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#51
11-07-2009, 07:48 PM
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Cousin Oliver.
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#52
11-07-2009, 08:16 PM
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Basement Rec Rooms. Pool tables, or Air Hockey, or both.
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#53
11-07-2009, 08:18 PM
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With wood paneling and green or brown shag carpet.
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#54
11-07-2009, 08:38 PM
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I appreciate all the great ideas I'm getting here - I'm cutting and pasting them into my 'side' file for later use.
I do have another (related question): for pre-teenagers in the early 80s, if you wanted to shorthand 'dweeb' you could use monty python; for teenagers in the mid-to-late 70s (or early 80s), you might use D&D. But what were dweebs doing circa 1970? Did dweebs even exist then? What were nerdy but marginally academic kids doing while their compatriots were smoking grass or demonstrating for Richard Nixon?
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#55
11-07-2009, 08:48 PM
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#56
11-07-2009, 09:02 PM
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Us nerds were in the marching band. And the AV club.
The Fifties were big in the 70's...my high school had a group of boys who dressed like greasers and lipsynched to the fifties hits. This was 1973.
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#57
11-07-2009, 09:17 PM
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I've always thought The Wonder Years did an excellent job of capturing the look and feel of suburban America in 1968-1975. I was 10 in 1968. The first time I saw The Wonder Years it brought back a flood of memories. The look of the neighborhood, clothing, cars everything was very accurate. At least from my childhood.
I'd watch a few episodes from seasons 3 or 4. That would fit your 1970-72 time frame.
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#58
11-07-2009, 09:29 PM
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Were they called "slide rules" or slide rulers"? Last edited by Siam Sam; 11-07-2009 at 09:30 PM.
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#59
11-07-2009, 09:42 PM
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Slide rules were called 'slide rules'.
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#60
11-07-2009, 09:43 PM
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I've never heard them described as "slide rulers".
"Didja see last night's MASH? Henry Blake died!"
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#61
11-07-2009, 10:01 PM
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(Some random memories follow, served up just as they come to me...)
Shields & Yarnell. UHF television stations. Saturday morning cartoons — practically a religious rite for young kids in the 70s. Omni magazine. Playboy magazine, still a serious magazine with intelligent articles. Leaded gasoline, still around but creaking through its final years. Cigarette smoking still very common among adults. Ashtrays were in everyone's house: on end tables, kitchen counters, or close at hand in a drawer or cupboard. They were often decorative to fit in with the other furniture. No nutrition labels were on packaged foods. Also absent in grocery stores: foods imported from Europe (or farther lands). The term "Space Age" was still used seriously, not ironically. The Voyager 1 and 2 probes launched in 1977, and both reached Jupiter in 1979. This was the first time the planet and its moons had been photographed up close. The four Galilean moons in particular had only ever been points of light in a telescope before this. Generally, people found the images stunning. (Saturn and the other gas giants were also stunning, but they wouldn't be reached until the 80s.)
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#62
11-07-2009, 10:06 PM
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hand held Calculators were getting more common by 1975. I had a TI sr50A my parents bought when I started college in 1976. Any science or math major had calculators by then.
SR50's came out in 1975 http://www.datamath.org/Sci/WEDGE/sr-50a.htm
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#63
11-07-2009, 10:36 PM
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#64
11-07-2009, 10:57 PM
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Mad Magazine Six million Dollar Man Beer Can Collecting Monday Night Football Skateboard Parks Coulderoy Pants Christmas Ornament Making Pinball Hush Puppies Star Wars Big Foot Smash Up-Derby Roller Derby Roller Skating Hitchhiking Sceeching African American Knocking  Streaking I guess some of theses are still around.
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#65
11-07-2009, 10:59 PM
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Anyone remember Crazy Wheels? They were bicycle tires that came in red, blue, yellow, orange, and green (Makin' the scene!).
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#66
11-07-2009, 11:19 PM
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Young kids, it should be noted, didn't usually ride in car seats after they were able to walk on their own. They'd ride in front or back, sprawl in the back of station wagons, etc. I remember occasionally lying on the deck atop the back seats of a sedan. If I obscured my Dad's view through the rear-view mirror, he never complained. Regarding early '70s dweebs -- science toys were still fairly common at the time. Chemistry sets. Model rocketry. Rock collecting and tumbling. They might also have been more likely (like myself) to have still been playing with toy soldiers and guns in an era when "war toys" had become somewhat controversial and shunned by some parents. GI Joe at the time (kung-fu grip and all) had shifted into "Adventure Team" mode, with toys oriented more toward exploration than combat (to which they would return, battling COBRA during the Reagan era). Also, I recall Monty Python running on PBS late at night in the mid-70s, where it was perhaps even more likely to be found by the geekier set. Fleeting unedited bits of nudity in a couple of episodes added to its appeal.
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#67
11-07-2009, 11:28 PM
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"I don't like Zan and Jayna. Wendy and Marvin were better."
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#68
11-07-2009, 11:44 PM
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The Six Million Dollar Man
Carole King's Tapestry Carly Simon James Taylor Pong The word "hassle" Hare Krishnas, esp. in airports Dalkin Shield IUDs K-tel compilation music album commercials
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#69
11-07-2009, 11:53 PM
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Nerds were putting together Tandy kits, building speakers, playing Pong and Atari. Home computers were just coming out (Alan Alda was in a commercial for one).
Also from 70's: Earth Shoes began to replace Desert Boots.
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#70
11-08-2009, 01:13 AM
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Also, in 1975 weren't PONG machines still to be found?
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#71
11-08-2009, 03:00 AM
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ATMs started coming into use in the late 60's, but weren't widely popular for some time after that. If you needed cash on the weekend and didn't have it in your wallet, you were SOL till monday.
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#72
11-08-2009, 03:31 AM
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Here's mine: stagflation ABBA David Cassidy Leif Garrett Watergate Happy Days Disco OPEC MASH High heels for men Ridiculously flared pants Enormous collars on business shirts Fat ties Digital LED watches Calculators Super Elastic Bubble Plastic Last edited by Imasquare; 11-08-2009 at 03:32 AM.
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#75
11-08-2009, 04:21 AM
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#76
11-08-2009, 04:45 AM
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Nerdy things to do in 1970? Well, that was before Star Wars, and before Star Trek fandom had arisen from the ashes of the series. But there was model building, Lord of the Rings fandom, science fiction novels, science fair projects, baseball card collecting, comic book collecting, rock collecting, stamp collecting, coin collecting, Heathkit assemble-it-yourself projects, amateur radio, The Whole Earth Catalog.
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#77
11-08-2009, 08:30 AM
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Speaking of phones, when did they start to have cords that you could unhook from the handset and from the phone and the wall? I think in 1975 they were still all hardwired in by the phone company, from whom you rented your handsets.
They came in some sweet colors, too. The Life on Mars guy has an aqua one.
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#78
11-08-2009, 08:43 AM
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I remember the 70's as an era of shortages and shoddiness. Gas lines due to oil embargoes. Cars that came off the Detroit assembly lines with shit wrong with them and which promptly began to rust. Plastic kid's toys made from brittle polymers that snapped with ridiculous ease. Polyester clothes. Diet pop that tasted like industrial waste. Grocery stores full of flavorless fruits and vegetables all year round, not just in winter. Most of what was on TV was shit, there were only the 3 networks and they strove mightily to be indistinguishable from each other.
There were some good things too. The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was really cool. It was still kind of a novelty to see bewbees in movies. DC published 100 page Super Spectaculars with reprints of old stories in them...I really loved those. It was still a golden age for mail ordering jokes and novelties (which were cheap and shoddy) and the catalogs rocked. To answer a question from upthread, one things dweebs did back then was spend a lot of time playing board games. I remember Risk being popular.
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#79
11-08-2009, 08:59 AM
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#80
11-08-2009, 09:03 AM
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Lots of smaller cars due to the energy crisis.
Little Japanese cars & Datsun pick-up trucks. Wood burning stoves in the New England, again due to the energy crisis. Leisure suits. Big hair for guys, long straight hair for girls. George Carlin records were big. Texas Instruments scientific calculator were around $250 as I entered my senior year of high school in the fall '75. The price dropped a lot during the school year, as our math teacher loved to announce to the geek in our class who had bought one early.
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#82
11-08-2009, 09:23 AM
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Dessert anyone? I made a delicious carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, and there's a new recipe I've tried - orange raisin cake, made with ground up oranges!
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#83
11-08-2009, 09:41 AM
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MY first new car was a brand new 1972 Ford Pinto. Showroom floor price $1800
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#84
11-08-2009, 09:43 AM
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Clacker balls
Early 70's there was a toy with two plastic balls tied on a string. You could swing it and make them clash together. Extremely popular for awhile. Then, kids started getting hurt because the plastic shattered. My mom took mine and threw it out. I'm sure there must of been a product recall. http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml85/85065.html Last edited by aceplace57; 11-08-2009 at 09:45 AM.
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#86
11-08-2009, 10:16 AM
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This thread has brought back so many memories.
Quadraphonic Sound came out in 1970. Primarily a 4 channel format for records. There was even a Quadraphonic 8-Track! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadraphonic_sound Once in awhile I still see someone's prized 70's Quadraphonic system for sale on ebay.
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#87
11-08-2009, 10:25 AM
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The moustache thread in GQ reminded me that leading men in movies were a lot hairier then. Like they were wearing hair vests. And many of them wore moustaches.
The Ecology movement. The Ecology flag was popular. (So was the 13-star American flag, for the Bicentennial.) Macrame. Seems everyone was doing it. And candles. There were candle-making kits advertised on TV; ones with moulds so that you could make mushroom candles and such. And home winemaking. My sister had a winemaking kit that had a plastic cask that contained a plastic bag inside, and a spout. Even though I was well underage, I sampled her effort. It was ghastly. ISTM that Americans were discovering wine in the '70s. Before that, my parents and their friends drank cocktails, and the neighbours drank Coors and Bud. The really hip people had homes furnished in heavy wood; a rebellion, I think, to the modern plastic designs of the '60s. And stone. If your house was made with rough stone and heavy wooden beams, had macrame hanging all over the place, and you drank wine by the light of your homemade candles while wearing your moustache and long-ish brushed hair, with your robe open to display your chest hair you were definitely cool. When I was a kid in the '70s my motorcycles were two-stroke Yamahas. If you rode an offroad bike or an Enduro, it was a two-stroke. You could hear them coming. YIIIINNNNN-yinyinyinyinyin... People were familiar with premix -- gas and two-stroke oil mixed in a gas can. My bikes had 'oil injection' where the oil was stored in a separate tank, so pre-mixing was not necessary. But the first real motorcycle I learned on was dad's old '64 Yamaha 80. That one needed premix.
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#88
11-08-2009, 10:44 AM
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Beer was better back then. The regional beers were still common, though the dominance of CoorsBuschCo was on the horizon. California wines were actually becoming drinkable.
Hickory Farms was in the shopping malls and passed for a gourmet shop for lots of working class people. Red Barn, Winky's, Burger Chef, and Tastee Freez were all still fast food places you could visit.
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#89
11-08-2009, 10:59 AM
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Twelve VHF channels on the TV, and three or four broadcasters on UHF. You changed channels with knobs that had rings around them for fine-tuning. Nobody had remote controls. If they did, they had cords; and they clicked when you pushed one of the two buttons.
Broadcasters would shut down at night. In the morning there would be a test pattern (often with an indian head) and a medium-pitch tone. Around two in the morning the station would go off-air, closing their day with The Star Spangled Banner. Later, they would show footage of the Blue Angels and either play TSSB or read High Flight. Every house had a TV antenna on the roof. You could buy TV antennas at Radio Shack and Sears. Upscale people had boxes with a knob on them on top of their TVs that controlled a motor on the rooftop antenna so that they could turn the antenna for a better signal. Networks would show Movies of the Week. Some of them were pretty good; e.g., Duel. 'Specials' were heavily promoted and really were 'special'. Miss it, and you may never see it again; or else wait another year for a re-broadcast. The annual broadcast of The Wizard Of Oz was an event. And people drank Mateus wine.
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#90
11-08-2009, 11:26 AM
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#91
11-08-2009, 11:29 AM
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Local TV stations still had some amount of locally produced programming beyond news broadcasts. Downtowns were still viable shopping districts, for the most part, though shopping malls were already on the scene.
Unless you lived in a pretty good sized city, Chinese food meant Chung King canned chow mein and frozen egg rolls. Norman Lear was producing TV shows that today we'd descibe as "edgey." Lots of consumer goods were still produced in the US and they were generally considered superior to their overseas competitors. Exceptions to this included high-end cameras and audio gear. Here in the US, Instamatic cameras were popular, especially in the 110 format. Polaroid instant cameras were also popular in both the older peel-apart versions and that far out SX70. Mad Magazine was still funny and doing some pretty good parodies of movies and TV shows. Al Jaffee and Don Martin were hilarious. Porn, in those pre-Internet days, for most people ran to Playboy and similar mags. A few hardy pioneer pervs had things like 8mm porn films. If you lived in a large and seamy enough city, there were porn theaters and such, of course. Such places still got raided by the cops in those days, though. Retail department stores like Sears still sold guns. Only Wally World does that today, and they seem to be getting away from it. Corporal punishment was still routine in lots of schools.
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#92
11-08-2009, 11:37 AM
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Oh, and you can't do anything set in 1975 without mentioning the movie Jaws. It dominated the summer box office (it was in fact the first "summer blockbuster" movie) and permeated pop culture. Saturday Night Live did its "Land Shark" spoof, and even Superman got in on the act.
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#93
11-08-2009, 11:42 AM
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In 1975, I was six...so my recollections are limited. But here are some early 70s things that I think haven't been mentioned yet...
Waterbeds! Doorways with strands of beads hanging in them in lieu of actual doors (very popular with teen & early 20something hippie girls.) Josie & the Pussycats (and a million other variation of Saturday morning cartoons in which the principal characters drive around the country in a van and perform in a bubblegum rock group). "Free to Be You & Me." Pucca shell necklaces. "Hang In There, Kitty!" posters. Jimmy Carter admitting that he had "lusted in his heart." Patti Hearst being kidnapped by SLA, and then becoming a member. Steve Martin as the "wild & crazy guy!"
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#94
11-08-2009, 11:49 AM
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#95
11-08-2009, 11:52 AM
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Quote:
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#96
11-08-2009, 12:02 PM
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Oh, and nerdy kids were collecting comic books. There were several articles around that time about the increasing value of old comics, and that's when comic book collecting as a hobby really began to take off, with comic book conventions just starting to get off the ground. Nerdy kids might talk about going to the comic book convention in the nearest city.
Wolverine made his first full appearance in Incredible Hulk # 182 in November of 1974. If you wanted a funny moment for geeky readers you could have a kid saying it was a crappy character that would never last. Or maybe how much they hated the new X-Men, who debuted in 1975. There were endless, tedious debates over who was the best comic book artist: Neal Adams? Berni Wrightson? Jack Kirby? Barry Smith? Plenty of nerd conversation fodder there. Last edited by Spoke; 11-08-2009 at 12:06 PM.
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#97
11-08-2009, 12:06 PM
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Watchbands were often ridiculously thick and wide and made out leather.
Ties were ridiculously wide and in awful colors and patterns. Platform shoes. Cars had vinyl interiors and, especially when new, parking one in the sun would cause the interior to outgas all sorts of wonderful chemicals. Said vinyl interiors would also begin cracking in just a year or two. Some cars had vinyl roofs for the apparent reason of looking shitty straight off the assembly line. Last edited by Scumpup; 11-08-2009 at 12:07 PM.
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#98
11-08-2009, 12:07 PM
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Weren't there Lord Of The Rings geeks back then? It would have fitted into the whole Ecology/Back-to-Nature thing of the early-'70s. Rankin-Bass made The Hobbit in 1977.
Speaking of Back-to-Nature, Euell Gibbons/ 'Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.' . Last edited by Johnny L.A.; 11-08-2009 at 12:07 PM.
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#99
11-08-2009, 12:11 PM
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Sounds just like the 1960 version. Dozens of Duncan YY's to choose from, and some guy on TV (Barney something??) who did amazing tricks. Yo-yo's are fun, and a 70's resurgence doesn't surprise me at all, even though I don't remember it. I was in a hipper-than-thou "don't even own a television phase." Also an extended drug-induced haze. .
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#100
11-08-2009, 12:23 PM
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