Set in the wake of World War
II, ABC’s Happy Days portrayed a relatively sweet image of life in
America of the 1950s and early 1960s, focusing as it did on the period as a
mainly innocent and tame moment before the social revolutions of the 1960s. How
true to life, though, was such a saccharine portrayal? As a precursor to a fuller
exploration of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, “Fungo Bats, Fat
Monroe, and Howdy Doody” aims to explore life in the Ohio Valley in the few
years immediately after World War II by allowing the largely fictional work of
Kentucky authors Ed McClanahan, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Gurney Norman,
and Bobbie Ann Mason to offer possible ways to re-imagine the moments between
the end of the Second World War, the rise of the Cold War, and the advent of
the social and cultural revolution known as the Counterculture Movement.
Richard A. Bailey is
Fitzpatrick Professor of History at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. A
native of north Alabama, he is the author of Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (OUP, 2011). While he continues to write
and lecture about “race" and religion in colonial New England, Richard is
also currently working on several projects about the life and writings of some
prominent Kentucky authors.