Athanasius is quite right about the 1950s and 60s for Jehovah's Witnesses. The biggest downer was that young brothers just getting out of high school still faced the possibility of being drafted and by refusing, likely to go to prison. We had one brother that spent 3 years in federal prison (messed him up some, too) and another young man in his early 20s (and a recent JW convert) who did go to prison for 18 months around 1960. I sweated a few bullets over that at the time, but getting married and having a baby daughter, bad knees, and being color blind got me through it unscathed.
But going to meetings and even out in the door to door service was kinda fun and a chance to mix with a lot of people of various ages. Going to conventions for a teenager was great fun and I met a lot of new friends and cute girls while roaming the hallways.
But the mid-1960s saw a major change in attitudes. Everything started feeling uncomfortable. In 1966 the idea of Armageddon coming in the mid-1970s was just hitting the ground. Rules became stricter. Public talks began to move from being self-prepared from an outline to being delivered from a rigid script that allowed very little modification by speakers. So we heard the same 8-10 talks nearly word for word about three times a year. For young people teens and up - who and how you dated them suddenly became more restrictive. I met my first wife in high school and dated her for well over a year before we got engaged. I never tried to change her from being a Catholic - and she didn't mind being around Jehovah's Witnesses - so she came to meetings and also went out with me in service while she was unbaptized. Yes, she was encouraged by my parents and the congregation members to consider becoming a JW, but I felt no pressure by my parents or JW friends to break up with my fiance or restrict who I married. Of course, all of that also changed in the 1960s. So my wife became one - and I soon "unbecame" one.
Everyone was being encouraged to "go where the need was greater." Our congregation saw several families (including my parents and siblings) sell their homes and move to remote cities in the midwest (USA) and southeast states like Mississippi and South Carolina. My parents moved to Nebraska and then later to Arkansas. They saw their savings dissipate and had great difficulty finding reasonable jobs in order to survive. Some brothers were rewarded by their Kingdom Hall by being assigned as servants in their local congregation - but many also found the preaching work in strange places to be quite stressful. Many couldn't deal with it and eventually returned to their hometowns to try to pick up where they left off.
Being a JW wasn't much fun after that - at least nothing like it was in the late 1940s to early 1960s. There was no longer any joy in Watchtowerland. Many of my former acquaintances experienced major mental and physical problems that could be directly tied to the new policies that the Society embraced and enforced. Shunning, lots of shunning - unlike anything we'd seen before.
JV
