Green Stamps to Hot Pants: Growing Up in the 50s and 60s

Genny Zak Kieley, the author of several best-selling books about the neighborhoods and early history of Northeast Minneapolis, here turns her attention to her own childhood years. Intermixing social research and personal nostalgia, she creates a portrait of a simpler era, when Monday was washday and Tuesday was ironing day, and busy housewives collected green stamps. Drive-ins were the hot spots on Saturday nights, and kids experienced first loves (and first heartbreaks) while listening to doo-wop music on their transistor radios. Cars had fins, bikes were big and bulky, and television had just arrived. Countless Westerns vied with The Wonderful World of Disney for the family’s attention, and Ed Sullivan introduced the nation to those mop-headed youths, the Beatles. “I’ll always remember that time [Kieley writes]. Like many other baby boomers I have a deep sentimental yearning to reclaim the memory of days long past. The music was deep and powerful and also a little crazy. But it was also a time of innocence; this is a memoir of the world as I remember it in the 1950s and 60s.”