Life In the Late Sixties and Early Seventies
I graduated HS in 1970 and I must say, life was good back then. My father was an auto mechanic and he raised five of us kids with a stay at home mother. He managed to buy us a house and a couple of hundred acres of land up north to hunt on. We built a nice cabin on it and went hunting there every year as well as taking many summer trips to go fishing in his nice big boat. We went on annual vacations to all parts of America and Canada, and took annual fall hunting trips out of state too as well as hunting on our own land.
I look back on that and I think it was pretty impressive to be able to do all that on an auto mechanic’s wages. So, economically, I think that from the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies were probably our country’s Golden Years. People had a lot of purchasing power back then. Most households were still one wage earner households.
Some of you mentioned music. Sure, I admit that I am biased. But I have to say that the best music to listen to and have fun with was that from the mid-sixties through the early seventies. Now, technically, I would have to say the best music was from the eighties. But, man, it just doesn’t get any better than The Doors, my all-time favorite band. And I can listen to Led Zeppelin all day long. To me, today’s music is nothing but a bunch of garage bands. I just don’t see any talent any more. It is just a bunch of commercial stuff that will sell. Where have all the lead guitarists gone? I lament. Bring on another Duane Allman! Here, here!!
Ah, the lovely TRS-80! Weren’t they wonderful? When I got to college in the fall of 70 we used punch cards to program computers that filled a room. That is kind of funny when you think about it.
As for the sex, that part of the late sixties and the seventies was great. With the advent of the pill there just weren’t the worries of pregnancy to have to deal with like others before us had had to do. So yes, there definitely was an explosion of promiscuity back then. I think it was mostly the women who were liberated from the fear of pregnancy that caused the explosion. The men always wanted it, they just started getting it more when the pill came along. And remember, this was pre-AIDS so there was no pressure like that to stifle the sexual revolution.
I had a very high draft number (338) so I didn’t have to worry about going to Viet Nam, but a lot of my friends and classmates did. Some didn’t come back, some did in coffins, and some came back all messed up physically or mentally. And some moved to Canada. This was one part of living back then that wasn’t good. In today’s world with bush’s war in Iraq, I see many similarities. I predict that we will start seeing some protests in the streets before long, especially if the body bags keep coming home.
The day after I graduated I picked up a hippie hitch-hiker and drove him to his commune because he got me high and promised to give me more to pay for his ride. When we got there I met some really nice people and I ended up staying with them a good part of the summer until it was time for college. Let’s just say a good time was had by all. I ended up going back there every summer during my college years and then ended up moving across the country or I might still be going back, if it is still there. Hippies were very good people. I can’t say that I ever met a lazy one. In the commune I was involved with, everyone pitched in to do the work out of a sense of community.
Ah yes! Then, we had the Muscle Cars. No one will ever be able to convince me that today’s cars are better in any way, shape, or form than the cars of the late sixties and early seventies. Put me in a ’67 GTO any day! Or a ’69 Camero! Or a ’70 Charger. Or a Hemi-Cuda!!! I have had more fun drag racing than probably anything else I have ever done. I can remember a few of us with fast cars would get together and make a run to another town and call out the guys with the fastest cars in their town for some street racing. Actually, it was more like country racing because we’d all go out of the towns a ways and find a straight stretch of road where we could see if anyone was coming for a long ways. In my area, most of the towns seemed to have some quarter-miles measured out somewhere a few miles out of town where the locals would always go to race. It kept it safe. And we almost always ended up partying with them after we were done racing. Lots of good friends were made that way. Yup, cars just have never been the same since the muscle cars died out.
For those of you younger ones here that think you like it so well today, do a google and find out how many working days for an average working stiff it takes to pay off a car nowdays compared to say, 1970. Five year loans back then were unheard of! Yep, the dollar definitely went a LOT farther back then.
And of course, there was the space program. I had a paper route back when it was getting going and I would sit and read every single word in every article that had anything to do with our (and Russia’s) space program. I watched everything I could on every news program. Without thinking about them for years, I can still rattle off the names of every astronaut from the Mercury, Gemini, and Saturn missions. And yes, I remember vividly the day Neil and Buzz set foot on the moon. Oh yes, that was a great time to live. Yes indeed! Very exciting!
Let’s also not forget that you couldn’t lose the remote. It was connected to the television by a wire! And those phone calls in the booth cost a dime, as did a bottle of pop, or two Snickers bars. In the town I grew up in the local theater owner offered free movies to children every Saturday afternoon ( I think the local merchants subsidized him) Parents would drop off their kids and do their shopping then, I guess. We’d go there and get a bag of popcorn and a soda for twenty cents. Yahoo! Oh, and I also lament the demise of the drive-in movie theater. Where in the world do kids go to make out nowdays? It is sad, truly sad.
I quit smoking when they raised the price of a pack of cigarettes up to 55 cents from a half dollar. I thought that was outrageous!
So, yes, I think I grew up at the perfect time. The only thing I am jealous about are all of the wonderful discoveries that are going to happen in the future. One observation though is that with all of these labor-saving devices that seem to come down the pike nowdays, it seems like we are all busier and don’t have nearly as much leisure time as people used to. What is up with that?
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