What would today’s teenag­er find dif­fer­ent in 1946? How would she react if she sud­den­ly found her­self in that alien land? That’s the ques­tion I had to answer when I wrote Cher­ish, a mys­tery for young adults. (It’s now under con­sid­er­a­tion by a pub­lish­er so don’t look for it yet.)

One of the first things a teen might notice is—no seat belts in cars. None, not one. No car seats, no safe­ty air bags, and nobody was in the least con­cerned about it. They were too excit­ed about any new car, since there had been none dur­ing World War II, from the end of 1941 to mid-1945. And some of those new 1946 cars might look sus­pi­cious­ly like those pre-war mod­els. Names of cars one might see were Ford, Chevro­let, Dodge, Lin­coln, Mer­cury, Cadil­lac, Buick, and Chrysler, but the styles would be dif­fer­ent. Then there were oth­er autos no longer being built today. Among them are: DeS­o­to, Ply­mouth, Pon­ti­ac, and Hudson.

Of course, a teenag­er would notice the cloth­ing styles right away. No one wore jeans to school. Girls wore skirts or dress­es, except pos­si­bly on a spe­cial­ly des­ig­nat­ed casu­al Fri­day. Then she could wear nice­ly tai­lored wool slacks. Shoes were often sad­dle shoes or pen­ny loafers. Sweaters were a giv­en. In a large city school, the teen would want a dif­fer­ent cash­mere sweater for every day of the week. In a small coun­try school, one cot­ton or plain wool sweater to wear with a skirt, and trade off with a blouse and skirt ensem­ble or a dress was ade­quate. Peas­ant blous­es and dress­es were quite the rage. And every girl wore bob­by sox. For dress-up she wore the new­ly avail­able nylons and pumps with Cuban heels with her dress. She did wear jeans after school and on week­ends. Her jeans had slim legs that she rolled up to just under the knee. There were some­times region­al dif­fer­ences in cloth­ing fads. One was bell-bot­tom jeans. They mim­ic­ked the sailor’s bell-bot­tom trousers. That craze trav­eled around the coun­try, often pop­u­lar in one area and com­plete­ly out in another.

These are a cou­ple of dif­fer­ences a teen would notice. There would cer­tain­ly be oth­ers. What do you think a teen from 1946 would first notice about the year 2013?