinary things disappear quietly. A habit can be universal on one block and gone ten years later, with no parade to mark the change. This sitting stays roughly between the 1940s and the 1970s. None of it required you to be famous. It required you to be there, in a house that had its own way of getting through a Tuesday.

Nostalgia works when the detail is real, so the notes try to be specific. Towns did not keep the same rules. A city kitchen and a small-town kitchen in the same year could still be a decade apart. If your memory and your cousin's memory disagree, you may both be describing a true street. The country was less uniform than the commercials suggested.

This page is affectionate and it is not a sermon about going backward. Shared phone lines were cheap and nosy. A civil-defense drill was a heavy thing to hand a child. Catalogs from Sears and Montgomery Ward really did bring a department store to a rural mailbox, which was a kind of freedom, and they also fixed a picture of what a household was supposed to own. Long-distance family driving became ordinary as interstate highways spread in the late 1950s and 1960s. Many towns still had one high school and one movie theater, so Friday night had a short menu.

Play it as a conversation with the house you remember, or with the house your parents described. The television quiz starts in the same living room, after supper. The states quiz is the map those errands and vacations were drawn on.