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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 The exhilaration that came from first piecing together the main trends of commercial development has been replaced by larger doses of minutiae and by furrowed-brow scrutiny of unhappy social implications.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.

Early bowling alleys were often appendages to neighborhood taverns. Pins were set by boys who sometimes taunted dawdling customers to hurry up, since their pay rose as more games were rolled. As long as bowling alleys depended on pin boys, they could operate only for limited hours, and it would be difficult to refine the atmosphere enough to attract families and children. Those problems were solved in 1946 by the automatic pin-setting machine, which eliminated the labor problem and let newly built suburban bowling "lanes" (nicer sounding than "alleys") present themselves as instruments of family togetherness. The number of bowlers jumped from around 10 to 15 million in 1946 to 39 million in 1964, near the peak of the sport's popularity.

Diners, attempting a similar transformation, dropped the most overtly ethnic dishes from their menus, moved the burly fry cook out of sight, and replaced the crisp aesthetic of streamlined stainless steel with fussier, more colorful decor. Real working-class hangouts dwindled. Nonetheless, the diner remake failed to fend off the onslaught by national fast food, coffee shops, and family restaurant chains. Trailer parks, tarred by tawdry novels such as Trailer Park Woman, never really had a chance to escape their lower-middle-class taint. Said one disenchanted resident of a "park" where privacy was scarce: "Everybody is on exhibition like in a zoo."

Parts of Hurley's book are enjoyable, especially the previously little-explored evolution of bowling alleys. Hurley could have been less repetitious and hectoring, but he has devised an ingenious argument about how the establishments and messages created by businesses in the 1950s sowed the dissatisfaction of the '60s. Hurley presents diners and bowling alleys as resembling countless other postwar commercial enterprises that turned their back on distinctive working-class culture--and downplayed the distinctiveness of almost every other slice of the American populace as well. Instead, businesses marketed their products, services, and establishments with the theme that we're one big, homogeneous society in which satisfaction springs from acquiring "respectable" but bland middle-class goods and services, whether they're meals in family restaurants, evenings in gambling-free bowling alleys, or ranch houses equipped with the latest appliances.

The '50s view that American greatness lay in the nation's skill in orchestrating mass consumption--a view espoused by Vice President Nixon during the "kitchen debate" with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959--ultimately spurred a counterattack from the Left, says Hurley. "The frustrations articulated by Betty Friedan on behalf of millions of suburban homemakers in her 1963 best seller The Feminine Mystique were grounded in the empty promises of fulfillment extended by the purveyors of consumer goods and services."

Hurley's is a relentlessly downbeat interpretation of the meaning of roadside enterprises. Where earlier books admired the cleverness, creativity, and nimbleness of twentieth-century commercial establishments, Hurley studiously sticks to the dark side. It's an oddly sour way of treating places that produced so many good times.

Philip Langdon is a TAE contributing writer and author of Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants.