I do remember those feelings. I remember walking to school in the morning, and every time I heard a plane above, I'd wonder if it was packing a bomb that was going to drop on my head.
Rob, a lot of the things you mentioned in your post were true--it was simpler in many ways without today's technology, but when my DH pulls out the nostalgia he has for those times, I remind him while life was good for the quintessential Normal Rockwell family, choices were very limited for large swaths of the population; namely women and minorities. Even though we still have inequality, we're a far cry from where we were back then. My mother had to remarry to be able to feed me and my brothers; my MIL had to live with her parents for the same reason after her husband died at a young age. Both my MIL and mother had little hope of rising above a low minimum wage job.