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I remember we watched Charlies Angels and Starsky and Hutch on Prime Time TV back then. I also watched The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch as after school favorates on TV also.
Hey! 6foot3! That's was a pretty good trick, considering that Charlie's Angels premiered in 1976 and The Partridge Family & The Brady Bunch came out in 1974. So, chances are that you didn't see the Brady Bunch or The Partridge Familt in after-school reruns until about 1977 or 78. Nicwe try, though.
I was born in January 1972 and curious what was life was like for my parents of that year. If you remember it well feel free to share.
The good things, the bad things what was popular, what did you enjoy and what did you hate.
Actually, I do. On New Year's ever 71-72, I met the woman I'd marry. I had gone through the previous couple of years living a loose and fanciful social life, and had just decided it was no longer satisfying, and I went through my little black book to see if there was anyone in there I might wish to marry. There were none. And then, suddenly, there was one.
In '71 I was 16 and licensed to drive. I'd been driving since I was 13, but I grew up in citrus and cattle country, so we could get away with stuff like that.
Gas was .25 a gallon, and my Summer job paid a buck an hour. That job was digging ditches in the hot sun. In river sand. Anyone who has tried to dig a ditch in dry sand knows the Sisyphean nature of that task.
In the Fall, I got a job at a brickyard after school and all day Saturday: $1.25 an hour.
White people, including students, did all the lower paying jobs. Now they're mostly filled by people from South of the border.
The nearest McDonalds was 24 miles away, hence we didn't grow up eating the golden arches. The nearest Kentucky Fried was 17 miles away. Pizza was unknown in the house I grew up in.
1971 was only three years since I'd taken a trip with my grandparents to the Deep South. There I saw, for the first time, a gas station with 3 restrooms (Men, Women, Colored) and two drinking fountains (White, Colored).
By the time 1971 had rolled around, I'd had it with AM radio and the screaming disk jockeys. There was something called "underground radio" on the mysterious FM band, and they played music that wasn't on a hit rotation list, so you didn't keep hearing the same popular songs over and over. Of course, you also didn't hear the manic AM disk jockeys and the equally manic screaming commercials done in way too much reverb.
All in the Family was breaking new TV barriers, and my dad and I never missed it.
Nobody wore seat belts, everyone's parents smoked, little kids weren't strapped in car seats, people smoked in grocery stores and restaurants, a case of Bud was under 2 bucks, a pack of smokes was 30 cents, 45 in a machine.
You went to the local record store to BUY 45s, LPs and 8-tracks, and you previewed the records in listening booths.
I remember the draft and all the boys/men that had to go to Vietnam. They were so brave and then many Americans treated them like **** when they come home (those who did come home). Of course it was happening before and during 71' and is worthy of mention. I can't remember when the draft was abolished, but many people were afraid of it.
Gas was 25 cents a gallon.
There was no internet; how did we do it? And the records (the large round black circles).
Many fashioned themselves around the ideas of Woodstock and rock festivals broke out everywhere.
Grand Funk Railroad, Cream, Led Zepplin, Beatles, BB King and all too many to mention.
I remember a McDonalds, but we were too busy hanging out in the Dairy Queen place parking lot, doing nothing really. I remember the cops, but the concept of loitering hadn't caught on yet where I was.
The legal speed limits were high, you wouldn't believe me if I told you.
Kindergarten and first grade, ah the good old days. We sang the "Candy Man" song, learned our ABC's and I rode a bike with training wheels for a while. We made hand prints into a mold of plaster (a plastic coffee can lid) and learned how to tie our shoes. There never was a big push to learn alot before Kindergarten like there was a decade later. Was caught by a teacher saying a cuss word at recess and and she drug me inside to the washroom and made me bite off a chunk of a bar of soap and chew it, then spit it out. They never paddled the really little kids, but they would send you to the office and let you gaze into your future hanging on the wall. There they always kept on display an array of paddles, thin ones, thick ones, ones with holes drilled in them. I had to wait till about '73 or '74 to get on the receiving end.
We played with matchbox cars and rode on heavy steel tricycles before we entered kindergarten. All school photos were still black and white till about '74. Still have my Kindergarten class photo, I was the only kid with a suit on. I enjoyed finger painting, but did not enjoy the results of eating a chocolate bar I found in the medicine cabinet. Oh, and all the older kids would flash you the peace sign and I gave my V for victory sign back at them, hoping they believed in the soviet global domination theory like I did and wishing for as many VC kills as possible in Vietnam.
1971 and 1972 were challenging years for this country. Richard Nixon was President and we were engaged fighting the Vietnam War. Nixon was "winding down" the war by withdrawing a number of the 500,000 troops there at the beginning of his presidency, but in other ways he appeared to escalate the war. He ordered saturation bombing of the north Vietnamese city of Hanoi, he had mines laid in Haiphong Harbor, and he had invaded the neighboring nation of Cambodia in 1970.
Nixon went to Communist China in 1971 and began a long process that eventually lead to good relations between the US and that country. He also succeeded in getting the Soviet Union to sign an important nuclear arms limitation treaty known as the SALT I Treaty.
In 1972, in appeared as though the US was close to obtaining a cease fire agreement to end the Vietnam War. This process was very slow, but in 1973, the US signed the Paris Accords with North Vietnam temporarily ending the conflict.
In November 1972, Richard Nixon won a landslide reelection against Democrat George McGovern. Nixon carried 49 of 50 states in the election. However, the seeds of Nixon's destruction and resignation from office had already been planted. During the summer of 1972, men broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. This burglary attempted was discovered and the men arrested. A man involved in the break in named "E Howard Hunt" told authorities that people in the White House had commissioned the burglary or the break in. The reality is that Nixon probably knew absolutely nothing about what Hunt was doing. However, he made a huge mistake in attempting to cover up the extent of involvement of "higher ups" at the White House. During this process, the President conspired to obstruct justice in violation of criminal statutes. None of this would come to light until 1973 and 1974 though.
From a personal standpoint, I remember these were years I attended junior high school. Junior High was much different in those days. I don't remember ever hearing about drugs in our school. Students from different schools sometimes met one another and "rumbled" or fought. There seemed to be little effort to prevent this sort of thing. Girls were required to wear dresses or skirts to school. Long hair was the "rage" , but the dress code severely restricted how long the boys could wear their hair. Teachers were strict and I remember the paddle being used with some frequency. I was paddled and so were most of my friends and we were pretty good kids for the most part. It seemed so normal, none of us even considered complaining about it.
That's what went on during those years.
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