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For those of you who would have been say young teens in the 50s/60s/70s was it really easy for a young person to buy alcohol? With store keepers not caring? I also heard back then if a cop pulled you over you could be super drunk and there would be a good chance he'd drive you home, or let you walk home, is that true?
NO! If you were of legal age, a cop may drive you home vs write a DUI, but that was by no means a given or a regular occurrence - the DUI ticket and a booking was far more likely. Oh, and porn (basically boobs) was generally only found in magazines, behind the counter, and a confrontation with a stern old pharmacist, not on your cell phone.
If you looked older, it was easy for teens to buy alcohol. But those teens were generally at least 16 or 17, not really young kids. I looked very young for my age so never tried it - I got carded until I was 30.
Usually older teens or young adults would buy the beer for a party. In my small hometown in the late 1960's and 1970's, we would have large parties up in the national forest with a bonfire. If the cops showed up, they just told us to go home. If they stopped your car and you had been drinking, they would give you a verbal warning. Mostly we just drank beer so were not super drunk. I don't remember anyone in my group getting a DUI except for my older brother who got a DUI in his early 20's and lost his license for six months or more. He was very drunk and had driven his car off the road.
But years later, I read through some old obituaries for my hometown and was surprised how many male teenagers died in one car accidents on country roads where alcohol was involved. It was popular for some of the "wilder kids" to drive out into the country with friends while drinking excessively and/or to go to a party or dance in a nearby small town and return late at night smashed and driving fast on dark, winding roads.
For those of you who would have been say young teens in the 50s/60s/70s was it really easy for a young person to buy alcohol? With store keepers not caring? I also heard back then if a cop pulled you over you could be super drunk and there would be a good chance he'd drive you home, or let you walk home, is that true?
Yes, getting alcohol was very easy in the 1970s.
I could safely say that I could pretty much buy ANY alcohol at age 14 either through an adult or one of the kids in my high school. In addition, my parents always had a pretty healthy stock of beer and spirits of all sorts at home.
High school students could easily get any alcoholic beverage as the legal age in Kentucky was 18 for all beverages. We had classmates who would purchase in Kentucky and bring it over the river to Ohio where the legal age was 21 on most alcoholic beverages.
Nearly every party I attended in high school had beer or some cheap wine involved. That pretty much crossed socioeconomic lines.
Shopkeepers? Well, it depended on the circumstance. My father would need a couple of cases of beer and call the local pony keg. They would let me pick it up even though I was underage. If I had gone in myself, I am sure that I would have been carded.
As for the being super drunk and getting away with a DWI, I don't believe that happened very often. However, even today, DWI is not taken that seriously compared to other countries. A few years ago, one of the Milwaukee attorneys pointed out on the radio that the state of Wisconsin could not permanently revoke a driver's license until the TENTH DWI conviction.
For the record, I did not drink in high school or college. If I had started drinking in high school, I would have faced a very strict curfew at home. For me, as THE designated driver, I could stay out until 2-3 am on weekends while my drinking siblings were home by 10 pm.
Back in the 70's in Colorado, you could legally buy 3.2 beer at age 18. If you wanted the hard stuff, you had to wait until age 21. In high school, it never occurred to me to try to buy alcohol illegally - just wasn't that interested. When I hit college I acquired a grad school BF who was 9 years older than I was. I'd go out with him and his "old" friends and be served alcohol just like everyone else without being carded. Given the "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" attitude of the late 60's and early 70's, alcohol was actually considered pretty tame stuff by many. I felt that I was being a "good girl" because I "only" drank alcohol. Plus, I was a science major and I had to stay sober to learn all that calculus and chemistry and physics. My roommate was a Theater major and she and her friends never seemed to have any difficulty acquiring the booze to do an awful lot of underage partying. That damn calculus class probably saved me from all sorts of grief!
Back in the 40's-50's we tried and got into trouble. Retailers would chase us out. But sometimes it wasn't hard to get an adult to buy some booze for you. Cops were not sympathetic either, they'd take you to the jailhouse and call your parents. Then you were in real trouble.
Taxi drivers would take orders for alcohol, buy it and deliver it to a specified address where we would meet him outside and pay the cab fare and the cost of the alcohol-- maybe a tip, I don't recall. There were probably cheaper ways but this worked. Cops were more concerned that we pick up the empties than that we were under age. This was a small town.
For those of you who would have been say young teens in the 50s/60s/70s was it really easy for a young person to buy alcohol? With store keepers not caring? I also heard back then if a cop pulled you over you could be super drunk and there would be a good chance he'd drive you home, or let you walk home, is that true?
I can only talk about the '70s in L.A. but yes, it was pretty easy, especially in the liquor stores run by Asian immigrants. Not so easy in the supermarkets and in liquor stores owned by white Americans (there were still some in the 1970s.) DUIs were rare. Knowing the nature of the LAPD, LASD, and the suburban departments in those years, I'm sure DUI laws were enforced against black and Latino drivers more, but if you were white and you weren't a hippie, outlaw biker, or punk rocker, the odds of getting a DUI were very low.
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