Things society were in a uproar over when you were young? (70's, events)
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Nixon, Johnson, Agnew, oil embargo of 73, and the cost of these new tennis shoes called Addidas...with three slanted black stripes down the side....I think they were $16...heady sum for the day...
Speaking of Tennis, the match between Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King. Johnny Carson joking about toilet paper shortages leading to a run on the stuff and an actual shortage for a while. Followed by streaking.
I don't think newer generations really understand that people during the fifties expected nuclear war, and for everyone who built a bomb shelter in the back yard, there was someone who decided it might not be worth surviving. But yes, we grew up in a time when most people expected to end up living in a post atomic world. On the day Castro would blink or not, my parents kept me home from school. My dad stayed home from work. If it was the end we wanted to be together.
I'd also add polio, though as a kid I really didn't know that the year I was born more people contracted it than any year before. One of my dear friends in Jr. High was still damaged by it. I was her friend even though everyone picked on her since she couldn't walk without a brace and was hard to understand her speech.
And yes, I remember rock and roll. My mom listened to big band and Sinatra all day every day so I appreciate her music very much too. My aunt loved surf music and played that all day. She also wanted to see the Stones but her kids were to embarresed to have MOM go to take her.
And don't forget the war and the social uphevial and the way I remember my teens being in a state of perpetual anger and worry and wondering when some other city would riot and the way people hated each other for politics. In my family it was NEVER discussed. Thus, we stayed a family.
Much of the stuff the current generations started out with as issues seem so... small .... some how.
I remember the first mass polio vaccinations in schools. We lined up in the hallways, and went into the clinic to get our shot. I don't remember the shot, just the waiting and that some kids cried.
I also remember the push to build fall out shelters. I was really upset that my parents didn't build one.
Nightbird47, I agree with everything you wrote.
Our coming-of-age was a tumultuous time.
"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
Right now I'm watching shows about Kennedy on, of all channels, National Geographic.
It still makes me cry, 50 years later, as do the documentaries of 9/11.
Some things will forever live in infamy.
I'll both of you, Fox Terrier and Nightbird. It was the same for me.
In my senior year in high school, first Martin Luther King was murdered (March) and then Bobby Kennedy (June). Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for POTUS, and then there was the riot in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. All this against the background of the Vietnam War, race riots, anti-war protests, etc etc. And that was all in 1 year!
I remember the first mass polio vaccinations in schools. We lined up in the hallways, and went into the clinic to get our shot. I don't remember the shot, just the waiting and that some kids cried.
I also remember the push to build fall out shelters. I was really upset that my parents didn't build one.
Funny how as a kid you don't get some of the things going on. I didn't know polio was epidemic the year I was born until long after, just the absolute joy when the first shots came out. And my Grandfather was in the movie industry and I had never really heard of McCarthy. I think my parents and aunt and uncle learned it was best to leave politics out of things long before the vietnam war because to just keep your thoughts to yourself then was the best policy.
Laziness, lack of respect, being spoiled and over indulged (see Benjamin Spock), over sexed, lose of moral values, over sexualized music and dance, in short the same things that folks are foaming at the mouth about now.
Pretty much.
People were also hysterical about the country going to hell in hand basket back in the 1920s, too, what with speakeasies, fast cars, flappers, etc.
People were also hysterical about the country going to hell in hand basket back in the 1920s, too, what with speakeasies, fast cars, flappers, etc.
I think that is true of some decades. But not all. WW2 and the poverty of the Great Depression and the violence of the sixties stand out as a far different time to grow up. It is interesting that the most violent and disruptive times are followed by very reprsessed, and undramatic (on the surface) times.
The fourties saw many a young man go to war, and many a family lose members of it to that war, and the bomb. The parents of the fifties wanted calm and peace. Underneath that was a river of change, but it hadn't spilled through yet until their children got old enough to make their mark. And while the bomb had been a horrifying new weapon when it was used, it became part of the background of life. After the dramatic events and high emotions of the sixties, the seventies were very blah. We deal with both the immediate and the wash of what had gone before.
But the fourties, the sixties and other decades are the times when the same small things happened but they were never to be confused with 'normal' decades. I think the most calm ones are the ones which follow the most dramatic since everyone is drained.
Integration. My high school teachers (deep south) said the schools would collapse and rot. I remember one weeping the last day of school (high school) my senior year.
AIDS
Brooke Shields / Calvin Klein Jeans
Space Shuttle Crashed
MTV
Reaganomics
Assasination attempts on the Pope and President Reagan
John Lennon shot and killed
DOS commands
Pac-Man
I think that is true of some decades. But not all. WW2 and the poverty of the Great Depression and the violence of the sixties stand out as a far different time to grow up. It is interesting that the most violent and disruptive times are followed by very reprsessed, and undramatic (on the surface) times.
The fourties saw many a young man go to war, and many a family lose members of it to that war, and the bomb. The parents of the fifties wanted calm and peace. Underneath that was a river of change, but it hadn't spilled through yet until their children got old enough to make their mark. And while the bomb had been a horrifying new weapon when it was used, it became part of the background of life. After the dramatic events and high emotions of the sixties, the seventies were very blah. We deal with both the immediate and the wash of what had gone before.
But the fourties, the sixties and other decades are the times when the same small things happened but they were never to be confused with 'normal' decades. I think the most calm ones are the ones which follow the most dramatic since everyone is drained.
The sentences that I have bolded ring true to me. I remember growing up in the late forties and early fifties as being a very peaceful time. Sure, I prayed for peace every Tuesday night with my mom and other mothers on the block, but I wasn't afraid of anything. If the public was foaming at the mouth over anything, it went right over my head.
The Cold War was ratcheting up, though, and by the time it peaked during the Cuban Missile Crisis I was sitting on a tarmac in Japan waiting with a few hundred other guys to be sent to only God knew where. By then I was old enough to make my mark, and could hardly wait.
I remember everyone believing that the Japanese were going to take over the country. That Madonna's 'Like a Virgin' was a crime against humanity. That women in the workforce had to dress like men or men wouldn't be able to concentrate (I still remember the little 'ties' we had to wear). That every house bore yellow ribbons for the hostages in Iran. That AIDS was spread by touch. That computers were so huge they needed their own rooms and a/c units...and that de-bugging meant literally removing insects from the machines.
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both of you, Fox Terrier and Nightbird. It was the same for me. 