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Old 02-25-2008, 09:03 PM
 
48,505 posts, read 96,629,449 times
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The early 60' were good times. From 67 thru the end of the 70's were bad overall. Vietnam war made the present conflict seem tame as far as number involved and killed/wounded. People also treated the ones coming back like trash mostly. I remember my old brother said when he returned people at LAX shot him the finger and hollered at him because he was in uniform. Then there were also riots in cities and on college campuses.The 1968 democratic convention in chicago was terriable with looting ;burning and shooting.I really think that this changed america into a very self centered society because it hasn't changed much since. Then carter became president and the oil embargo. Long lines for gas;people fighting and prices tripled. That along with a deep recession and double digit inflation. After that the Iranian embassy hostage crisis and failed rescue attempt. Then the 80's that were alot better except that people still remained hateful is the only way I can describe it.That's why so many historians say that 1968 changed america forever.Once 80's arrived people flip-flopped from free love to greed is OK. Looking at the internet things haven't changed but their children learned their lessons well.

 
Old 02-25-2008, 09:07 PM
 
Location: Madison
14 posts, read 53,538 times
Reputation: 17
The 70's
I remember the lines of cars waiting to get gas.
I remember the god awful clothes (say no to polyester).
The awesome music!!
Riding my bike,with my brother,around our neighborhood looking for soda bottles to turn in for money..
My parents complaining about not being able to buy a stick of furniture during the Carter administration...lol
The Space Shuttle being built..
1976 celebrations and my little brother being born that year...
 
Old 02-25-2008, 10:28 PM
 
Location: Lower Michigan
3,087 posts, read 1,074,407 times
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I remember we got together with my cousins alot and played outside all the time. At night the parents played cards. Euchre, Canasta, Pinochle, a board game called aggervation, cribbage which we all played in the early to mid 70's. Now I can't even remember how to play except for euchre and only play online sometimes. lol.
 
Old 02-25-2008, 10:35 PM
 
Location: southern california
61,289 posts, read 87,214,458 times
Reputation: 55551
we were better then.
30 years later more violent more unruly,
Dr Spock lied. time out does not work.
Timothy leary lied. drugs are in fact not good for you.
carole hanisch lied (womens lib '68). women are not genetically superior beings.
they have heart attacks just like guys in high stress jobs.
its not the gender its the job.
 
Old 02-26-2008, 06:01 PM
 
Location: Albuquerque
2,296 posts, read 6,271,183 times
Reputation: 1109
My mom did too. She made these Christmas cookies from cornflakes which were dyed green with food coloring and then stuck together with some type of marshmallow goo. They were topped with red hots for decoration. After the 70s she stopped baking and let my step dad bake since that was more his thing.

Quote:
Originally Posted by missncr View Post
I also remember my mom making cake, frosting, pies, cookies all from scratch.
 
Old 02-26-2008, 06:15 PM
 
Location: SW Montana
355 posts, read 1,143,509 times
Reputation: 254
Default TV days

lisak64
Senior Member wrote:

TV programming ended around midnight with the national anthem and a daily reflection


Boy, I had about forgotten about the anthem and test patterns with the tone that went on forever. I grew up a fair share of my life in tornado alley, and we had an old black and white Zenith TV in the living room of the farmhouse. We used what is now called the "Weller method" (from the 60's proponent) to detect possible tornado activity near our place. We turned on the TV, let it warm up and tuned into channel 13. Then you turned the brightness down until it was almost black - just a little bit of snow. Then we tuned the set to channel 3 and left everything alone. The story was it would glow if there was an approaching tornado due to electrical activity.

I don't specifically remember how accurate that old TV was because when it was storming at night we would usually being paying attention to the other signs that we had a twister around. I do remember maybe a couple occasions where it did glow pretty good, but we didn't stick around to see much - headed straight for the storm cellar. Any sort of storm warnings in those days were pretty much useless because AM radio was pure static and TV about the same - lightning wreaked havoc on those signals, especially out in the sticks where we lived.
 
Old 02-27-2008, 04:36 PM
 
Location: Seattle, WA
269 posts, read 1,241,628 times
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I'm not going to say it was worse or better ... it was just different. I grew up mostly in the 1960's, on & around US military installations. That in itself colors my perceptions, because that isn't "Main Street America" as one commonly thinks of it. There never really was a post-World War 2 Pax Americana, but that era was full of the feeling that there should have been, the dirty commies notwithstanding.

Among my earliest memories is the cut-it-with-a-knife thick miasma of tension during the Cuban Missile Crisis ... we were living right off Camp Pendleton at the time, living around the Marines from the West Coast who would have been the second batch into a hot war in Cuba only because they had more miles to travel than the Marines from the East Coast. Assuming, of course, the Soviets didn't launch nuclear missiles first and triggered the world-ending nuclear war everyone dreaded.

I was living in West Berlin when Kennedy gave his famous speech there ... and a few months later when he was assassinated. My father went to Viet Nam (as a civilian, so he wasn't in any of the fighting) 1967-68 (which includes the Tet Offensive), and I recall part of the terrible spring/summer of 1968 -- the assassinations of Rev. M. L. King and Robert Kennedy, the riots, the rise of disorder in the 1968 election campaign. Fortunately, we left for Europe again in late July, so we missed being inundated in the chaos of the Chicago riots around the Democratic Convention. But gas was about 30 cents a gallon....

I was a space and science fan ("geek" and "nerd" either hadn't been coined, or had yet to reach their current popular meanings), and frankly, the late 1960's were the best of times for that. The Apollo missions ultimately reached the Moon, though, ironically, I missed seeing the TV broadcasts of that by being asleep in my bunk in a Boy Scout camp in Germany when Armstrong stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquility. Even the drama and relief of the Apollo XIII accident in 1970 contributed to the feeling of can-do supremacy, because Lovell, Swigert and Haise came back alive, rescued by brilliant extemporizations that, clearly, only the United States could have managed to pull off. (I have read, but cannot find a verification, that in order to solve for the orbit of the spacecraft and its return to Earth in a short-enough period of time to be useful, NASA requisitioned a quarter of the computing capacity of North America -- a drastically smaller capacity than nowadays.)

I went to high school in the early '70s (so my memories are colored with the teen-age hormonal angst that seems to be a timeless constant). I learned cynicism from the successive "betrayals" of the cancellations of the final three Apollo missions and the grossly illegal activities of the Nixon administration at Watergate that brought down that administration on Nagasaki Day. I registered for the old draft but was never reclassified out of 1-H, no one having been drafted for over a year when I registered. (Had the draft and the war been still going, and my student status not given me a deferment, I probably would have enlisted in the Navy rather than be drafted ... having been around all of the armed forces in my formative years, my opinion was that the Navy was the least f***ed up of all of them).

Then I went off to college and arrived in Seattle at the tag end of the Ted Bundy scare. College students were still tagged as being lazy, hippies, drug-abusing, etc., but by then (1974) most college people were apathetic to politics and there was a strong wave of conservatism coming up, as the Democrats were drunk on power and success, while the conservatives that seized control of the Republicans despised young people as in the hippie image I mentioned above. I was definitely in the apathy section, the effort demanded by my studies reinforcing that. Grad school was more of the same, and that saw me into the mid-1980s with my nose in my books.
 
Old 02-27-2008, 06:46 PM
 
Location: Vermont / NEK
5,794 posts, read 13,905,325 times
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I was classified as 1-H too. My lottery number was 230. My best friend's was 232. We always joked that I'd get drafted and he wouldn't, but it never came to pass for either of us.

I also remember one of my close neighbors building a bomb shelter in the early 60s. I have no idea what the current owners of that house do with it. Perhaps it's a wine cellar now.
 
Old 02-28-2008, 10:23 PM
 
Location: At Sea....and Midwest....
272 posts, read 783,293 times
Reputation: 163
The 60's and the 70's were the beginning of the 'self hate' era of American "life".
What started as a "movement" of greater consciousness quickly degenerated into a nightmarish chasm of meaningless sensory overload. I'm not trying to say that your parents are not correct...but they probably did not live through the 60's and 70's like I did. It was a crazy scary time....All the great American traditions and societal values were not only openly mocked and ridiculed...but were violently attacked. Any person or group who attempted to hold true....was attacked....Cities burned with riots that lasted many days....
It was the beginning of the decline in modern rational western thought, and life. It was the beginning of the advent of dictatorship of 'issues' of group think, hype, and lies dressed up as "openness".
It was the time of filth over cleanliness....the time of shouting and screaming over rational talk and discussion....It was the closest this nation will ever come to a grassroots fascist movement....it was mass collective mind control of millions of Americans....Drug induced insanity....huge rallies....huge concerts...wasted lives.
I remember the "wave" controversy at Cubberly Highschool in Palo Alto California, my hometown......
It was a neat experiment in brainwashing. Students were led to believe that the group they were getting involved in was the beginning of a new positive movement.....yet all the while...from beginning to end...the group was modeled directly on any nascent fascist movement found in history. Sadly NONE of the students picked up on this...NONE of them EVER clued in that they were being USED to form a fascist organization....They TOTALLY BOUGHT the LIE....and believed in all the hype...painted to look on the outside like some sort of 'hippy' movement.....but in reality....they re-invented fascism....all by themselves....SAD...the 60's and 70's so sad....so FULL of IT!

Last edited by Coffee Mate; 02-28-2008 at 10:26 PM.. Reason: ......California Uber Alles!.......
 
Old 02-29-2008, 03:59 AM
 
Location: in the southwest
13,396 posts, read 44,940,909 times
Reputation: 13599
Quote:
Originally Posted by Coffee Mate View Post
The 60's and the 70's were the beginning of the 'self hate' era of American "life".
What started as a "movement" of greater consciousness quickly degenerated into a nightmarish chasm of meaningless sensory overload. I'm not trying to say that your parents are not correct...but they probably did not live through the 60's and 70's like I did. It was a crazy scary time....All the great American traditions and societal values were not only openly mocked and ridiculed..
Yes, Jello Biafra had a good point.
IMHO some of those great American traditions (such as racial segregation) really needed to go.
It's just that some of the new ones (Whoever Has The Most Toys Wins) are no better.
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