When the going was good!

The decade of the 1950’s really didn’t end until November 22, 1963, with the assassination of JFK. My teacher Jeffrey Hart nailed the period of the ’50’s in the title to his revisionist history cum memoir When the Going Was Good! Jeff Jacoby recalls the political humor of the era in his terrific Boston Globe column “When the joke was on JFK.”

Jeff is too young to remember the era himself, but his column brought the memories flooding back for me. The weekly television show That Was The Week That Was and the Mort Sahl of those years could also be adduced to support Jeff’s thesis. Though beyond the period Jeff recalls, Jeff’s column also brought to mind the musical takeoff on the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” by “Senator Bobby” (Bill Minkin) that I haven’t heard or thought about since it left the charts in 1967. It’s probably funnier in the idea than the execution, but funny nevertheless.

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