I spent my childhood in the fifties, living a standard working class childhood. Besides all the other tasks associated with socializing children, the adults in my life were focused on exposing us to wholesomeentertainment. I remember Sundays at Mass where we would as a community take the Legion of Decency pledge, foreswearing temptation, and the work of the Devil. One version of the pledge read as follows:

I condemn all indecent and immoral motion pictures, and those which glorify crime or criminals. I promise to do all that I can to strengthen public opinion against the production of indecent and immoral films, and to unite with all who protest against them. I acknowledge my obligation to form a right conscience about pictures that are dangerous to my moral life. I pledge myself to remain away from them. I promise, further, to stay away altogether from places of amusement which show them as a matter of policy.

I remember all sorts of films received C (condemned) ratings including the Rosemary’s Baby, Clockwork Orange, The Producers, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Saturday Night Fever.  The Legion of Decency was run by a loose affiliation of local civic leaders, not really a body of the Church. Pope Pius XII wrote that instead of condemning morally dangerous movies, Catholic organizations should be promoting good ones which is something my mother and my grammar school did all the time. I am not certain why the adults were so obsessed with movies. Perhaps, they had seen the ravages of unwholesome entertainment on the brains, souls, and character on the population. Maybe these effects were especially powerful on innocent children and callow youth. They wanted to mount a defense. My Catholic elementary school was especially vigilant about protecting “purity”. In my reading of the Lives of the Saints, a very high percentage of girls who became saints did so by protecting their purity. As a small child, I had no idea what any of this meant.  I imagined it might have to do with the cleanliness of my soul, making sure nothing nasty entered.  The ritual of confession offered a nice regular scrub down. You would share your sins with the priest. He would pass along some penance prayers, and within no time, you could be back to making mischief again.

I had loads of questions about penance. I knew that basically my sins were small potatoes. But suppose, someone confessed that they murdered someone or denied their faith or stole candy from their brother, could the priest make them go to jail or whip them or send them to their room without dessert? Certainly, it couldn’t be that everyone should just get to say a few prayers and go about their evil business. Who even remembered those prayers and who checked up to see if they were really recited with a pure heart? 

A prime rule of child rearing in mid-century families was that It is important to offer children good things to do and consider, otherwise evil forces will capture them and never let go. They had to cut off bad influences at the start. A child will not want to see a a bad movie, “bad” in the sense of corrupting, when they can see a “good” movie, one that would lift them up morally, like the Song of Bernadette or even better, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm? The former was nominated and won several Academy Awards. The film tells the story of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to a poor girl named Bernadette.  Miracles ensue, the sick are cured, and she is eventually canonized. Her faith triumphs over lots of disbelief and naysaying. As a Catholic child, I saw that movie lots of times, fully expecting my own apparition, if I could remember to pray and be good and simple hearted, full of faith and obedience and not much else.  I was not visited but neither were my more obedient and devout classmates. 

Despite the fact that I saw plenty of religious movies, the central figure of my wholesome childhood viewing was Shirley Temple. She loomed large at home and at school. We saw her movies at school at our first Friday film afternoons where the entire student body from first through ninth grade would gather. These were also shown on television on Saturday afternoons and my mother, a real devotee of Shirley’s, would watch those movies with us. We laughed and cried and “Awwwed” together. My mother could recite lines from these films that she remembered from seeing them in the movie theaters as a child and as a young adult.  She loved Shirley Temple; I could see the adoration in her eyes, and I think I wanted some of that unqualified enchantment.

She had everything on her side. She was undeniably and overwhelmingly cute. She danced and sang in an adorable little girl way. She pouted endearingly. She had a strong moral compass and consistently directed adults to do the good and better thing. She showed the path to joy through good wholesome living. Even if you were a misanthrope, you had to like this kid.  I remember feeling badly for boys because their role models seemed to be troublemakers from the Little Rascals, like Spanky, Alfalfa, and Buckwheat. 

I don’t ever remember thinking that Shirley and I could be friends. I don’t remember thinking that she’d be a nice sister to have. I liked all of my friends well enough and really loved my sister. But I watched her in overalls in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and made a note that I had overalls, but I didn’t quite look as cute. What was it about this kid?  I saw her in so many movies with those killer banana curls. I had thick, black, nearly uncombable hair but earlier in my life, I had workable hair. Somehow that changed. Maybe, we lose our lovely baby hair like we do our baby teeth. My mother’s only attempt at hair styling was to cut my bangs short and let things fly.  To address my hair issue, my favorite aunt took me to the hairdressers in the first grade where Leona gave me a makeover in the form of a pixie cut. With a gap in my front teeth and a very short haircut, I was quickly running away from any chance of looking like Shirley Temple. I needed another strategy.

Me at three years old. The Shirley Temple influence is obvious.

I tried to sing like Shirley Temple and followed her steps closely when she tap-danced up and down a staircase. I tried to pout, swing my arm into a let’s-go-get-‘em pose, and say cute things like, “I’m very self-reliant”, which Shirley pronounced to the great delight of her elders in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.  My obsession with Shirley reflected my mother’s. She clearly adored this little girl. I compared her object of adoration and her own regard of me, which was so full of ambiguity and restraint. I recently learned that films like The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel, Captain January, Bright Eyes, Curly Top, Poor Little Rich Girl, andSusannah of the Mounties were made between 1935 and 1938. They were full of messages about optimism, grit, resilience, and spunkiness. Adults in Shirley’s orbit are charmed by her to do the right thing, to change their lives toward the better, to raise money for good causes, and golly, to do whatever it took to keep this child happy.  

She is often without a family of her own. She is orphaned more frequently than any kid should be, but this gives her lots of chances to wheedle her way into the hearts of rich and poor, young and old, white, Black and Native American, the kindly and the grouchy. It is truly amazing. My Mom grew up during this time – in those years between the Depression and the Second World War. She may have embraced Shirley as a role model of sorts. She had six brothers and sister in an alcoholic home and was placed in an orphanage during the Depression at two or three years old when her parents couldn’t afford to keep her at home. Shirley Temple offered a glittering example of a charmed life. If the Gods could grant it, I would have loved to have been that child for my mother, but she very effectively resisted my charms for good reason. 

But to live in the shadow of this lovely golden child – to see her weekly on TV and often at school, gave me a model of what a child I could be. What about this little girl could I emulate? Or maybe that was a losing battle. Maybe, I could simply understand that Shirley Temple was my mother’s fairy tale, and I was too busy with my own stories to be diverted by this one for too many years. I grew out of love with Shirley Temple and set my sights on Annie Oakley, another hero of fifties television.