I don't recall 1963 very clearly as I would have been about four. Oddly enough, my first actual memory is the assassination of President Kennedy. I recall being in the back seat of the car, when the announcement came on the radio that JFK had been shot. I recall how frightened my mother and her sister-in-law were.
From my perspective, in those days everyone seemed old and dressed in baggy, dowdy clothing. As I think of it, some of those "old" people were in their mid- to late-20's!
When working in the yard (pulling weeds, working in the garden. etc.), my mother wore shorts slightly above the knee, but she always laid out a wrap-around skirt on the bed before she went outside. Her mother highly disapproved of females of any age wearing jeans or pants of any kind. When Mamaw would drive in, my mother would drop everything, dodge behind the bushes, run (and I mean she sprinted!) for the house to put on the wrap-around skirt. Then she would come out as if nothing had happened. Hmmm, she wasn't "out" about her wearing of shorts.
We lived in farm country (Indiana) and at that time, still had a crank phone on a party line, shared with at least three other households. "Two longs and two shorts" was our "number". Dial phones arrived pretty quickly, but my parents had a party line until around 1969 or '70. Nearby towns had phone numbers like KLondike 3 -1234, but we went from a crank phone to seven digit phone numbers. Until the regional phone operators were shut down, we could dial only the last four digits as long as we shared the same three digit prefix.
I've posted this at IMDb before, but long distance calling simply didn't happen. We were not without money, but "we can't call them" meant the person was long-distance. If someone who was long-distance needed to be phoned, my parents would call a family member or friend, who would pass the message to another person, and so forth, until the message reached the final recipient. If there was a response, the process was reversed until the message reached us.
The term "gay" meant "happy", and there was no discussion of homosexuality (or sex of any kind) in my school. Women who had children "out of wedlock" were basically shunned. Two unmarried men living together would have been the topic of much suspicious gossip within the community, and people would have openly stared at them in public. They most likely would have been confronted in public with (at least) angry rhetoric. Mailbox bashing was and still is common in that area. The men's vehicle would most likely have been "egged" and their trees toilet papered at the very least. Actually, I can still imagine those things happening today. Now I'm a bit depressed.
In 1986, while my new hubby shared my apartment (after my divorce from a female), we were called to the apartment rental office. The lady there told us two unrelated men weren't allowed to live in a one-bedroom apartment, that we would need to make other arrangements or one of us would have to move out. I denied any wrong-doing (I didn't/don't think our living together was wrong!) and I asked to see that specific regulation on my rental contract. Of course there was no such clause, and she reluctantly recanted.
~Larz
