So I was a young child at the time.

pastel leisure suits, bell bottoms, granny dresses, platform shoes, shag hair cuts, porn star moustaches -- a butt ugly, hideous decade for clothing and style.

Good black Evan Picone blazers, jeans and assorted tops, from vintage to oxfords. Vintage dresses. Tall cognac leather boots.

Either had my look for the fancy stuff, like Evan Picone and nik nik shirts, or my flower child, flowers in my hair, peasant blouses, long skirts or hip hugger bell bottoms and dashiki. Loved the comfort

Everything about the 70's sucked, didn't you get the memo?

-- Mal

Good thing. Would have missed that wonderful sexual revolution! Ah! The good old days!

Last edited Mon Jun 8, 2015, 11:36 AM - Edit history (1)

... that the demonization of the '70s has more to do with the reactionaries post 1980 trying to wipe out all progress than with any particular problems with the 70s. After all, things had to have gone to hell, or Saint Ronnie wouldn't get the credit for rescuing us.

-- Mal

That and the one horror of the 70s. Disco

In many ways, it is the perfect expression of the late-70s gestalt.

-- Mal

blouses, maxidresses (which we all sewed for ourselves), and the BACKLESS maxidresses which my friend and I wore to town. We stopped traffic. Also, at our college, we started a little fad (which was reported in the local newspaper) of wearing our pajama tops to class. Just a bit of fun. . .

In retrospect, I also loved the freedom of movement we all had. Today, you always feel as if you are on video wherever you go (and you are). The children who have grown up in this age will never know what it's like to feel unobserved. It's pretty sad.

I also loved long hair on men. I'm an old lady now, but a guy with long hair will still turn my head.

for your entire post.

I'd like to read that long rant. I've always thought that the (late) 70s dislike of the (mid-late) 60s was what lead us to Saint Ronnie. Well that and the rise of the fundies.

the fall of Saigon. Up until then there was still an anti-Nixon, anti-war, protest zeitgeist, at least where I was then in the Bay Area (Berkeley).

I was looking for that word earlier... alas, aphasia has caused a number of the connections in my brain to drop out.

I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that there's a good stretch of time in the 20th century for which the "decades" should really be calculated as running from 5 to 5.

-- Mal

The early 60s was so different than protest-era 60s — almost a continuation of the 50s.

The seventies were strange, but I had an enormous amount of fun back then. And great music was everywhere except the Top 40. FM radio was great back then. Sigh.

I believe it.

Helluva combo.

Great time to be in high school, it was.

Didn't look too hot if one was assless tho! And for guys...Angel Flights with de rigeur poodle perm and porn star stache.

Good times...

all that played on our tv was The Watergate hearings.
I was a kid,it was horrible.
plus my dad had a vein in his neck that never stopped throbbing and bulging from anger.

1972 was the first time I could vote and I KNEW the election had been stolen because of Nixon's dirty tricks.

The day he resigned we threw a huge party to celebrate.

eom

And spending most of the decade in grad school.

n/t

I was a a junior in high school in 1974. I literally got high every single day... I stopped cold turkey and have been high less than a dozen times in the ensuing forty years. The last time I got high was 1993.

I don't miss it...If someone lit up a joint in my presence I might take a hit and I might not.

The platforms and the streaking were in 1974. The year I graduated high school.

It was a time of excess.

Politically, Watergate.

Though I had an enormous crush on MTM.

pushed off the carrier to make room for the next inbound Huey.

Madness.

Also remember the avocado green/harvest gold appliances, shag carpeting and here in Canada, the North Star running shoes.

ETA: I remember President Jimmy Carter looking so tired during the Iranian Hostage Crisis as well.

Every single genre of music on the spectrum produced amazing music during that decade.

And my house still has the green ceramic toilet and vanity sink, although we did finally replace the pink ones upstairs with white. Heck, my parents still have a shag carpet in their living room, which desperately needs replaced.

Whatever your tastes were if you could not find it in the 70s you were not looking to hard.

They were teens in the 1980's, and felt their music ( with some notable exceptions) pretty much sucked.

My Dad had great taste in music, from Gordon Lightfoot & Jim Croce, to the ones I mentioned above. Sinatra and the big band era as well...

So I was exposed to a pretty wide variety of music - and that influences me still.

It's weird. During HS in the 80's, I was never really into "new wave." I knew of it, of course, but listened mostly to the stuff we call "classic rock" today.

to wake the kids for school.
That or Tocatta and Fugue etc

Taht came back to bite me when THEY got older and introduced me to Pink Floyd....full blast.
Who knew the lil buggers would have such long memories?

It was my job as a young child to "rake" the shag carpet...yes, one raked their shag carpet

basement rooms that were my space in my folks' house.

Closed out the 1970s for me.

Listening to the radio, whether local or shortwave, was so much more fun back then.

Acapulco Gold. The fine Columbian. Panama Red. Toledo Window Box.

Carlin and Pryor and Cheech and Chong and Mork and Mindy.

And she's buying a stairway to a whole lotta love.

Damn, I miss the 70's!

I think I''m going to flip the TV over to the 70s music channel and spend the day wallowing in good music.

Fort Jackson SC

An engine falling off a DC-10 while taking off from Chicago.
The Baader-Meinhof Gang.
The Glomar Explorer.
The genocide in Cambodia.
American cars were pieces of shit from 1970 to about
1980; poor fuel economy, reduced power than previous years,
and the engine dieseling when the ignition was turned off.

I grew up in a California 'burb and the living was easy. Lots of people in our hood had pools and we swam from April to October. Middle class families kept horses and we kids would ride them around the suburban streets and in the hills. Tennis was HUGE and you had to wait for a court at the public courts. Most people had a couple of cars and a three- or four-bedroom house on one income. It probably wasn't as easy as it seemed to me at the time, because I didn't have any adult problems to deal with.

Television was a huge uniting force. We all watched Roots. Montreal Olympics. Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart, Sonny & Cher, Carol Burnett, Johnny Carson, MASH, Waltons, Little House on the Prairie. Those were a big part of my childhood.

I remember so well when the Vietnam War officially ended in '75. I was in a kids' movie with friends and they stopped the projector in the middle of "Zebra in the Kitchen" (which was already ten years old at that point) to say that the war was over. Quite surreal.

Also, in the 70s a lot of weird shit was going down that was related to the Bay Area where I lived. Chowchilla kidnapping. Patty Hearst kidnapping. Jonestown. Moscone/Milk murders. Etc.

i know you read about inflation and veitnam and stuff like that, but there is an exuberance. like racial harmony and womens rights and even gay people were all cool things on some tv, and you sense that people thought that would all be getting easier in the future. and here we are.

Vietnam for most of the 70s and Watergate. Even thought many of our leaders had been killed. Hope still existed. The music - all of it was very hopeful calling for change that we really thought would happen. In many ways we did not see the 80s coming.

The pools and horses especially. Chowchilla was just crazy.

M*A*S*H

Hippies.

Communes.

Disco.

Shock Theater on Saturday afternoon.

Swimming in a clear lake.

Trying to ride our neighbor's wild ponies without getting caught.

Star Wars.

I was a happy kid growing up in Vermont.

Bloody brilliant television show that was. Still enjoy catching it from time to time.

for a couple of years. Then I got the same basic cut shagged.

And yes, I had a pair of Frye boots, too.

of the Marine Corps on 7/28/1970.

You must be, I'm the only one here!

Although by the end of the decade, more involved memories seep in...I was seven by then!

Philip Glass
Weird public radio (KPFT, KTRU)
New Wave
D&D

Yeah, Star Wars, too

Shah out/Khomeini in was a biggie...

The end of the war in Vietnam was also a pretty memorable event.

Good lord what a fad that was.

How many words must Big Bird spell
Before he gives up in disgust?
Yes and how many eggs must a monologue lay
Before Carson crumbles to dust?
How many crimes must an Angel deduce
Before she can cover her bust?

The answer my friends is blowin' up the tube
The answer is blowin' up the tube.

I recently "re-discovered" this one:

I remember Star Wars the most. Saw it when I was 7. I also remember the iran hostage crisis. Even at my young age that seemed to go on forever.

My graduating class barely escaped the draft as the war ended, but it was AIDs that claimed several lives by the time our 10th reunion came around.

Watergate took down a president, and changed the discourse of American politics.

The Santa Barbara oil spill of '69 sticks in my mind - it was so horrible it inspired me to go to UC Santa Barbara and get my degree in environmental studies. Hard to believe another spill has happened today, when we were all told never again. That inspired the first Earh Day and an environmental movement around the world.

Oh and of course the music...Elton John, Neil Diamond, and I even saw Elvis Presley in one of his last concerts.

Also some really weird clothes--platform shoes etc. And women's lib -- bra burning, the push for the Equal Rights Amendment that never get adopted as part of the constitution.

From Wikipedia:
The earliest well documented case of HIV in a human dates back to 1959 in the Congo.[221] The virus may have been present in the United States as early as 1966,[222] but the vast majority of infections occurring outside sub-Saharan Africa (including the U.S.) can be traced back to a single unknown individual who became infected with HIV in Haiti and then brought the infection to the United States some time around 1969.[223] The epidemic then rapidly spread among high-risk groups (initially, sexually promiscuous men who have sex with men). By 1978, the prevalence of HIV-1 among homosexual male residents of New York and San Francisco was estimated at 5%, suggesting that several thousand individuals in the country had been infected.[223]

I graduated in '75, and by the 10 year reunion, several were already dead of AIDs, some just a few years after graduating, which means they likely contracted it in high school or just after -- back then it was an instant death sentence. But nobody had even heard of it until well into the 70s, and by then they were already infected.

and gas lines. I really have no use for the 70s, it's when a lot of stuff got corporatized and a lot of other stuff just fell apart. It was when the pompadoured televangelists really got going and a bunch of utterly evil pigs started buying up all other media. Talk radio got started around sports and the sports guys started to talk right wing politics right along with the televangelists.

The 70s set us up for Reagan.

Mostly good times, except the draft number and a girl or two that dumped me. I was happy on my own, with a small one bedroom apartment, decent music system, a guitar, and a VW that ran about half the time. Seems like yesterday.

Gathering with friends singing together while some played guitars harmonicas, baseball games against other groups the losing team buying a case of beer, friends you could count on..

Simpler times....

a lot of it is a haze... the 80's even hazier (snow blind )...

Wait... what? Dave's not here, man!


Peace,

Ghost

smoking weed, and having incredible sex, lol and becoming a mom for the very first time

As for movies, I remember Jaws, Star Trek, and the lot and watching Archie Bunker on TV

I was camping in New Hampshire when Nixon stepped down, it was a very weird evening... I remember listening to the Watergate hearings, and taking notice of a very young Hillary at the time...

OH, and LOTS OF WEED AND INCREDIBLE SEX, haha

The music turned into disco, which I didn't care for.
Yeah sure I remember Star Trek.

But none of the rest of popular culture compared to us getting rid of Nixon, and hearing Barbara Jordan's beautiful baritone proclaim "The Constitution is whole." I was so proud of Daniel K. Inouye's part in it, because he was my Senator.

But to do Nixon a bit of justice: he got us out of Vietnam and opened relations with China, both of which were monumental.

My daughter and son were born at the end of 1975 and the beginning of 1978, respectively, so I was pretty busy from then on.

listening to some really hideous music.

I actually had a great class, even teachers from my school called us an exceptional class. I hated all the Bi-Centennial BS cause it was really weird and commercialized. Still friends with some great people from high school. However, I don't think I am going to go to my 40th next year cause it would be to weird.

started the 70s struggling with money -- by the mid-to-end doing much better.
clothes -- i liked the clothes in the early 70s - leftover from late 60s..
viet nam
nixon and watergate
didn't care for disco
made a vow in '75 to never cut my hair again and have never cut it shorter than shoulder length.
'75 -- last time inside a movie theater -- "the exorcist"

lots of ups and downs in my life

A lot happened in my life. Probably most personally momentous was the birth of my two older daughters, moving to Alaska, getting married (#2).

Of course, there's Watergate, disco, Jimmy Carter, Iran hostage crisis. Lines at the gas pump. I started the decade a full-on, acid-loving hippie and ended it as a settled down, married, legal secretary mom.

High School graduation, Navy boot camp (Great Lakes),

I was a grade school-er in the 70's. The biggest things in the 70's for me was the rock band KISS and Star Wars.

It rains and snows a lot here where I grew up...

The longest hangover I ever had lasted 4 days, and was probably a hairsbreadth away from alcohol poisoning, liver failure and death. But I was young, ignorant, and thankfully a heck of a lot more resilient.

with a pre-Magnum John Hillerman addressing Bonnie Franklin's character as 'Emm Ess Romano', in resistance to the use of the honorific Ms. being popularized by the womens equality movement. My senior year ('73-'74) English Lit teacher insisted we address her as Ms.

She was the school's token radical on the faculty. I was fine with calling her by her first name, but most of the kids preferred the honorific.

-- Mal

while she handed me my brown bag lunch.

I could spend the whole day exploring the countryside, but I made sure I was back by sundown. Any bike wipe-outs resulted in me just getting back on the bike. I LOVED popping wheelies (banana bar bikes!), and riding with badly skinned knees happened!

If a friend asked me to stay for dinner, I just had to call home to check if was OK -- and it always was.

I still savor the freedom I had when I was a kid.

Great photo, BluesBassman - just wonderful!

That's pretty much how it was for me too. I was blessed to grow up in a small town (not small anymore sadly) and we were free range before anybody knew what that was!

Glad you liked the photo. That really was how we rolled!

long lines to wait for a shrinking supply, and wondering if there would be enough to go around.

WIBG and WFIL in Philadelphia. Both Christian stations now (which in Wibbage's case is a return to the roots: WIBG initially stood for "Why I Believe In God.&quot

I have a theory that for several decades after WWII, it is more appropriate to think of decades as running from the "5" to the "5." E.g., 1975 had more in common with 1965 than 1979. The early '70s were very different from the later years. The contrast is even more stark in the 60's: 65 has much more in common with 69 than with 61, IMO.

-- Mal

Son of Svengoolie and Ray Rayner.

Star Wars and the great Hollywood resurrection.

Bad music.

Lines at the gas pumps

More locally owned stores and businesses.

Now he's just Svengoolie. I watch him regularly and love those cheesy horror movies I grew up with.

eom

Star Wars would probably come in second (though at the time first, since I saw it before reading the Norton books) after voraciously devouring the entire canon of the Witch World novels, the Zero Stone books, and all the rest as hand me downs from my older sister who had moved on to romance novels.

I spent 60 days in the hospital when I was 3 years old because some jack hole covered burning embers with sand at Horseneck Beach in Westport, Massachusetts. My feet were covered with third degree burns and needed skin grafts. How I didn't fall completely into the pit, I will never know. Sorry to derail the conversation, just thought I should share.. you did ask what you remember most This is actually my first memory.