Our icons included heroes like champ, Rocky Marciano, Yankee slugger, Mickey Mantle, and others who, like the immortal James Dean, spoke out for us kids, each in their own special way, and helped us invent the "generation gap" in the 1950s (even though we never heard that term until the '60s). Just for us — yes, I said just for us — Alan Freed and Dick Clark, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, Rick Nelson and the Everly Brothers, along with countless others, fashioned and formed the most far-reaching, enduring and significant symbol of American popular culture of our time — and of all time — and filled all our free time with that then new, fresh and fabulous '50s' rock 'n' roll music — our music that we loved and that we now call "oldies." I'm talking about the real oldies. (By the way, did anybody hear any music they remember? I want you to know, I gave the DJ a playlist to select the music from, and if you hear anything you don't like, I didn't pick it. Someone else did.) Although our music was seen by our parents as shockingly suggestive, it was not sexually explicit like today’s music. 

Oh, how different it was.   

As we were pioneering life in a brand new suburban America, practically right next door in Brooklyn, where kids watched "submarine races" at Plum Beach, in 1957, you could still hear the call, "PLAY BALL!" at Ebbet's Field, followed by the crack of a major league bat, you could even catch a homer hit by one of baseball’s beloved "Bums," and you could see and hear Chuck Berry, our generation’s number one, self–styled, self-appointed spokesman, and the decade’s most prominent poet, playing at the Paramount, as he told old Beethoven’s ghost to roll over and sang, "It's gotta be rock 'n' roll music, if you wanna dance with me." 

And did we dance.  Although we never heard of "dirty dancing," we invented that, too.  (We did it in dark basements and called it "grinding," remember that?)