Looking Back: The fabulous fifties 

Hotel rooms were available for a modest $7 to $11 per night (with luxury suites going for a whopping $23) and activities included a “Ladies Tea,” in addition to the usual policy-intensive, data-rich array of workshops and seminars. The California School Boards Association’s Long Beach 1957 “convention,” as the association’s annual meeting was called back then, focused on the major issues of the day: “finance and buildings, instruction, personnel and public relations.”

The program also featured a demonstration of “closed-circuit educational television” that conference planners listed as a “convention first.”