I don't know about glam in the sticks. Even the ranch summers weren't so far from a good sized university town. Still, I do relate to the kind of gathering and entertaining your folks did. There have been studies about the breakdown of this kind of community. It's not just where the economics have changed the population makeup, but in big cities where there's still everyone and everything, people just don't join the way they did. They work considerably longer hours than our parents did, and have longer commutes.

There's more emphasis on the family unit, and less dividing up after work/school into men's, women's and children's activities and social groups. Just in the time I've been on GW, my social life and family makeup have changed and it's gone from reeling from occasion to occasion and buying more and more dishes to entertain everybody, to groups to small to even bother with the (cheap) company dishes.

OTOH, some of the twenty-somethings seem to be reinventing the kind of group social whirl my parents enjoyed, though without the community groups. It's more self-selecting but with big mashups of come-ye-all on only slight acquaintance. Different, but they do entertain a lot more than we did when I was their age. We went out more, and in smaller groups.

I suspect i am the age of most of your parents....and Iw as lucky to live in a fairly small midwestern town, with a major appliance factory and a "rule" that all the execs must live in town. So we had big honchos, cheek by jowl with, part time office help and school teachers, store owners and whatever else people do.
One New's years Eve wew ere invited to 5 cocktail parties before a dance at the Coountry ;Club and we hosted an after midnight breakfast for about 60 to 70 with bloody Marys, ham egg casserole home made rolls and a punch bowl full of fruit.
There were lots of cocktail parties and more than a few brunchs....and we regularly had dinner guests or were dinner guests.
My son and his wife o similar sort of entertaining....my daughter not so much.. I know there are people who still do the frequent dinner partys and gatherings of friends.

I peruse my mom's old cookbooks, the food is incredibly rich by today's standards, which is I guess why everyone went on diets and the low cholesterol craze in the late 70's.

I also peruse the three or four recipe boxes she left me. Full of recipes copied from friends, many in the dessert category. Between baby showers, birthday parties, youth groups, work, church and school functions, it was quite the baking competition. Now I really can't indulge much in sweets due to weight gain. One of my mom's best friends from whom many of the recipes came, is still alive. She still loves to bake cookies but can't eat them due to gastric bypass. She's always giving away cookies!

Now you go to any of those types of events and it will be mostly store bought stuff. It all changed in the late 70's when my state went through a big economic downturn from which it never really recovered. Husbands got laid off, or downsized and ended up working more or commuting farther, wives went to work so no longer had as much creative kitchen time on their hands. Not in every situation of course, but most in our social circle. Then came the round of divorces and folks moving away upon retirement. There was a brief uptick in entertaining at retirement, but now even the ones still alive sigh and tell me they are tired, more than ready for someone else to pick up the slack. If only I could. We are running ragged with work and home maintenance responsibilities.

My mother would be 92 if she were alive. My dad is 88. He still makes out pretty good in the food and baked goods dept., a lot of friends and neighbors give him things. I take stuff over or have him for dinner at least twice a week.

I did more entertaining when I lived out East. My town has really died down socially, most just stick to home and family. I have tried a few times, and will probably try again, but attendance is sparse and tends to leave early, not eat much. We're all late middle age and trying to stave off the middle age spread.

You mentioned one of our favorite restaurants, The Magic Pan. We found one in 1973 in Chicago as we were weekending along Michigan Avenue. One quaint neighborhood off the avenue sported the first Magic Pan we had ever seen or heard of. It became our destination restaurant whenever we stayed in the Loop at the Hampshire House for a weekend. Years later we moved to southern California and discovered a Magic Pan at South Coast Plaza. We were sorry to see them close.

I've been to Magic Pan in San Francisco, but I liked Maison Crêpes in Houston (but I remember it as Maison des Crêpes) and so it might be a different restaurant. Anyway it is no longer open.

Seems like crepes have fallen out of fashion . . .

I think cooking has fallen out of fashion. We have a few downscale French restaurants here and they always have crepes. Possibly because people demand them from any place French or something like that. What was popular about 10-15 years ago for parties was to have a crepe maker come make them on the spot. Often just as the dessert, with the host making the meal, but sometimes for the whole shebang. They used those large convex appliances, rather than crepe pans on the stove, so they could easily set up a couple in a backyard.

My mom had a crepe maker. Not sure what happened to it. Didn't get a lot of use. I have a crepe pan but I can't find it, still packed away in some box. Regular ol' pan works fine though.

Fresh made omelette bars are big in colleges, but not crepes.

I don't think my parents ever made crepes, and they both loved to cook. I've eaten them a couple times in restaurants. I'm 65, so I guess the folks didn't follow that trend.

Protein is in. :) You're so right about using the pan you've got. What I like about my crepe pans is how fast they return to heat. I use them for fried eggs and omelettes too. :)

Maybe we need to invent a new way to serve crepes and see if it catches on. :)

I think crepes have been replaced with tortillas....:-(

The reason my parents were so into crepes is because my mother was a French and English major in college, so she channeled a lot of French culture, and also while my parents were courting my Mom lived in San Francisco and the Magic Pan crepe restaurant was one of their favorites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pan

The recipe in that cookbook from the sixties sort of illustrates why crepes have gone out of fashion. There were four steps: make the filling, make the crepes (with a recommendation to leave the batter sit for two hours or overnight in the fridge but not absolutely necessary), make the sauce, add some of the sauce to the filling when you fill the crepes, then finish the sauce and pour over the crepes and put them in the oven to heat up for 10 min. before serving. I skipped or used lower fat ingredients, but the bechamel recipe called for sherry, cognac, egg yolk, lots of butter, milk, chicken broth, cream and cheese. I left out the booze and subbed the white wine I had - Reisling, and used 2% milk and half and half and left out the egg yolk. Still incredibly rich.

And don't get me started on blintzes. I can't find farmer's cheese, dry cottage cheese or pot cheese, so they aren't as good as I would like. Obviously there are some lower fat ways to make crepes, but I rarely have time to cook something elaborate. I get home late, start work early, and am exhausted on the weekends. We often make pancakes of one sort or the other on Saturdays though. I wonder if IHOPs are struggling . . . never had them around where I live so I wouldn't know.

A lot of folks paid for their 60's indulgences by getting heart disease, diabetes and a weight problem. Dad got heart disease and Mom got diabetes in their old ages. Hence a new style of cooking from what we all grew up with. Still, sometimes it is nice to revisit the past. Hubs and I both fondly remember eating liverwurst sandwiches as young kids, although we called it braunschweiger at my house. I can't imagine that now. Although even then, it was an exotic thing, most of my friends were eating baloney.

Edited to add in response to John, that if we were going to have anything gourmet, it would have had to have been made at home. I grew up in the sticks, small town that in the 60's had just one pizza parlor and that was considered an exotic foreign food. We were part of a more adventurous social circle, but it was by no means the norm, and has gotten even less so now, although there are five or six pizza places all serving awful pizza now. My mother and one of her good friends used to take day trips to the big city to eat out and shop. The escalator at the big Hudson's department store was as exciting as Disneyland for me, I used to go up and down it while mom shopped, something one would not do nowdays for fear of the child being abducted . . .

I found the crepes. They're at hipster joints.

The first morning at safari camp, I was starving at 6 AM because my body thought it was dinner time, I don't normally eat much breakfast. The food at that camp was beyond fabulous....and I ordered juice which I think was a mix of mango and whatever, heavenly coffee, eggs, bacon and pancakes....just one please. Well my pancake was a crepe....carefully folded, not filled....just a crepe.???
Next morning I had an omelette!