The Beaver and his friend get a cheerful send-off as they head off towards school, maybe in anticipation of a forthcoming social studies test on world events!! In preparation for the quiz, the Beaver had few sources to gather information on world issues. Ward Cleaver, the local newspaper, and maybe a short fifteen minute new brief by Douglas Edwards on the evening television, would be the extent of information gained from the (not so super) information highway of the late Fifties and early Sixties.

This could be an explanation of why we felt our experiences, during our youth, compared to the present day, were less stressful and un-encumbered by volatile world events.

The Beaver Cleaver of today would have access to the Internet, twenty-four hour television news programs, specialty stations on every facet of history, world government, social issues, and be able to see real time world events as they happen!

The constant barrage of information on a daily and worldwide scale is what differentiates the Fifties and early Sixties from the present day!

If the late Fifties and early Sixties would have had the same forms of communications that are available today, the stress factor of Wally, the Beaver, and Eddy Haskell and other youth of that period may have been vastly different.

One can only speculate what the affect would have been on the Beaver Cleaver generation if they had had the same information highway as the youth of today. Dismissing the premise that times were simpler decades ago, lets take a brief look at what could have been daily headline news stories between 1958 and 1963. Then you can decide if the world was a simpler place and what led the USS Hancock CVA-19 and her crew to be at sea in Nineteen-sixty-three.