“Once dinner was over, you could at least get out of your Sunday clothes.”

A gray-haired man says, “On any Sunday 50 years ago you could stand at one end of Main Street and you wouldn’t see a soul except the town dog.” He, his wife, and I are drinking coffee in a shopping mall restaurant on a Sunday afternoon. We watch shoppers — hundreds of them — crisscross the parking lot. If his mother ran out of sugar, the man says, she sent him to the neighbor’s back door to borrow. Except for an occasional cigar store or ice cream parlor, stores did not open on Sunday. “The day had a placid, tranquil air,” he says. His wife adds that back then Sunday was always the same: church, Sunday dinner, a nap, a drive, a light supper, and Jack Benny on the radio.

History chronicles big news. The past we study in school is epic, heroic, intimidating. Little people and gritty daily life, the man says, don’t make history books. That’s too bad, we agree, finishing our coffee.

The American Sunday of half a century ago, fettered by blue laws and centered on family, was peculiar to this continent. As far back as 321 A.D. Constantine forbade town dwellers to work on Sunday, but by the 1300s Sunday restrictions had loosened. European Roman Catholics’ only Sunday duty was to attend Mass. After that there were street fairs, gaming, theater, dances.

Then in 1618, James I, the king of England who followed Elizabeth’s reign, issued a set of decrees known as the Book of Sports, permitting archery and dancing on Sunday. James’s son, Charles I, reissued the Book in 1633. Its leniency outraged growing ranks of English Puritans and helped spark the religion-inspired English Civil War, a war that cost Charles I his head and gave Puritan Oliver Cromwell an 11-year try at administering England. But the country remained strongly anti-Puritan and pro-Royalist, and in 1660 Charles II was restored to the English throne.

“True blue” described a staunch Presbyterian, the rebellious Protestants having adopted blue as their color in opposition to the Royalist’s red. The laws that Cromwell’s Parliament established were called “blue laws.” Blue laws were sumptuary laws, a class of legislation that on religious principle regulated personal behavior in areas of “sumptuous” dress, food, entertainment, housing. Even the high-living Romans had sumptuary laws that disallowed luxury to the lower classes. In the Middle Ages, one of the many sumptuary laws denied joints of roasted meat to anyone less than a duke.

But it took the austere English Puritans to formulate sumptuary or blue laws the likes of which had never hobbled the Western world. Essentially, no one could leave home on Sunday except to attend church, and at home on Sunday, nothing more worldly than dinner was permitted. Church services three to five hours long were followed at home by family devotions, private prayer, and soul-searching.

During the troubled 1600s, Puritans sailed to the Colonies to establish their version of Christian civilization in North America. Theirs was an obsession that ate up the continent. In the 1700s Connecticut passed a law forbidding a person to leave home on Sunday except to attend worship. In 1810, when Congress voted to open post offices and deliver mail seven days of the week, churchgoers fought the order. On a Sunday afternoon at New York City’s Polo Grounds in 1917, managers of the Giants and Cincinnati Reds were arrested for violating blue laws, and the game was stopped. Not even the Great Depression significantly altered Sunday — although the religious revival that churchmen expected never took fire. The day could be so stultifying that in the ’30s humorist Robert Benchley suggested that others try his method for getting through the day. “I buy a small quantity of veronal at the nearest druggist’s,” he wrote, “put it slyly in my coffee on Saturday night, and then bundle off to bed. When you wake up on Monday morning you may not feel crisp, but Sunday will be over.”

In conversation with men and women past 55, a picture of the Sunday-that-was can be reconstructed. The day started with church and revolved around family. But even before church services, there would be a quick skim of the Sunday paper.

A man who grew up in rural Iowa recalls that before Sunday breakfast, his father sent him to the one store that stayed open on Sunday, the cigar store, to pick up the Chicago Tribune. Behind a black curtain in this particular cigar store, single men and “reprobate” husbands began dealing a Sunday poker game even before morning church bells pealed. The Iowan heard cards snap, slap, and shuffle; he knew, he says, that card playing was taboo on Sundays because where his uncle lived, if the landlord caught tenants at a bridge game on Sunday, he evicted them.

Sunday was also the day when adolescents, if they dared, began to rebel against family mores. One man recalls, wincing, how his father threw him down the stairs when he refused to get up for church. “I was 17,” he says, “and according to my father, ‘too big for my britches.’ He said I could believe what I Goddamn well wanted to, but I was not going to break my mother’s heart.”

Sunday school came before church. It was taught in his town, a Southerner says, by maiden ladies. Even the smallest children memorized Bible verses, and over Sunday breakfast one’s mother might ask one to recite the verse for the day. To illustrate the day’s assignments, teachers used a flannel board to which they stuck flannel cutouts of Moses and the bulrushes, Noah and his ark and animal duos, or Jesus and the disciples. “This was made bearable,” the Southerner says, “by paper cups of juice and graham crackers spread with marshmallow fluff.”

Adults might go to classes also and in many areas were expected to attend. One Methodist, born and raised in Kansas, was shamed, she says, because her father dropped her off for Sunday school and an hour later came back with her mother to attend church. But they never went to Sunday school. Her Sunday school teacher took her aside and insisted they pray together for her parents. Another woman recollects how wonderful her Presbyterian church smelled. On Saturdays the janitor waxed the floors, and women brought garden flowers and arranged them. On Sunday morning the women’s scents were flowery — Midwestern ladies did not wear perfume; they dotted behind ears and in crooks of elbows with toilet waters and colognes — and the men gave off sharp aromas of bay rum and citrus aftershave.

There were special clothes for Sunday. Women wore hats. In winter the hats were small and fit the head closely. From Easter until Labor Day hats could be large and were often made of straw and decked out with artificial flowers. “A Mrs. Collins,” the Presbyterian says, “wore a wide skimmer that carried an entire artificial robin’s nest on the rim with a robin sitting on three aqua eggs. My father held me up to count them.”

Another Presbyterian remembers, “Our minister was Scottish. He spoke with a burr and preached heaven and hell…more hell than heaven. He was very fierce, pointing fingers and slamming his fist. He shouted about burrrrrning pits and eterrrrrnal torment and fairly spit lists of sins. I was not a particularly religious or pious child. But I was conscientious. My stomach would turn. I could almost feel myself falling. It took years before I recovered from some of his sermons, before I got back, you might say, my balance.”

A man in his 70s, retired from teaching musicology in a state university, says he despised the church music popular in the ’20s and ’30s. “The anthem business was flourishing,” he says. “Anthem and solo manufacturers, not composers, mass-produced music: ghastly texts, morbid and gruesome; sentimental, insipid, ersatz music.

“And the soloists! Oh God! There was usually a big-chested woman whose contralto vibrated in a wide, yawing tremolo. Pitch was flat. I remember one tenor, a bookkeeper during the week, a stringy pale man — almost albino. Whenever he sang any text that related to crucifixion he would stretch out his arms as if he were nailed to the cross and roll back his eyes until all you saw was white.

“I was in my first university teaching position, and poor. I eventually played every Protestant church in the area to supplement my income. I got $10 for Sunday and $5 for Thursday-night choir rehearsal. I often went to the latter slightly tipsy. The Methodists, however, were the only church that fired me. They were annoyed because I repeatedly fell asleep during the sermon. And snored.”

A man who claims he never goes to church now, except for funerals, suggests there was value to churchgoing. “Just the hours on those hard pews,” he says, “forced me to think some equally hard thoughts.” On Sunday his Baptist mother renewed her pleas that his father sign the “temperance pledge.” His father rarely drank, but he refused to sign. “Until the day he died,” he says, “she kept after him. She had come from a family of women who got together with other ladies and took axes to the saloons…broke them all up and the like. She saw the temperance pledge as much necessary to salvation as church and prayer. My father was the only man in her crowd of womenfolks without the gold temperance pin on his Sunday suit. I think sometimes she drove him to his death sooner with all that talk about liquor than corn liquor would ever have done.”

Before World War II women’s magazines featured Sunday dinner menus. This was the week’s most important meal, and second only to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter dinners in elaborateness. Larger cuts of meat — roast beef, crown rib, pot roast, leg of lamb, ham, goose, duckling, a roasting hen, a spring turkey, and fried chicken were served on Sundays. Individual cuts of meat — steak, cutlets, chops — were weekday fare. On Sunday the family shared one piece of meat. There would be mashed potatoes, gravy, fresh vegetables in spring and summer, fruit salad, fussy gelatin molds, homemade yeast rolls, and in some homes, two desserts, perhaps a coconut or Red Devil cake and a lemon meringue or black bottom pie. One woman remembers that her father always stopped on the way home from church at the ice cream parlor and bought ice cream — New York vanilla, made with egg yolk.

Fried chicken was the national Sunday food in summer. By the Fourth of July the male chick, born around Easter, would have reached its apotheosis as a fryer. The fried chicken would be served then with fresh roasted corn, sliced tomatoes from the garden, and perhaps corn muffins baked in cast-iron pans that gave the muffins the shape of small ears of corn. In the homes of Episcopalians, a cocktail might be served before dinner and wine with the meal.

The Southerner who recalls Sunday school marshmallow fluff and flannel boards remembers how chicken tasted different then. “Not rubbery. Our cook, Annie, wrung the chicken’s neck in the back yard, then cut off the head. My brother and I hated that. The chicken squawked. And it ran, with its head off, in a circle. Annie took a pot of boiling water outside, and holding the chicken by its feet, she plunged its carcass up and down in the steaming water. Our dog would tear around yapping while she plucked the feathers. When the chicken was plucked, she brought it into the kitchen and singed its pin feathers over the burner on the gas stove.”

While dinner cooked, and later that day, the young Southerner would walk around the chokecherry where chicken blood had dropped on the red dirt. He scuffed at the blood spots. The dog licked the ground, and chicken feathers stuck to its muzzle. He would kick the daylights out of that dog.

The Presbyterian whose Scottish preacher raised specters of hell describes Sunday dinner as the time when the best linens, silver, china, and crystal came out. Inevitably, some of the napery and serving pieces were heirlooms. Using these pieces would remind the family of stories about aunts and grandparents and great-uncles. “In those days too,” she adds, “you were close to your cousins. It was possible to have one’s first big crush on a cousin, and that was one of my sins as a teenager.” Because the family circle was larger 50 years ago, she says, one knew more people more intimately.

Family often shared the Sunday meal. Unmarried family members commonly took every Sunday dinner at the home of a married family member or returned from city to small town to dine with parents. Several people remember that the unmarried guests were given the leftovers to tide them over during the week. Families entertained schoolteachers, preachers, and anyone they feared might be lonely. The Southerner recalls that Sunday, for his mother, was an extension of her “waifs and strays” Thanksgiving, but that his father did not care who came to dinner — preacher, visiting congressman, great-aunt — immediately after dinner, his father went to bed and slept. “I’m going to go, now,” he would say, “and sleep off my dinner.”

Better-off families still had “help” fifty years ago. In the South, “help” would be a black woman, and in the Midwest often a still-unmarried girl from the farm or a young woman who would have recently emigrated from Europe. After Sunday dinner the help was excused until Monday morning. In the South, black churches held afternoon and evening services. In the Midwest the hired girls would go home to the farm for the evening.

After the huge meals, folks were sleepy. On Sunday afternoons from two until four, a woman says she could almost hear the snores rising out of homes. 0n the back porch the dog gnawed a bone and thumped its tail. A cat, a chicken wing in its mouth, slithered between fence slats.

“For centuries,” humorist Benchley wrote, “Sunday afternoon has been Old Nell’s Curse among the days of the week.… When the automobile came in, it looked as if the Sunday afternoon problem was solved. You could climb in at the back door of the old steamer and puff out into the country, where at least you couldn’t hear people playing ‘Narcissus’ on the piano several houses away.

“But as soon as everybody got automobiles, the first thing they did, naturally, was to try to run away from Sunday afternoon.” The roads, he noted, became crowded.

“Once dinner was over,” the Kansas-bred woman says, “you could at least get out of your Sunday clothes.” Children played quietly in the neighborhood. In less strict families, the children might go to the movies. In towns with country clubs, men played golf and ladies visited. But in some towns this was considered “fast,” the pastime, like cocktails and wine with dinner, of Episcopalians. In some small cities and county seats there would be lectures. Speakers, the man with the antitemperance father recalls, were moralists, literary types, and adventurers. The adventurers would have gone to Africa and shot lions and would invariably display photographs of themselves wearing bush suits, standing with one foot on the corpse of a lion. After 1930, for those who liked classical music, the New York Philharmonic’s Sunday concert could be heard, nationwide, on radio.

Families who did not crowd Benchley’s roadways might go for a walk. Fathers would smoke cigars while they walked. Toward five o’clock the family might stop at the ice-cream parlor for a sundae or soda. “But it did not matter where you went,” a woman says. “You did not need to have some particular destination in view, for a walk or a ride. You strolled or you rather aimlessly drove.”

By the ’30s young married couples and teenagers had begun to go to the movies on Sunday evenings. The Iowan who, as a boy, fetched the Chicago Tribune from the cigar store for his father, recalls that the Sunday evening movie was considered the proper occasion for taking a girl on a first date. “The best movies,” he says, “showed on Sunday night,” and cites particularly the Andy Hardy movies with Judy Garland.

Baptist and Methodist families might go back to church after supper. Before the 7:30 service (usually called a prayer meeting), young people’s leagues would meet. The Kansas Methodist recalls that her Methodist Youth Fellowship group discussed intimate, worldly matters in the evening: dating, parent-child relationships, life goals. “The talk felt provocative and vaguely sinful, intimate.” If you were going with someone, she says, he was permitted to walk you home after prayer meeting.

For those who stayed home on Sunday evenings, there were, as the couple at the shopping mall had said, “Jack Benny…and Burns and Allen.” They were, for years, Sunday evening’s most popular radio shows.

Then bedtime would come close, and with it, any anxieties one had for Monday, and the next week. The very air would change as evening drew on. “It would begin to get a hurry in it,” the Kansan says. “You would stack your school books, pack your lunch, lay out a skirt, a blouse. And those were the days when no one washed her hair every day. Sunday night, for some reason, was often the time when women washed their hair.” Lights seemed to go off earlier in the neighborhood on Sunday night.

For men and women who had broken away from family and church, Sunday could still be a time of emotional tumult. A now-retired English professor remembers Sundays as days when he and his fellow instructors at a small Minnesota college got drunk. “We saw ourselves as rejecting the middle class. We were disgusted with America’s mercantile Babbitt society and its moral hypocrisy. We had pulled away from what felt like rigorous, repressive standards kept up by our parents. The Sunday of church and family seemed to express the worst of all that.” He particularly remembers one Sunday night, grading papers. “It was past midnight…actually early Monday! A woman, a waitress from the college cafeteria, was breathing heavily in her sleep on my cotlike bed, and I was grading exams on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Drunk still, and sick at heart.

“Even though I had sworn as a young man that someday I would get away from small town, from parents, grandparents, and church, when I was finally hundreds of miles from all of them and on my own, I had still not gotten away from memories of all that. It took liquor. Sunday was a day when no matter what your religious, social, moral persuasions, you were peculiarly aware of being apart from a family, away from a hometown, cut off. Even though I, and many like me, regarded that cut as a blessing that freed us, you still tried — all day — to escape the day. You still bowed down to Sunday’s reality no matter how you spent the day. It was as much in your consciousness as ever.

“Our crowd was art teachers, music, philosophy, history, English. Those of us who were still single — in part because many of us were unable to afford wives on our salaries — would go to the home of a married friend, taking food along and liquor. People were poor then. We would eat and drink, complain about our bad students, our unrecognized talents, the deans and administration. Perhaps we would flirt with our friend’s wife. And I remember that many a Monday eight o’clock class was fraught with hangover and terrible depression.”

Until that Sunday in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, Sunday held out against changes battering the week’s six other days. The seventh day was the last outpost of the America the Pilgrim fathers had envisioned. When the war ended in 1945, more than the world map had changed. Sunday would never be the same. Perhaps what finished the day off was Saturday. By the ’50s, the five-day workweek became a commonplace, and the American weekend eclipsed the American Sunday. But the blue laws maintaining Sunday quiet hung on long into the ’60s, long after church attendance had fallen off and austere Puritan dress became only another costume possibility for Halloween.