1966: Remembering An Ominous Suburban Portrait

"On a late winter night [in 1966], CBS News held up a mirror to the prideful face of Webster Groves, Missouri -- 'six square miles of the American dream,' as the network proclaimed -- and very few people liked what they saw. Inexplicably, the passage of time has done little to diminish the anger and embarrassment."

"...CBS identified Webster Groves as the quintessential upper-middle-class slice of mid-America in which to delve into what sixteen-year-old high-school juniors really thought about their community, their school and their future. A nine-member crew shot twenty-eight hours of footage in order to unearth, as narrator Charles Kuralt...put it, 'youthful rebellion and dissatisfaction.'"

"What [CBS] found instead -- or what they chose to show after three months nestled amid the shaggy trees and century-old homes -- was a Babbitt-like conformity, rigid and overbearing parents, an insular and soulless class and a callous indifference to the minuscule number of 'negroes' in the community."