Back to my childhood

Life in the 50's

Memories swell in 1950s house
In Park Forest house decorated for the decade, Baby Boomers have discovered the joys of their youth in an emotional 'trip back home'

A kitchen with white metal cabinets on display at a 1950s museum in Park Forest, Ill. a suburb of Chicago. The 1950s-styled home, turned into a museum, has every room outfitted with authentic 1950s furniture, decorations and technology. Park Forest was built as a model suburban community built after WWII. (Tribune photo by John Smierciak / January 21, 2008)



By Joel Hood | Tribune reporter
February 3, 2008

In the working-class suburb of Park Forest, where history drips from the old Eagle Theater downtown and from the broad, pitched roofs above quiet streets, it would be easy to miss the simple house at 141 Forest Blvd.

But inside the plain, red-brick building is a three-dimensional snapshot of early 1950s Americana: sculpted desks and dressers, Formica and chrome table tops, hand-crank ice crushers and a barrel-bodied Maytag Chieftain washing machine.

On Saturday, the village opened this modest home-museum with an old-fashioned ribbon-cutting ceremony that was itself a tribute to the town's unique past. Forty miles south of Chicago, Park Forest was among the first wave of suburban towns built after World War II specifically to meet the needs of returning veterans and their young families.

Two of the early master-planned communities, Park Forest and northwest suburban Rolling Meadows, have painstakingly restored Mid-Century Modern homes with authentic furniture, appliances and gadgets that bring the colorful post-war period back to life.

For Baby Boomers who came of age in the early 1950s and their parents, the museums can stir up deep emotional connections to that iconic post-war period, organizers say.

For younger generations, they provide a glimpse of domestic life long before microwave ovens and plasma televisions. In doing so, the museums tell the stories of their towns, and of an era.

"You walk in and you see a cereal box you remember as a kid, or a chair your mother used to own; it jogs memories," said Jerry Shnay, an author, president of the town's historical society and retired Tribune reporter. "These aren't just historical memories but cultural memories. Images that you might have forgotten until the memories come rushing back."

While Park Forest has changed -- the old clock tower was torn down, the original Goldblatt's department store was demolished -- the home-museum on the corner of Forest Boulevard and Fir Street remains frozen in time.

Rose- and teal-colored Boonton Ware dishes, among the world's first mass-produced plastic plates, sit atop a green Formica and chrome table in the dinning room. An oval-screen Admiral television in a sturdy mahogany cabinet has been placed in the living room beside embroidered frieze fabric chairs. A rotary phone is positioned by a 1955 calendar touting the City Coal & Coke Company of Chicago Heights.

"It's not that things were simpler in the '50s -- it's that people expected less," said Jane Nicoll, the town's archivist and director of the museum. "What you have to understand is that these were people who were raised in the Depression and had been through years of war. They didn't have the attitude that they had to own everything."

Park Forest, incorporated in 1949, had the distinction of being the very first master-planned community in the country. It was celebrated as a town of the future -- the first modern suburb built from the ground up.

Affordable two-story brick duplexes, laid out over a network of twisting streets, attracted young families by the thousands. The homes were small but comfortable, the yards big enough for children to play. In another perk of life in the 'burbs, there was ample street parking for the Automotive Age that would follow.

"Park Forest at that time was an extraordinary place," said Leona DeLue, 93, whose family was among the first to settle in town in 1948. "They always refer to it as a GI town. But it was much more than that. There were so many children and young families that were really learning to be on their own for the first time."

Which is why organizers were meticulous about the museum's authenticity. Many relics were donated by local residents; others were culled from antique stores, garage sales and the Internet.

There's something unusually poignant about seeing them in this kind of a setting, Nicoll said. Visitors are encouraged to open kitchen drawers and look in closets for hidden treasures, such as an olive drab army coat and antiquated medicines in the bathroom cabinet.

By design, both the Park Forest and Rolling Meadows homes are presented exactly as someone might have arranged theirs in that period, which can be a powerful experience for visitors.

"We get a lot of tears, a lot of gulping," said Marti Roberts, president of Rolling Meadows' historical society. "It's emotional because, for a lot of them, it's like taking a trip back home."

The Park Forest museum is the second created by the town's historical society. The first debuted in 1998 to celebrate the village's 50th anniversary. It was designed to be a temporary exhibit but became so popular that officials decided to keep it up year-round, Nicoll said.

The museum, which will be open Saturdays this month from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., is a couple blocks away from the original, which the previous landlord took back, forcing its closing last May. The new museum is similar, Nicoll said, but is stocked with more mementos.

"From the beginning, we always wanted to tell the story of Park Forest in a way that engaged the public," she said. "With the town's history rooted in the 1950s, it just made sense to start there."

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jhood@tribune.com

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If any of you readers are as old as I am you will be touched by the pictures of this museum as I was. Seeing these pics took me back 50 + years, my moms sewing machin, laundry room, VIM soap, Green Stamps, and all of the rest of it, the toys, the phone, the radio the toaster etc, times were easier, like the aricle said, "we didn't expect as much" back then. There were no computers, or VCR's or anything else, we stayed outside until the street lights came on, playing oh what a simpler time we just didn't know what we were missing lol

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