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Most 60s hippys were becoming preppys and finding out love wasn't so free after all . So most became communist and are now radical professors and congress-persons or presidents .
The music was good but the family was breaking up and crime was increasing . Women and children were being abandoned because fems were a dime a dozen in the streets and work places . men were no longer allowed to be men because of their feminist mothers and teachers .
I don't think the OP was looking for fictional accounts.
One thing about the late 1960s and 1970s, cartoons were violent and not politically correct. I watched cartoons like Speed Racer and some japanese live action shows( Battle of the Planets, Ultra man, Johnny Socko and his Flying Robot) and people died in them and there was violence. By the time the 1980s came cartoons made kids into sissies, particularly shows like G I Joe and all the kiddy shows.
TV kind of sucked but the music was good. Movies were good.
Nowadays its all crime shows and court and corpse shows. Comedies reek.
I was about 13-14 in 1970 and what I remember most was how much trust or naivete we had for one another. I once gave a stranger directions and he thanked me by giving me a joint, I didn't even smoke pot but I took it a carried it a round with me in my wallet for a couple of months or more. You could hitch hike any where. I remember working the same minimum wage job from the time I was 15 until I was about 21. If anyone over the age of 21 showed up to work there we considered him a loser who was working for kids wages. There were some 30 and 40-year-olds working there and they did have issues. There was just to many good paying factory jobs for some one who had to support a family.
You could easilly tell which parking lot was for the students and which parking lot was for teachers only at high school just by looking at the cars.
I don't remember any one who was renting a house. Poor people in my urban neighborhood came from Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and all bought a house.
The 70's were a time of the end of the vietnam conflict and the start of alot of inner city problems.their was the oil embargo and crime really satrted to grow. It was at that time people satrted actaully loskign their doors when they left even for a short while. 1968 is pretty much acknowledged as the end of the the world controlled by the greatest genertion and thngs started going downhill quickly.Having lived thru the late 0's as a child and the 60's as a teen I thnik tehy are rightin that aftre 68 pretty much the world changed;not for the better either.
The 70's were a time of the end of the vietnam conflict and the start of alot of inner city problems.their was the oil embargo and crime really satrted to grow. It was at that time people satrted actaully loskign their doors when they left even for a short while. 1968 is pretty much acknowledged as the end of the the world controlled by the greatest genertion and thngs started going downhill quickly.Having lived thru the late 0's as a child and the 60's as a teen I thnik tehy are rightin that aftre 68 pretty much the world changed;not for the better either.
Platform shoes were hot...not only for the girls but for the guys too! Afro's were popular on white guys and gals. We didn't have cell phones or computers but somehow we seemed to get along in life just fine.
True. No one was pressuring us to care about Vietnam or that all we needed was love. We were basically out of Vietnam by 1973, and it was perfectly clear to any sober mind that we needed not love, but better fuel efficiency and to get inflation under control.
Yeah, the cities weren't burning as often in the 70's. But some of us had to deal with the urban bight and ill will well into the 80's.
Nerdy odd ball guys drove; Datsuns, Toyotas, and Hondas. They talked about Pentax cameras and "pushing" 35mm film, quad systems, and the commodore computer. There was a video game called pong. Back then we would fight over the joystick. Today your basic 11 year old would equate it with being water boarded.
You could buy a record album at the grocery store for about $7.00-$12.00/ "cut outs" for $5.00. Dressing cool was more expensive back then. I remember paying $25.00 for Disco shirts, $25.00 for double Knit bells with a three in cuff. I made a $1.90 and hour working 20 hrs a week. eventually minimum wage went up to $2.20
I probably bought an album and an item of clothing every payday. You could buy a car for $75.00. A nice kid I worked with offered me a gold 62 T-bird for that price. I eventually bought my brothers Buick Special, It was a great car (early V6)
The 70's were a time of the end of the vietnam conflict and the start of alot of inner city problems.their was the oil embargo and crime really satrted to grow. It was at that time people satrted actaully loskign their doors when they left even for a short while. 1968 is pretty much acknowledged as the end of the the world controlled by the greatest genertion and thngs started going downhill quickly.Having lived thru the late 0's as a child and the 60's as a teen I thnik tehy are rightin that aftre 68 pretty much the world changed;not for the better either.
I was born in 71, so I was a little kid in the 70s. Naturally, my perspective would be different than that of someone who was older.
We lived in a big neighborhood full of families and we kids were outside ALL THE TIME. (That can't be stressed enough.) We kids ran in packs in the neighborhood and were always playing games or riding bikes. Our parents didn't really know exactly where we were generally...they just knew that we were in the neighborhood with the other kids and we'd come back before dinner. In the summer, we all went out again after dinner to play Spotlight (hide-and-seek with flashlights) in the dark.
Where I lived, the sport every kid did was swimming. We all swam (competitively) in the summer leagues and then in the winter, we swam with the Y leagues. Football, basketball, and baseball were standard, too. Soccer was unheard of. (Seriously...I'd never heard of or seen soccer until the 80s.) Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts -- beginning with Cub Scouts and Brownies -- were fairly big. And we all ran road races. They were everywhere! All our parents ran, and we kids ran, too. I just did the 1 and 3 mile fun runs. My mom did the 10Ks. My dad and brother did the 10Ks, the half-marathons, and the short triathelons.
Pizza Hut was probably our favorite place to go as a group.
In the summers, the local movie theatres did weekly movies for the kids. Our parents would drop us off at the theatre in the morning (with our paper-bags of home-popped popcorn) and we'd watch crazy, cheesy movies like "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger." In the summers, we also camped. In my neighborhood, there was a huge group of families that banded together and camped every fourth of July for a couple weeks -- tent camping, power-boating, water-skiing. I always hated it when my parents bought generic sodas to take with us, but the grape soda was okay.
My favorite candy bar was a Marathon bar: a foot-long strip of chocolate-coated braided caramel. The wrapper had the inches marked off. Banana popsicles were also a fave. In the summer, we all got snow cones from the ice cream trucks that came through the neighborhood.
Every room in our house had carpet that was a different color than in the other rooms...like a patchwork quilt. Very ugly! Most of the rooms in our house had wallpaper. We had flatware with wooden handles -- very popular in the 70s -- and macrame was EVERYWHERE. We got our first microwave in the 70s and it was HUGELY exciting. Cable television came into our lives for the first time then as well.
We had AWESOME Saturday morning cartoons and watched them faithfully every week.
Our parents smoked like crazy, and drank a fair bit, too. They got together regularly with other couples to play bridge.
We didn't have babysitters. We came home from school -- rode the bus -- and were alone until our parents got home. If our parents went out at night, we were generally left to fend for ourselves. I don't recall EVER having had a babysitter.
We had a totally rockin' 70s van with the plush shag carpet and velour captains chairs.
Every time we saw a VW Beetle on the road, we kids would punch each other: "Punch bug BLUE!" "Punch bug RED!"
Amongst my friends, we had no perception of status symbols. We were all the same. Clothing didn't matter, looks didn't mater. I don't recall there being a lot of racism, but there also wasn't a lot of blending. There were a few black kids in my classes, but not many. I got into a fight with one black girl who called me "honey-child" because I thought she called me a bad word. It was her tone of voice, I guess. We slapped at each other, girl-style, and then the next day she taught me a hand jive that became our favorite thing to do on the playground.
Oh...playground: Red Rover, Simon Says, and jumping rope. All huge. And every time I hear the song "Celebration" I think of being in the 4th grade and having a jump-rope competition at school. In PE, they taught us square dancing. (I loved it!)
I (sniff) miss those days!
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