Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It was fun back then. Not the emphasis on materialism, Disneyworld, helicopter moms, spoiled brats, buying things. For vacations we went camping in a tent and once we went to Europe (and camped in a tent when we got there.) It wasn't a keeping up with the Joneses world yet. MUCH simpler and more fun.
I had a new Pontiac LeMans convertible with bucket seats and a stick shirt on the floor. Women did a lot of craft work like embroidery. There were no drugs except marijuana which wasn't really a drug, just something people used at parties. The older people would whine about crime but there really wasn't much crime compared to today. i never heard of school shootings or any of that other craziness that we have today.
The early 70s were a continuation of the 60s and then it went downhill into the 70s which were kind of boring and aimless with a terrible recession around 1973.
I read that amphetamine was popular for dieting, and barbiturates were still used.
Remembering more from kindergarten and 1st grade, like standing in line with the other kids for those gun vaccinations, sounded and felt like getting nailed with a staple gun. It left a round scar a little smaller than a dime on my left shoulder, for smallpox vaccination.
I remember liking the novelty song "My Ding a Ling" without full understanding of the meaning of the song. My sister gave me a 45 RPM record of it and we were supposed to bring in a record to play at school for something, and the teacher would not play it. I had to wait until next day and play "on top of spaghetti" instead.
First grade I remember learning the highly valued phrase "Thirty days past September, April June and November, all the rest have 31, but February which has 28. Always found that handy. Back then we used wind up alarm clock, and watches had to be wound up by hand every day. Cookoo clocks were super cool, people had interesting clocks back then, especially old people. I remember being the first kid in our class that could tell time from a standard clock, making up for my knot tying disability.
I remember knit picking with teacher in her instruction of clock time, she would put the little hand on 8 and big one not quite on 6 but a little before, and I would say 8:28 and she said no, 8:30, then look and tell me "were just going in 5 minute increments, don't confuse the class". And I would point out that the hour hand should also be halfway between the 8 and the 9 if it were 8:30. She didn't like that much either. That was probably the one moment of my education where I was light years ahead of the class, and she shot me down. I liked her anyway, because she would read "The boxcar children" series of books to us in the afternoons, which I remember enjoying very much.
There was no childproofing or safety anything back then, my sister broke her arm on the side bar of a trampoline, no padded rails back then. They made chocolate ex-lax bars back then, and I got in the medicine cabinet and ate one, made for a pretty rough couple of days, I'll spare you the details. Some other medicine I had to take for something made my poop turn red, and teacher did not like me boasting about it. If a kid puked, the teacher would rush to get the janitor so he could sprinkle that stuff on it and get it cleaned up before there was a chain reaction, which happened in the lunch room one day.....the worst place for a puking, it was the smell that got things going. I remember Fridays were special for lunch as we got chocolate milk on that day only. I think Friday was the day we always got our "Weekly Reader" magazine.
Other than cartoons, I liked game shows and can still remember when Price is Right was on at night and had a different guy before Bob Barker, who was doing Truth Or Consequences, we also liked Let's Make a Deal. We would sing along with various bits of Hee Haw with much joy. Our parents really liked All in the Family, and you never bothered them when there was a Dean Martin special on, or there was going to be trouble.
Basically it was just a mirror of now with whatever turns you on thinking. The mid 60's was nationally a huge turning point towards conflict. between individual beliefs and morals.
I was a little girl at that time and my family was living in England. I remember watching a British TV show called Blue Peter and my younger brother watched "The Magic Roundabout". I also remember watching the British singer Sir Cliff Richard who had his own TV show and on that the show they chose the U.K. entry for the Eurovision song contest. I rememer my father driving his American car with the steering wheel on the left-hand side (which was next to the sidewalk) and whoever sat next him in the front passenger seat had to be his eyes for passing other cars on roads that only had one lane in each direction.
The earliest pro sport championship that i can remember was the 1972 baseball World Series between the Oakland A's and the Cinncinatti Reds as i still remember players on those teams like Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and manager Sparky Anderson for the Reds and Catfish Hunter, Joe Rudi, Dave Concepcion and manager Dick Williams for the A's.
Oh yeah the A's won 4 games to 3 games in the 7 game World Series even without allstar Reggie Jackson (hurt)
T
Dave Concepcion was the Reds shortstop. He should be in the Hall of Fame. But, yes, those were two great teams...five World Series titles and seven pennants in the seventies between them. How many Hall of Fame caliber players were on the field during that Series? One of the greatest times for baseball!
71-72 was when I played little league for the first time. I didn't know the rules because I had never played baseball. Out in California and New Mexico my game was rock throwing. My brother and I would team up with a couple of friends and then go into another neighborhood and start a war with other kids. When we came back to St.Louis everybody played baseball, I didn't care much for the game, couldn't hit, couldn't field but I had a cannon for an arm. The coach saw me throw a couple to home plate from deep right field and asked if I ever pitched, I lied and told him I did, so he had me start the next game. I think I balked 6 times that day. Drive-in movies were big for us back then, If we saw the old man cleaning his windshield when he got home after work on a Friday we knew we were going to the movies. Sometimes we would go over to our sister's and if we saw our brother-in-law taking the spare tire out of his trunk we knew we were going to the movies. Even though those cars back then were as big as battleships we were still wedged in there like sardines. I remember when we had the local news come to our class to do a story and we invited another class into our room and all the boys had to give up our seats and sit in a circle on the floor. After school I ran home to tell my mom I was going to be on the 5 o'clock news and the whole family gathered around our cheap little black/white set. The only part of me they showed was my left foot.
1972 I was a kid working a summer job with my neighbor who was a locksmith. He had two gigs with American lock. First one was to change all the locks and produce 7 keys perlock for the Howard Johnsons Hotel across the street from the Watergate Hotel in DC. The other was to service locks in the Watergate. My primary Job was reproducing those 7 keys per lock. It was over a year later that I found out this is the hotel the burglers stayed during their breakins in the summer of 72. Sometime later my neighbor changed the locks at the DNC headquarters in the Watergate. I remember several roads downtown lined in railroad ties, the beginnings of the completion of DC's Metro subway, opened in 76.
It was fun back then. Not the emphasis on materialism, Disneyworld, helicopter moms, spoiled brats, buying things. For vacations we went camping in a tent and once we went to Europe (and camped in a tent when we got there.) It wasn't a keeping up with the Joneses world yet. MUCH simpler and more fun.
I had a new Pontiac LeMans convertible with bucket seats and a stick shirt on the floor. Women did a lot of craft work like embroidery. There were no drugs except marijuana which wasn't really a drug, just something people used at parties. The older people would whine about crime but there really wasn't much crime compared to today. i never heard of school shootings or any of that other craziness that we have today.
The early 70s were a continuation of the 60s and then it went downhill into the 70s which were kind of boring and aimless with a terrible recession around 1973.
Actually, keeping up with the Joneses became a thing back in the 50's. The whole counterculture movement of the 60's and 70's was about youth rebelling against that widespread phenomenon. And traditional women's craftwork was a mid-Western thing, not so much on the West Coast.
But you're right that kids played outdoors in those days before video games, and some families went camping for vacation, but some many still do. For many, it's about affordability; they can't afford to take the whole family on vacation to stay in hotels. In that respect, little has changed.
I'm not sure of the exact year, but the early 70's was when the Arab oil embargo happened, from which OPEC was formed, and gas prices skyrocketed. This had a domino effect of causing an economic recession. Jobs were hard to come by for college grads of that period, and the federal government set up a program where employers would get subsidies for offering entry-level jobs to people.
I am from the '70s to 80s you could feel the vibe of good music with good meaning. Compare to this days where anything goes in the industry.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
