We are not talking about a public with debased sensibilities, either, since when Saying Grace appeared in 1951, television was in its infancy as were mass-marketed paperbacks, pornography was difficult to procure, Hollywood was still in its Golden Age, about to enter a decade when both movies and television aimed to bring the best of the playhouse to the living room, popular music ran from the lighthearted and simple to the extraordinarily sophisticated, even while sales of sheet music still outsold vinyl records, and the modernist devastation of old city neighborhoods had only just begun.