Life for a teenager in the fifties as compared to the first part of the twenty-first century will probably lead some younger readers to believe that I am talking about life on another planet.  As you read on, I think you will find out that teens then and now are more alike than you may have thought.  I'm not speaking of technology, today's youth have fifties kids hands down in that category, but more in terms of  biology and what was, and is still, foremost in a teenagers mind at any given time.

I was born in Sacramento, California in 1939 and grew up during the forties and fifties.  As I said I don't think guys then where a whole lot different from guys today, particularly in regards to sex.  Most of the guys I knew, including myself had a perpetual erection from the time we were eleven or twelve until that point in our lives when we were getting (it) regularly.  Unfortunately back in the day, getting (it) regularly meant getting married or convincing some poor girl that you were ready to tie the knot.  Most fifties girls were not that gullible and held out for the real deal.  I think that is why many of my friends dropped out of high school and got married or did so right after graduation.

The desire for sex among my contemporaries was like the quest for the Holy Grail.  The guys either chased (it) or thought about (it) twenty-four/seven.  Most of the girls defended the prize just as vigorously.  We had our strategies and they had theirs.  Guys would say absolutely anything to convince a girl that she should do (it).  We would try to prey on their female nurturing instincts by saying things like, "it's different for guys; guys have to have (it)."  We would describe all kinds of physical maladies that would befall us if we did not get to complete the sex act once we were aroused.  One that comes to mind was that horrible affliction known as ‘blue balls.'

I remember times when I would moan and get out of the car and lift the bumper up and down violently or maybe do push-ups in the road.  All to show the young lady what terrible torture she was putting me through, ‘blue balls.'  When that failed I would beg.  Needless to say most of this stuff did not work.  The girls would come back by saying, "I'm a nice girl or you won't respect me or I'm waiting until I get married."  This is when you would pull out the ring you carried around in your pocket, complete with a chain so she could wear it around her neck, and ask her to go steady.  Some of my buddies would actually stoop so low as to invoke the ‘L' word.

By the time we hit our very late teens me and my buddy Chad were doing pretty good with the girls and we were fairly successful in our quest for sex.  What I mean is that we were actually getting laid once in a while.  Prior to that point it mostly didn't happen.  What did happen was a lot of heavy petting, French kissing, feeling a little boob and lots of dry humping. In the mid-fifties, having real sex and being able to prove it, or at the very least convince your buddies that you had, was the stuff legends were made of.  You would achieve cult status among your peers and of course this was the goal of every sixteen year old guy that I knew. 

To defend themselves against these kinds of amorous assaults fifties chicks had devised their own kind of body armor. The female fashions in those days were almost impenetrable.  Outerwear consisted of a skin tight wool skirt all the way down to just above the saddle oxfords or white bucks.  Over this was a tight cardigan sweater with 500 tiny buttons, which was usually worn backwards.  The sweater would be tucked in at the waist with a 3 or 4 inch belt holding it all together.  Otherwise it was poodle skirt with a dozen or more stiff slips underneath.  If you got past these barriers you still had your work cut out for you.  Fifties girls dressed up for school as well as dates and would not have considered themselves fully clothed without foundation undergarments.

The brassieres were made of industrial strength materials.  They were padded and stiff, designed to make a girls breasts stick out like pointed cones.  If the gal needed help in that department there were falsie pocket for inserting foam-rubber falsies.  The bra would have four or more heavy-duty hooks and eyes at the back.  If you made it that far you were usually sweaty and all thumbs.  Trying to unhook one of those things could blow the moment and cost you the whole night's progress and you would be back out on the road doing push-ups.

Once the bra was off you had one more formidable challenge left, the panty girdle or the dreaded long-line panty girdle.  These things were sold in the supermarkets of the day and all the girls wore them.  I think they were made out of live rubber like the bumpers on a pool table.  You could make slingshots with them that would kill small animals.  To give you more of an insight into the problem of panty girdles, I will have to relate one of my ‘Chad Tales.'

So who was Chad?  I thought you would never ask.  Chad was and still is a lifelong friend.  We had a fist fight in the sixth grade and have been buddies ever since.  During our mid to late teens and for a while in our early twenties you would have thought were joined at the hip.  If you saw one of us you saw the other.  Chad and I were about the only guys in our crowd who did not succumb to early marriage.  We were having too much fun cruising Sacramento's drive-in restaurants in our street-rods and chasing girls.

Chad and I both came from blue collar families.  His dad was a cable splicer for the phone company and my dad was an electrician.  We were about the same size, 5 feet 9 inches or so and around 150 pounds.  Both of us had brown hair, mine was light and straight and Chad's was darker and curly or I guess you would call it wavy.  Chad was cursed with what could only be described as ‘terminal acne', but he had such a great smile and engaging personality, no one really noticed the acne.  It also did not hurt that he was a terrific dancer.  The only major handicap he had was a weak bladder.  When Chad had to pee it was a serious emergency, but that's another Chad tale.

Now, let's get back to the panty girdle story.  We were in my 1950 Mercury on this particular warm summer night.  The Merc was Kelly green it was nosed and decked, lowered all around, had whitewall tires with spinner hubcaps and dual pipes with small chrome tips peeking out from under the back bumper.  The engine was stock except for dual carburetors, a hot ignition system and of course the pipes that were sporting very loud cherry bomb mufflers.  It was a four door and inside it had green and white naugahyde upholstery and the dash board was splatter painted, what they used to call zola-tone.

Since car radios did not have rear speakers in those days I had hooked up my own so we could really hear Bobby Day and the Satellites belt out ‘Rockin' Robin' or maybe Chuck Berry singing ‘Johnny B Goode.'  We had been cruising the main drag, K Street, and we had had a pretty good evening.  I had won a couple of drag races and then we had picked up two girls at Mel's Drive Inn over on J Street. It was about midnight and we were parked under a giant live oak tree at William Land Park.  We had had a few beers from the case we had a bum purchase for us earlier in the evening and things were going particularly well in the romance department.  Chad was mounting such a vigorous campaign in the back seat that my girl and I had all but stopped what we were doing just to listen in on the activity.

Chad had wheedled, wooed and begged his girl out of her top and bra and had the poodle skirt bunched up around her waist, and there it was, the dreaded ‘long-line panty girdle' well, Chad had gone too far to let this stop him.  And this is precisely where his judgment failed him.  Instead of taking the time to work the girdle down from the top he tried to take a short-cut. He unhooked the girl's nylons from the girdle and then got a two handed grip on one of the girdle legs.  With a mighty effort he stretched the girdle up and away from the girl's thigh all the while maneuvering, his fully engorged, Mr. Happy in an attempt to make contact with ‘no man's land.

The next thing I heard was a Snap, followed by a loud howl and the back door of my car opening.  I looked out the window and saw Chad lying on the grass in the fetal position with both hands clutching his groin.  His moans were almost drowning out the strains of ‘One Summer Night" by the Danleers that was playing softly on the car radio.  I was laughing so hard, I thought I was going to piss in my pants.  Apparently, between the warm night and the workout he had been getting, his hands were sweaty and he lost his grip on the girdle leg.  It had snapped him right in the old family jewels and him with a woody. 

Ouch!  Boy, did we ever hate those panty girdles...