Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture.(Review)

Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture

By Andrew Hurley

Basic Books, 405 pages, $27.50

When artists, journalists, and academics first began writing about the American roadside a few decades ago, their books were joyful affairs, driven by a buoyant sense of discovery. Even a footnote-heavy university press production like Warren Belasco's Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 conveyed its author's happiness at the ordinary consumption habits of Americans.

Diners were a particular delight. Dip into John Baeder's evocative Diners or Richard J. S. Gutman and Elliott Kaufman's American Diner and you sense that even the most mundane need--for quickly served, inexpensive meals--had given birth to distinctive gathering places. Books about popular commercial buildings have likewise told fascinating stories of entrepreneurs and designers and why America looks the way it does.

Alas, that first flowering of roadside and pop commercial studies has been succeeded by a second generation of books that are meticulously scholarly but little fun to read. The exhilaration that came from first piecing together the main trends of commercial development has been replaced by larger doses of minutiae and by furrowed-brow scrutiny of unhappy social implications. Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks is a prime example.

Andrew Hurley chose to write 400 pages about diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks because, the associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis says, all three initially served the industrial working class but later tried to appeal to the broad center of the middle class. Diners, where rough-mannered laboring men grabbed a quick lunch or downed coffee after a night of heavy drinking, aimed for a more "respectable" customer base among middle-class families and women in the 1950s and '60s. Bowling alleys, regarded before World War II as "dreary basement dives where the poor and shiftless congregated to drink beer, spit tobacco, and make wagers on their bowling scores," tried in the 1950s and '60s to become centers of wholesome family recreation. Trailer parks tried to shed a downscale image and attract solidly middle-class residents who might want a dwelling they could relocate whenever they had an itch to experience a different section of the country.