Lee — Those who wander into the Scolforo Gallery at the Lee Library may find themselves waylaid, lost in a spread of old news clips, photos, and ads that covers three walls—the latest exhibit of the Lee Historical Society, on display for the entire month of August.
Viewers will be transported back to a time when most of the streets in Lee were still gravel outside of the thriving downtown; when you could get Thanksgiving dinner at the East Lee Inn for $2.50; when parents feared that their children would catch a deadly case of polio, and later, when Elvis broke onto the scene, that he would do some other incalculable damage.
“Happy Days: Lee in the 1950s” was curated and written by Phil Smith of the Lee Historical Society, who was himself starting high school in 1950. While some have nostalgia for the ’50s, it was a time of contrasts and shifts, and Smith wanted to explore how Lee was reacting to the national changes. “A lot of people think of it as sort of a mindless era, when people were having a great time and fooling around, but it was also a very serious era. Nuclear war was always a possibility.”
For each year of the 1950s, panels about Lee are placed beside overviews of what was going on in the U.S. on a whole, from Korean War headlines to fads and food crazes like green bean casserole, cheese balls, and Mr. Potato Head.
“It was thought of as being a very carefree era in which it was a great time to grow up, but it was also oppressive,” says Smith. He points to yearbook group photos of well-dressed female teachers all known by their husbands’ first (and last) names; a speech class of boys and a home-economic class of girls; and girls playing basketball in bloomers.
Girls were considered too fragile for the sport, says Smith, and unable to run the entire length of a basketball court, so three team members would take the front court, and three the back, and they couldn’t cross the center line.
Major societal shifts like 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education didn’t resonate immediately in Lee, which had “a very small minority population anyway,” says Smith, and the introduction of birth control in 1951 “really changed society dramatically, but you didn’t see that instantly in a little town like this.”
The Guy Lombardo Orchestra was the favorite band of the high school class of 1955, and even well after the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, the class of 1960 chose the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
This resonated with a gentleman who had joined Smith’s impromptu tour of the exhibit. The part-time Lee resident said he had played in a big band in high school in the 1950s. “Some of us were still interested in that kind of thing, but it really was dying.”
Lee enjoyed plenty of nightlife, though. Many young people crossed over to New York, where the drinking age was lower. The Showboat in New Lebanon, says Smith, “had some pretty edgy shows.” Despite this mixing, almost all marriages in Lee were between people from the town.
The 1950s saw the rise of the teenager, a term coined in 1941, says Smith, and authorities lamented their mischief. “It’s kind of hard to believe these cleancut-looking kids were feared troublemakers,” Smith remarks. The police chief of Pittsfield threatened mass arrests of high school kids if they didn’t behave themselves.
The exhibit shows the evolution of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Initially, people worried it might cut through the center of town. When it was opened in 1957, people hoped the town might swell to 10 or 12 thousand people, but that never happened, Smith explains.
There are clips about the arrival of Dutch elm disease; a tree measuring 44 feet across was removed from a town park. Price charts show that a deluxe private room in the maternity ward cost $23 a day in 1952.
Lee used to have vibrant ski areas that mostly hosted ski trains from New York, as well as a covered bridge that the town failed to preserve. When struck by a truck, authorities tried to block it off with piles of gravel, but locals moved the gravel and drove across the compromised bridge anyway.
Smith combed Lee town reports, school yearbooks, and Pittsfield newspapers to curate the exhibit, the fifth put on by the historical society. Lee had its own newspaper once, too, which is available online. “And in this case, I can remember a lot of it,” he says.
The several people who have been listening comment on how thorough and impressive the exhibit is. “You sound passionate about this, too,” someone adds.
“This is what I spend my winter doing,” says Smith, formerly a history teacher. “I’ll be working on the next one right away. Next year will probably be about transportation, going back to the horses and wagons 250 years ago,” he tells us.
One out-of-town visitor asks him if Lee was named after Robert E. No, Smith says; the town derives its name from Charles Lee, a general in the American Revolution. He was a “pretty bad guy” who got kicked out of army and court marshaled. “They claimed George Washington didn’t swear very much, but he swore at Charles Lee,” Smith recounts, after he failed to follow orders in the Battle of Monmouth.
Smith adds that by Massachusetts standards, Lee is a young town, settled (by colonists) in 1760, incorporated in 1777, 157 years after Plymouth. “This area was the last resort for people looking for farmland. It was too hilly … the main crop was rocks.”
Smith encourages people to join the Lee Historical Society, which costs only $10 for an individual, to support their work as a private nonprofit in preserving the town’s history. In addition to the exhibits, they put on a quarterly speaker series, host cemetery tours and Housatonic Heritage tours in the fall, and put out a newsletter. Follow these events and explore the history they have compiled on their website.
