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I wasn't born until 1962, so everything I know about 1957 I know from
books, old movies, and my mother. She was eighteen that fall, just out of
high school and working at a dime store in Stockton. I took her to see
The Iron Giant in August, and she spent the whole movie elbowing me
and whispering "that's right" at the screen. On the drive home I asked her
to tell me everything, and I wrote it down on a legal pad at a red light,
which I don't recommend. Then I went to the library and checked the dates.
Here's what we came up with.
| 1. SPUTNIK |
IN THE MOVIE: It opens with it, Sputnik going around and around the Earth.
WHAT I LOOKED UP: The Soviet Union launched Sputnik on Friday, October 4, 1957. It was the first man-made satellite, and it sent out a beeping radio signal that people could pick up on shortwave radios. America's first try, the Navy's Vanguard rocket, blew up on the launch pad that December, and our first satellite, Explorer 1, didn't go up until January 31, 1958.
WHAT MY MOTHER SAYS: People went out in their yards at night to look for it. Everybody at the dime store talked about it for weeks. She says she was more scared than she let on, and that the grown-ups were more scared than the kids.
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| 2. DUCK AND COVER |
IN THE MOVIE: Hogarth's class watches a film about what to do if the atomic bomb comes. It's one of the funniest parts of the movie, and if you think about it for a second, one of the scariest.
WHAT I LOOKED UP: The real civil defense film was called Duck and Cover, with a cartoon turtle named Bert, and it was shown in schools all through the fifties. The one in the movie is made up, but it's made up in exactly the right style.
WHAT MY MOTHER SAYS: She did the drills in junior high, under the desk with her hands over the back of her neck. She says nobody believed a wooden desk would really help, and everybody did it anyway.
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| 3. COMIC BOOKS |
IN THE MOVIE: Hogarth has a stack of them, and he shows them to the Giant, and the Giant learns about heroes from Superman. That scene is the heart of the whole picture.
WHAT I LOOKED UP: In the fifties, a lot of grown-ups were sure comic books were ruining children. There were even Senate hearings about it in 1954, and afterward the comic book publishers set up a code of rules for what could go in them.
WHAT MY MOTHER SAYS: Her little brother, my uncle, kept his under the mattress. She knew. She never told.
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| 4. THE DINER |
IN THE MOVIE: Hogarth's mother Annie is a waitress at the diner in town, with the long counter and the stools and the regulars who all know everybody's business.
WHAT MY MOTHER SAYS: She waited tables one summer and says the movie got the regulars exactly right. Every diner had a man at the end of the counter who'd seen something strange and wanted to tell you about it.
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| 5. THE BEATNIK |
IN THE MOVIE: Dean runs the junkyard and welds scrap into sculpture, and the town thinks he's a little strange.
WHAT I LOOKED UP: Jack Kerouac's On the Road came out in September 1957, so Dean is right on time. In a small town in Maine he'd have stood out about as much as a giant robot.
WHAT MY MOTHER SAYS: "We didn't have any of those in Stockton." Then she thought about it and said there was one fellow who played the bongos, and he worked at the gas station.
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| 6. THE GOVERNMENT MAN |
IN THE MOVIE: Kent Mansley, the government man in the suit and hat, comes to town convinced that whatever is in the woods must be the Russians' doing, and he will not let it go.
WHAT MY MOTHER SAYS: Everybody was a little like that then, she says, about the Communists. Some people were a lot like that. She says the movie is a little hard on him but not much.
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| 7. THE GIANT HIMSELF |
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WHAT THE DRAFTSMAN SAYS: This one's mine, not my mother's. Look at how he's put together: a big rounded head, a jaw that works like a hinge, plates and rivets, simple shapes you could draw with a compass and a straightedge. He looks like the robots on the covers of the old science-fiction magazines and the windup tin robots that sell for a fortune at antique shows now. Nothing about him looks like 1999. That was the right call. He looks like what a kid in 1957 would have drawn, and I should know, because I drew him a hundred times in 1972.
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On the drive home my mother said she thought it was strange that a
cartoon had made her homesick for a year when everybody was so afraid. Then
she said maybe that was the point: that people were afraid and some of them
were brave anyway. I've been thinking about that ever since.
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