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You would also see smoking on TV as well as commercials for cigarettes, which are banned now. If you go back and look at the old tapes of the Johnny Carson Shows you'll see most of Johnny's guests were chain smoking during the interviews. Then Johnny was followed by Tom Snyder, another chain smoker, who hosted the Tomorrow Show. Both classic American TV for the '70s before NBC gave Tom Snyder's slot to David Letterman.
We also didn't have cable TV with 500+ channels. Your choices were NBC, CBS, ABS, PBS, and maybe one or two independent stations. They all went off the air at midnight, playing the national anthem. TV was actually better in the '70's. Today we have 500+ stations of crap that isn't even entertaining.
...While smoking was everywhere (not a smoker here) I would say Americans were actually healthier, you won't see many obese kids in 1970's pictures and adults were leaner too. We ate more home-cooked meals if you lived with the folks.
This is so true. The country did not have the obesity epidemic that it has today. It wasn't until the early '80s that the food manufactures began to load the food with high fructose corn syrup and other exotic chemicals. (I believe that these are some of culprits. As soon as these chemicals were added to food the obesity stats climbed higher and higher.) All meals were home-cooked and were made from fresh ingredients that were not laced with chemicals.
Depending on where you lived, fast food was also a rarity in many parts of the country. I grew up in a small town in Missouri and the nearest McDonald's to me in 1975 was almost 40 miles away. As a kid we saw the commercials for McDonald's on TV but hardly no one had ever actually stepped foot in a McDonald's (or any other fast food joint). Almost everyone in town was skinny in 1975. Today the same town has almost every imaginable fast food outlet and everyone there looks like a sumo wrestler.
Politically and culturally, it was a bit of a depressing time, particularly the 70s. We had just lost the war in Viet Nam, which was still fresh in everyone's minds all through the 70s. Watergate...while it pales in comparison to the scandals of the current administration, was a pretty big deal. It was the most recent and blatant scandal and abuse of power by the federal government, and was an eye opener about how things really operated. We used to believe that elected officials were better than that. Our revulsion was so great that we elected a peanut farmer from Georgia to the big seat...and he initiated the worst recession since the great depression. UE was higher during and just after Carter's years....combined with mortgage interest rates upwards of 20%. Home ownership became nothing but a dream for many otherwise very successful people. We were an international joke as well. A bunch of uneducated animals overran a US embassy and held American citizens hostage for 444 days.
Still, there were high points. Back then, technology actually progressed at a meaningful rate. We had just put men on the moon. We had a manned space station. We developed the space shuttle. Personal computers made their debut during this time. We actually expected to put men on other planets, interstellar travel was a bit more "out there" but still conceivable. Heck, everyone expected to have flying cars, or at least self driving ones, by the md 80s. Supersonic commercial air travel was also developed in those days. In a great many meaningful ways...we have gone backwards as far as technology is concerned.
Flip side, medical technology was primitive by today's standards. A cancer diagnosis was a death sentence. There was no such thing as a knee or hip replacement. X-rays were about as advanced as diagnosis tools went.
Culturally, things were very different. Self reliance and self sufficiency were respected. Welfare or public assistance was something to be ashamed of. People expected to be productive and contribute to society, not simply take from it.
Daily life from the mid 70's to early 80's for me was being outside all day from dawn to dusk except to get something to eat during summer. Less fear mongering among society so it was normal for 5 year old kids to walk to and from school with no parental supervision. Kids were giving more independence and freedom with no adult supervision during childhood. As long as your parents had a general ideal where you were at in case they needed to find you was all that was necessary. Parents didn't involve themselves in finding ways for their children to entertain themselves but gave them certain tools ( sports equipment , toys, etc ) and than let them sort it for themselves. My parents my me go outside to play if they felt that i was spending to much time in front of the television when the sun was out. Smoking wasn't considered unhealthy back then. Food pretty much tasted the same. The Disco era and its type of music was out by 1980 not because it was unpopular but because some radio disc jockey in Chicago promoted " Disco is Dead " by asking people to bring their records to a White Sox game to be destroyed. Record labels highly dependent on bank financing whose main product was disco could no longer get loans because banks actually believed Disco was dead and were afraid to loan money to these record labels. The type of music popular today ( electronica ,rave, trance , dance ) is very similar to disco because it derives very key elements from it. So i would say the music is very similar to the present time period. Economically there was more hope because companies was not moving China, India or Mexico in search for sweatshop workers. Ronald Reagan with his optimistic disposition made many people (unfortunately myself included feel good ) about America . In this time period the young has very little hope due to low job prospects and low salaries even for people with a college degree. Culturally greed, selfishness and materialism begin to be espoused as virtues during the mid 1980's. Where as people and policies were more tolerant in the 1970's starting around the mid 1980's backlash against anything that represented the culture of the 60's and 70's was being denounced as to bring back the good old days of the 1950's. Immorality of the 60's and 70's was being preached in the 1980's as the cause of society ills. If only if we could only return the societal mores of the 1950's would society be better off was constantly pumped by Reagan and his political cronies, church and AM talk radio. So when the economy came roaring back in the mid 1980's the general atmosphere was maybe what Reagan, AM talk radio and conservatives was saying was right. In the 1970's school administrators didn't care what we wore to school. In this time period anything that smacks of sexuality, individuality or controversy is looked down upon if not forbidden. I remember in high school girls would wear short shorts and bra-less low-cut terry clothed halter tops that permitted ample cleavage in which you could clearly see the areolas and nipples of their breasts protruding out . The funny thing about it was nobody would blink an eye because it was common place. Guys summer fashion were really short shorts that if you wore in this time period people would instantly think gay. In this time period there is no way they would be allowed to wear something like that. Even many public schools have dress codes where students are required to wear basically uniforms.
Last edited by Coseau; 10-23-2013 at 09:20 PM..
Reason: spelling
I haven't read through the entire thread, so pardon me if many or all of these are things said before.
1. Smoking. Yes, I know people have mentioned it. You could smoke in bars, you could smoke in the mall (not in the stores themselves, but in the main "gallery" (? not sure if that's the best term to use) you could smoke. They had ashtrays. You could also smoke on airplanes and most restaurants had a smoking section.
2. Seat belts. As a kid before the mandatory seat belt law in my state was passed, we didn't wear them.
3. Hardcore FM radio formatting hadn't really come into it's own yet. My parents, my Dad especially, were fans of 60s, 70s rock. By the very early 80s, top 40 stations would play a song by Led Zeppelin, followed by a song by Duran Duran, followed by a song by the Commodores, followed by a song by the Ramones. Rock was rock and it all got played on the same stations.
4. More on music: We browsed records at the record store and bought cassette tapes and made mix tapes. My Dad had a reel-to-reel system.
5. Food was often more home-cooked (my Mom was a housewife for most of my childhood) and there were far less "convenience" items. We didn't even have a microwave until about 1990. If you wanted food, you had to cook it, even if it just meant opening a can and heating it up in a sauce pan. We also ate dinner at a table together, something we stopped doing when I became a teenager and we had our own tvs, cable, gaming systems, etc.
6. TV, we had our basic network stations (no Fox back then), two or three independent stations that mostly ran old tv shows and PBS, that was it. On Saturday mornings, there was cartoons. After school on weekdays, there was cartoons on the independent stations (mostly old Warner Brothers, Hanna Barbara and MGM cartoons, uncensored and often politically incorrect).
7. Afternoon newspapers were still common. Classified ads in newspapers were sometimes amusing and much larger than today since there was no craigslist or ebay.
8. Our first computer was a Commodore 64 that hooked up to our TV. We played junky games on it that took 20 minutes to load (no joke, it took them that long to load). We had an Atari 2600 when I was a kid too, but it was a pain to hook up, but it was fun.
9. As a kid we spent way more time outside playing with the other kids in the neighborhood. During summer and on weekends during the school year, we could go nearly the whole day while hardly ever having contact with an adult.
10. We didn't have a dishwasher, so we grew up hand washing and drying all our dishes. We didn't have a dishwasher until I was in junior high.
11. A relatively high number of my peers (the boys at least) would get corporal punishment (spankings) from their parents when they were bad, something that's rare today.
12. There were many more local, or regional brands or chains. For example, my Mom used to grocery stop at a grocery called "Stock Market Foods" where you had to write the price on every single item with a pen. And there were several more local grocery stores and chains. There were also more regional/local brands of foods. There used to be a hilarious brand of generic foods that were in completely white packaging and just had their description written in black, block letters. For example, a can of cola would just be a completely white can and just say "COLA" on it. They even had beer. I always thought it was funny. Cheapest packaging ever! You can google it and see pictures.
13. I think most of us read more. Not just books, but newspapers and magazines too. As a kid the whole class got excited when the Scholastic people showed up with their little catalog of books.
14. Speaking of catalogs, the Christmas catalogs were popular back in the days before the internet. Sears called theirs the Wishbook and we always went straight to the back where the toy section was.
15. And speaking of toys, we could be satisfied with some rather simpler toys back then it seems. We loved fancy toys, but most of us didn't have too many of them when I was a kid. Plastic army men was good enough for most of us.
16. Nobody wore a helmet while riding a bike or skateboard except for professionals.
17. People wrote more letters and sent more postcards and talked over our land-line phones that were connected to the wall. If you wanted privacy, better make sure everyone was out of the house when you talked.
18. At elementary school, we had metal bars to climb and play on that were simply planted in the cement. There was no padding underneath. They added the padding when I was in junior high. I thought it was wimpy at the time.
19. Politics was waaaay less brutal and partisan and there were almost no partisan talking heads on TV.
20. At least where I lived, there were more local tv programs and most television stations went off the air late at night and put up their test card with its high-pitched squeal. There were no infomercials. But there were religious shows on Sunday mornings (and no cartoons) which is why I didn't like Sunday tv.
21. We had one TV, so we all watched it together, and like one stand up comedian said, if the President was on, he was pretty much on every channel except the local independents, which my parents didn't really watch.
22. More soap operas, more daytime game shows too. The 70s especially saw many high-quality made-for TV movies, not like the Lifetime Network junk today (but there was some junk back then too). And after school specials, oh my. I remember those. Stories about young people with a moral to teach that came on about 3 or 4 pm on a weekday. And the mini-series, like "Roots." Many of them were highly acclaimed and big viewing events. I remember my parents getting together with some friends of theirs to watch a mini-series.
23. And because there was no ESPN, Fox Sports, etc, there was way less sports on TV. To find out the college football scores, you'd have to read the Sunday morning paper, the nightly news usually only showed the local team(s), conference teams, and top 25 scores. Games also didn't have a constant scoreboard/clock showing, so if you wanted to know the score, you'd better be watching when they went to commercial or came back from commercial. Sometimes they'd show scores from other games while you watched, but there was no constant scroll like today. And of course, no internet to check.
24. And commercials were different. More hokey than today's, I notice they were different in two ways. First, more of them referenced a past that most younger people today wouldn't recognize because advertisers were less obsessed with the young demographic (but there were certainly commercials for them too). What I mean, is that a McDonald's commercial could feature a bunch of young guys mopping up and cleaning while singing in old-timey fashion (it's on Youtube, you can see for yourself) and dancing like they're on Broadway. Second, commercials mostly advertised actual material goods and foods. There were few car insurance commercials and there were no hard alcohol or condom commercials but there were tons of coffee commercials and car commercials usually featured someone making a pitch about everything the car had to offer compared to its competitors. And there were less of them, FCC regulations at the time mandated slightly less commercial time per half hour bloc.
25. Cops looked less like swat team members and more like the guys from Adam 12. They even used to wear peaked caps and ties and carry revolvers.
26. Security cameras? Mostly only in banks. There were no ATM machines. If you needed money, you had to go into the bank and withdraw it.
27. Virtually nothing was open 24 hours except some restaurants and maybe the occasional gas station or mini-mart. I'm sure in major downtown city areas there was more, but we lived in the suburbs.
28. VHS and Betamax machines were a novelty as I grew older (we didn't have them when I was younger and we didn't know anyone who had them). Renting movies from a tiny video store was kind of exciting.
29. There were pizza joints that had video game sections (kind of like Chuck E. Cheese, but smaller) and it was a treat to go and get some quarters to play arcade games.
30. We had fast food maybe once every few months and that was the norm for me and my friends when we were kids. Our parents might order pizza delivery slightly more often, but most delivery pizzas in that era tasted like cardboard.
31. Door-to-door salesmen were far more common than today, and the kid that delivered the paper came to the door to collect.
32. At school, we had Halloween (we could wear our costumes to school) and Christmas parties.
33. We didn't know who the Kardashians were and we liked it that way.
34. Battle of the Network stars! TV stars from each of the three major networks would compete against each other in a sort of olympics hosted by Howard Cossell. I believe it was usually aired on ABC. My parents really enjoyed it, and so did us kids.
35. My parents mortgage in the 70s was $200 a month on a three bedroom (one bath!) home with a huge backyard and a full basement, two car garage in the suburbs. Gas was like 59 cents a gallon. You could buy four Hershey bars for a dollar.
36. Fast food places had no extra value meals. You only ordered by number at Chinese restaurants.
37. My niece and nephew in middle school and high school today know kids who are openly gay. Although we undoubtedly went to school with just as many gay and lesbian kids in my time, it was far less socially acceptable and stigmatized and it wasn't until high school (1990) when one kid came out as gay.
38. CB radios and CB lingo was a fad in the mid to late 70s. Now truckers have cell phones.
39. Variety shows were still popular on television. Donnie and Marie Osmond and the Captain and Tennille had variety shows. My mom loved them.
40. If it was not raining, and we were not in school, we were outside.
41. If it was raining or dark out, we might play board games or card games inside. Playing video games didn't happen with any regularity until the NES came out in the late 80s. For the most part, we'd rather play a board game than play the Atari games, especially if there was more than two of us.
42. They might still do this, but when I was kid, the neighborhood girls and the girls at school liked to play house. They always tried to draft a few boys to play too, but we'd rather play war or freeze tag. Wax museum was an outdoor game boys and girls liked playing together.
43. Eight track tapes. Geez. Those things were awful. It would skip to the next track in mid song!
44. Singles (the kind on vinyl) used to be cheap, about 98 cents, so if you liked a song, you could find the single at the record store and buy it.
45. There were no massive, big box stores except the department stores.
46. People used to build pretty cool home stereo systems component by component.
47. Photography, in which people actually developed their own photos in a makeshift darkroom in their house was a far more common hobby back then than today. And many people had pictures made into slides and used a slide projector to show them off. I remember how much I enjoyed watching our vacation slides when I was a kid.
48. Our elementary school also had a Halloween carnival every year. At night, a few days before Halloween, the place was packed. It was fun. I remember always enjoying the cake walk, my Mom telling me to win her a nice cake (she always baked one for it too). I won a few times.
49. In the era before gentrification. Many downtown urban areas of the US in the 70s-early 80s had declined and become seedy.
50. Finally, because this has been so long nobody will read it, news was far less celebrity-driven and personality-driven than today (aside from stories like Watergate, which centered around Nixon) and I think the public was at least somewhat better informed than they are today. But that's just an opinion. Although there was sensationalism, there was less celebrity news, and the nightly newscasts reported more world news and there weren't news outlets that were tailor-made for people's political partisanship and focused on domestic politics.
I forgot to touch on seat belts. I remember my mom driving across country from Kansas city to New Mexico and back and we played in the back of the car and on the floor board. It's crazy to think we drove on ice and snow without them too. And if we had to make a sudden stop, my mom's arm flew right in front of me as if it could stop me from going through the window shield. I started riding in the front seat of the car when I was 3 years old, now it's unheard of.
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. The funny thing about it was nobody would blink an eye because it was common place. Guys summer fashion were really short shorts that if you wore in this time period people would instantly think gay. In this time period there is no way they would be allowed to wear something like that. Even many public schools have dress codes where students are required to wear basically uniforms.