Part 2
Part two picks up with Grandma Eunice’s piano playing and just how much music filled Mom’s childhood home, before moving into small-town 1950s Minnesota — school, church, a bout of rheumatic fever at age nine — and working up through junior high: band, choir, and Friday night football. We end right as Elvis shows up on the Ed Sullivan Show, just before the Beatles arrive on the same stage a decade later.
A correction, and a rabbit hole
Early in this episode, Kyle mentions that the Nuremberg trials ended on Judy’s exact birthday, March 10, 1948 — a detail originally pulled from ChatGPT. That’s not quite right: the main Nuremberg trial actually ended back in 1946. However, one of twelve lesser-known follow-up trials — the RuSHA trial, dealing with Nazi “racial purity” policy — really was decided on March 10, 1948. Same day, different trial. The episode digs into what that trial actually was.
A bit of the era
- 45 rpm records cost about 99¢ at the time — a detail Judy specifically remembers.
- Little Golden Records and portable record players were a childhood staple.
- Square dancing was genuinely huge across the Midwest in the early-to-mid 1950s.
- Little House on the Prairie (published 1935) was already a well-established children’s classic by the time Judy read it in 5th grade — decades before the 1974–83 TV series. The real Ingalls family lived in Walnut Grove, MN, in the 1870s, the setting of the series’ 4th book, giving it a nice regional tie-in.
- Morning devotions in public school were routine at the time — not ruled unconstitutional until the 1962 Supreme Court case Engel v. Vitale.
- “Basement houses” were a common post-WWII practice: families would finish just the basement, live in it for a few years, and add the main floor once they’d saved enough. Many never got the upper floor built at all.
- TV in 1955: most homes got just a handful of channels, and stations signed off around midnight, leaving overnight hours as just a test pattern or static. Captain Kangaroo premiered that same year.
- Rheumatic fever was a genuinely feared childhood illness in the 1950s — a leading cause of death and disability in kids before antibiotics for strep became standard care.
- “Twenty Questions” was a popular radio quiz show families gathered around the console radio to hear, running until 1954.
- Elvis on Ed Sullivan (Sept. 9, 1956) drew 60 million viewers — 82.6% of the entire US TV audience — the most-watched broadcast of the decade.
Names & Places
Curious who’s who, or where these places are? See the full names and places index for this part.
