by Susan Ives, Alamo PC

 My mother, who would have been 85 this year, hit her teens during the 1920s. Too young to really be a part of the jazz age, it nonetheless formed her outlook. I got to play dress-up in a lovingly preserved silk flapper dress and cloche hat, and was regaled with stories of madcap excursions in Uncle Karl's Model T. 

In Alamo PC we have a few members who probably danced the charleston at their senior proms. If you are one of them, take a trip down memory lane via the Internet. Kevin Rayburn, from his perch at the University of Louisville, chronicles both the Roaring Twenties and the Boring Twenties, with funny, thoughtful essays on everything from prohibition to flagpole sitting. This is a remarkable site, covering the arts, news and politics, science and humanities, business and industry, society and fads and sports. Each entry has generous links to follow for more information.

 He has an extensive time line: this month we can celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Model A, unveiled by Ford Motor Company on December 2, 1927. The Broadway Musical Showboat opened and Trotsky was purged from the Communist Party on the same day in 1927, December 27.

 If this whets your appetite, you can indulge in more Twenties nostalgia at the Louise Brooks Society, with its excellent section on flapper culture and style. Flapper Station covers more than flappers, containing sections on fashion, cars, music, movies, radio and history. The Jazz Age Page concentrates on music, while the Harlem Renaissance is covered in A Great Day in Harlem. 

I had a lot of fun with The Roaring 1920's Concert Extravaganza, which contains about 15 RealAudio clips of 1920s songs, including Buddy Rogers crooning I'd Like To Be a Bee In Your Boudoir and Billy Murray & Aileen Stanley's Keep Your Skirt Down Maryann. It was the bee's knees. The company sponsoring the site, Vintage Cassettes, sells about 20 cassette tapes online for $9.95 each.

 My father, 82, is more a Thirties kind of guy. My introduction to that era was through Woody Guthrie's dust bowl ballads. I was sitting around a campfire singing "So long, it's been good to know ya, this dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home" before I even knew what the words meant. Woody lead me to to Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath. The California Novels site is a brilliant chapter-by-chapter recap of the book, maps and contextual links to documentation about the story. 

Mark Underwood has an enlightening collection of New York Times headlines that bring the stock market crash to life, while the 11th grade class at Point Grey Mini School in Vancouver, Canada, has a superb site devoted to the depression that will give you a taste of the urban life in their city, as well as a view in to the lives of those who lived in the 1930s. 

Another wonderful place to browse is at the New Deal Network, sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. They have more than 3,000 documents and photographs online about the New Deal era, many of them previously only available to scholars. There is also a growing collection of features, including a compilation of letters written to Mrs. Roosevelt by school children and a history of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Attention teachers: this site contains lesson plans!

 My oddest find was a course on America in the 1930s taught by the American Studies programs of the Universities in Wyoming, Denmark and The Netherlands. Students communicate with each other though e-mail and the World Wide Web and together work on a collective hyper-text on culture under the depression. Among the excellent essays included are The Lindberg Kidnaping, Frank Capra and American Ideals, Thirst in America: Prohibition and Liquor, The Rise of the Bakelite and Catalin Radio in the US during the 1930s, and Regionalism in the South. Wow!

 The Library of Congress' American Memories project covers more than the Thirties, but its holdings in this era shine especially bright because of the massive documentation collected by the Works Project Administration. Among the jewels in the collection are 1,600 Color Photographs from the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, 1938-1944; American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940; and 4,000 Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991.

 The life histories - and there are thousands of them - are compelling. The photos are fun - you'll even find an aerial shot of Kelly Field in 1919! I could spend eight hours a day mining this rich lode of information and never get bored.

 John's mother, a spry seventy-something, is stuck in the 1940s, when she did something complicated with tank treads in a factory in California, then moved to San Antonio to attend nursing school. The 1940s home front coverage is disappointingly thin. One of the better sites is What did you do in the War, Grandma?, an oral history of Rhode Island women during World War II written by students in the Honors English Program at a Rhode Island high school.

 The Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II is a series of in-depth interviews with Rutgers and Douglass alums who served on the home front and overseas. One insight I gleaned was from an interview with a woman who said, "during the war we started to wear the blue jeans and the shirt tail hanging out because we wore our brothers' clothes." An equation for a major American cultural tradition: cloth rationing plus a the available of Willie's and Joe's abandoned wardrobes equals women wearing jeans as a fashion trend. Every one of the 40-odd interviewees has a similar gem.

 Be sure to visit the American Airpower Heritage Museum of the Confederate Air Force, based in Midland. I was surprised that most metal office furniture was salvaged for war production and replaced with wooden furniture. I could have sworn that some of those grungy metal desks that I was issued during my army career were relics of a much earlier age.

 Better Homes and Gardens Magazine is celebrating its 75th anniversary with a display of every magazine cover of the 1940s. The series is accompanied by a wacky time line that juxtaposes such events as: 1941: Pearl Harbor attacked; BH&G publishes the first national barbecue story. And 1948: BH&G introduces the chiffon cake and Berlin Airlift begins. Another site features a series of World War II-era posters encourage people to carpool, avoid unnecessary trips, take the bus and even maintain their shoes.

 I searched until the letters eroded from my keyboard, but haven't been able to unearth the ultimate Big Band or Swing site. Some of the band leaders and musicians have excellent sites. Gene Krupa's site is elegant; Kay Kayser's is a hoot, including a fun spoof on his Kollege of Musical Knowledge.

 The Original Big Band Database isn't pretty, but it packs in a lot of information, including every hit parade tune from 1935 through1955 (after that date, the webmaster declares, there was no more music, only noise.) I'm skipping a decade here, but San Antonio dominated the charts twice in 1955, with the Ballad of Davy Crockett (15 weeks at the top of the charts) and The Yellow Rose of Texas (14 weeks.) 

Since we've started in on the Fifties, lets stay there. I came that close to being named Lucy, after you-know-who, during the decade when television families were just as familiar as our real-world neighbors. Lucy and Desi have a slew of links; Ted's Lucy Page is my favorite, even though the fussy background makes life difficult for a nearsighted baby-boomer. 

Today, when almost anything goes on prime time, Lucy's pregnancy seems tame, but showing it on TV in 1952 caused a flap comparable to Murphy Brown's single parenthood and Ellen's coming out of the closet. I always assumed that Lucy and my mother were expecting at the same time, but Ted's episode guide indicated that Lucy didn't announce her condition until after I was born. Although I escaped being named Lucy, Desi, Jr. and I do have the same middle name - he's Alberto and I'm Alberta. I had it first!

 Two good places for you to surf around the clock tonight are the Fifties Web and John Lacey's Bringing Back the Fifties. Both have links to music and TV shows, plus John has a collection of 1950s pinup girls (almost puritanical by today's standards) and a huge muscle car section.

 I was one of those kids who snuck a flashlight under the bed sheets and indulged in the forbidden delights of comic books. MAD Magazine, which debuted the year I was born, was my secret passion and probably the source of most of the grief that I inflicted upon my parents and teachers. Alfred E. Neuman and the self-styled usual gang of idiots are on the 'Net, irreverent as ever.

 Another neat comics site is The Adventures of John Snavely, "an account of some of the events in a boy's life in 1950's small-town Ohio." This is a new strip, not a reprint of a classic one, but it captures small town Fifties life perfectly.

 The less frivolous among you might want to read The Atomic Duty of Bill Bires, the memoirs of a soldier assigned to the Atomic Test Series in the Nevada desert in the fall of 1951. The Literature & Culture of the American 1950s is a series of more than 100 powerful articles used in an English course at the University of Pennsylvania, covering topics from baseball to blacklists. It includes an extensive set of links on the cold war and the "red menace."

 Even in retrospect, the Fifties were blah. Make way for the Sixties!

 I almost went to Woodstock. 

I had just turned 17, was about to start my senior year of high school and had a perfect cover story. My scout troop was spending a week camping on the Jersey Shore. I could have slipped out of the house unremarked, even the sleeping bag and guitar accounted for. Honesty (and fear) won out. I stuck with the scouts. The car full of friends headed for upstate New York stalled somewhere near Poughkeepsie and missed out on the legendary weekend of peace, love and music.

 Instead of dropping LSD, type a few URLs to have a Sixties flashback. There are 78 sites listed in the Psychedelic TripRing., about ninety percent of them either dedicated to drugs, the Grateful Dead, or both. (DeadHeads should check out the LoneStar Dead web site. A $35 tax-deductible contribution to Dallas radio station KNON bags you an incredible t-shirt.)

 There seem to be about 400,000 Woodstock '69 pages, at least one for every person who attended, and then some. Check out Woodstock69.com, and hop over to their links to get a look at some more Woodstock sites.

 Remember, I'm the one who blew off Woodstock for Girl Scout camp. More my speed is Patio Culture, a celebration of suburban life in the Sixties. There are cheese dip and Jell-O salad recipes and a photo of a red plaid cylindrical cooler, just like the one we used to have.

 Well, shucks, I've run out of space just as I was about to cover the Seventies. And I was so looking forward to researching Barry Manilow, leisure suits and disco balls. If you can't wait, go to DeeT's 70's page, and follow the links yourself.
 
 

Susan Ives, president of Alamo PC, never looks back.