I like Ike. LSMFT: Lucky Strike means fine tobacco. The pause that refreshes. The Fifties and Sixties beckon to us with memories of simpler times and, it seems, gentler people.
It’s easy for baby boomers to forget the pastel-painted dark side: Guys’ hair slicked back with enough Brylcreem to lube a Ford Fairlane, the Singing Chipmunks, and that prototype of every Stepford Wife, June Cleaver.
For the taste of the Fifties on your tongue and its echo in your ear, Nifty Fiftys, 817 Water St., in Port Townsend offers 45s on the jukebox, malteds and hamburgers
Capturing the essence of the period in Port Angeles is not a malt shop, but a store offering furniture, knickknacks and memorabilia called, appropriately, Retroville.
Port Townsend’s Nifty Fiftys, opened 10 years ago by John and Elaine Johnson and owned for the past eight by Beldacar Garcia and Mauricio Cisneros, it recreates a soda fountain of the style that drew teenagers together before they could instant-message one another.
“What makes the shop unique is that most of the stuff is original,” said Cisneros.
“The music, of course, has a lot to do with it.”
Baby boomers — even war babies — bring in their children and grandchildren.
“They want them to know what it was like listening to the music and sitting at the counter,” Cisneros said.
Cisneros ceded that the era also was one of the Cold War, civil rights strife and political assassinations.
“But they still managed,” he said, “to have good, clean fun.”
Those thrilling days of yesteryear are on sale at Retroville at 108 S. Lincoln St., Port Angeles.
A stroll around the shop — accompanied by Elvis singing “Blue Christmas” — reveals aluminum tumblers, Princess-style phones, Crosley radios and pink flamingo swizzle sticks.
Presley and Marilyn Monroe seem to peek out at you from ever nook and cranny.
Santa Claus, clad in a grass skirt, dances a hula as he ho-ho-hos.
And Retroville is arguably one of the last places in town where you can buy an ashtray.
New goods, old packages
Nearly none of it is genuine, produced instead by companies cashing in a longing for times that slipped through our fingers 50 years ago.
Jeanette Hendrickson, who owns the store with her husband David, said Sunday that collectors have cornered the market.
“The old stuff is getting harder to find,” said Hendrickson, who previously operated Retrovilles at two other Port Angeles locations.
“I decided to look for retro-style items that are newly produced.”
Crosley, for instance, makes modern phones, phonographs and radios in pre- and post-war packages.
Some firms are cranking out South Sea-themed curios like those beloved of servicemen who were stationed in the Pacific theater during World War II.
“Right after the war, there was a lot of optimism,” she said. “Everything up to 1963 (when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated) had an innocence.”
Two other Olympic Peninsula business that have ties to the spirit and look of yesteryear:
— The Elevated Ice Cream Co., 627 and 631 Water St., Port Townsend, is an old-fashioned ice cream parlor and candy shop in the downtown historic district — an environment that gives it a look farther back than its 1977 founding.
— Hi-Way 101 Diner, 392 W. Washington St., Sequim, compiles 1950s patter all the way down to the menu items. Of particular interest: a jukebox worked into the front of a Ford T-bird, and Red Skelton clown paintings.