Suburban sadness / produced by Lili Francklyn and Robin Steinhardt.

“Suburban Sadness” was produced for the year 1952 in KPFA’s thirty-year retrospective. Suburbia’s housing developments and housewives, cars, televisions, drive-ins and Cold War anxieties are all discussed in the context of music from the early fifties. There is the story of a typical American family according to one journalist, and an analysis of suburbia by Prof. David Riesman of the Center for Leisure Studies in Chicago. Pacifica recorded all of Reisman’s lecture series and called it “The American Future.” Contains dubs of pirated 1950s television commercials and readings by Tillie Olsen of excerpts from Here I Stand Ironing, recorded at KPFA in the mid-1950’s. Produced for KPFA’s Public Affairs Department by Lili Francklyn and Robin Steinhardt, engineered by Lili Francklyn.