The fiftieth anniversary of the Bicentennial celebration of 1976 approaches. Based on the board demographics, I suspect many posters were around for the festivities.
I remember that the country turned red, white and blue that summer. Every product and television commercial oozed patriotism. People dressed as Paul Revere and Ben Franklin and the Statue of Liberty. Everywhere you looked, there were muskets and liberty bells and bald eagles.
I was an impressionable 10-year-old kid in 1976, and I remember that it felt like we were truly the “United” States of America, even if only for a few brief months. I haven’t felt that level of unity and patriotism in this country since, with the exception of September 11th. All three news networks devoted the entire day to covering the festivities. Block parties and major events and barbecues were held all across the nation. It was a day of glorious celebration.
On that special day, 50 years ago, I was at Eisenhower Park, on Long Island, NY, along with thousands of others. It rained that morning, but turned into a beautiful day. We ate NY hot dogs from a cart and Mr. Frosty ice cream. The firework show that evening was tremendous. It was a day I’ll never forget.
I’m curious as to what your recollections are of the Bicentennial. Did you spend the day anywhere special? Do you have any crazy stories? Do you remember it fondly like I do?
Would love to hear your thoughts. What a different time that was compared to today.
I graduated from high school that year, and the green and gold caps we practiced in that spring disappeared the day of graduation, to be replaced by red, white and blue pasteboards, and we were told to march in red then white then blue, red then white then blue etc. One hour after the patriotic finish I was driven to the USAF intake center in Spokane, and was flown out to Texas early the next morning.
Very early the next morning.
Still fucking dark very early the next morning.
I spent the Bicentennial in basic training, with nothing to do.
I’d love to find a photo of my bedroom that year. For some reason*, I switched bedrooms from the front to the back of the house, essentially just moving across the hall. As part of this, my parent gave we wide latitude in how I decorated the new room.
That latitude extended to my seven year old self looks at wallpaper samples\ books, Formica chips for the built in desk that was to come, bedspread material, lamps, just Al,ost everything. And goddamnit, I wanted red, white and blue. And I got it.
The wallpaper was thin RWB stripes, the bedspread was blue with large red and white stars. The desk had a red top on a blue frame with white drawer fronts and cabinet fronts above. The lights in the room were those things meant to look like oil lanterns with a bulb on top and of course they were red, white and blue with red white and blue lampshades.
At the time, I thought it was the coolest, most patriotic thing that ever existed. Right now trying to picture it in my mind‘s eye, it seems like a diseased vision of the bicentennial. Maybe in the next couple days I’ll go up in the attic and try to find the photo album of that era.
*as I think about it, I can’t really come up with a reason why I needed to move. We sold that house a year later anyway. I have this very faint suspicion that it had something to do maybe with one of my father’s clients. He was representing a local Muslim group that was trying to build a mosque and was not popular in my community for that Across was burned in our yard, I remember learning that I was never to answer the phone, all sorts of things that seemed fairly normal to a kid, but now stand out as appalling.
I posted this in the Clusterfuck thread a while ago, but it’s probably a better fit here.
When we were in sixth grade, a bunch of us did some math, and figured out that we would graduating from high school in 1976. We were quite excited; our yearbook is full of red white and blue pictures, and even had the Spirit of '76 picture on the cover. There was so much hype and hoopla back then, and everyone wanted in on the action. This recent NYT (gift) article describes how a historian was able get his students to save “Bicentennial junk” (his words), and it brings back a wide range of memories about how pervasive the Bicentennial hype was back then. Take a look at some of the things that got saved “for history”, and compare that widespread obsession with how little people seem to care today.
I was 14 in 1976 and lived in a tiny town in southern Iowa. There were no local celebrations that I remember but we did a school trip to Des Moines to see the Freedom Train. It had Abe Lincoln’s top hat amongst other displays.
I was 8 and the thing I remember most was that the town had painted all of the fire hydrants to look like continental soldiers. I remember it raining all day in central NJ but they still held the fireworks - which I hated, but my parents wouldn’t let me stay home because my grandparents wanted to go to the fireworks too. I do not remember it fondly. I mostly remember being wet and uncomfortable.
I was in Newport, RI, for some training in the Navy. I remember tall ships visiting the city and I suppose I watched fireworks, but nothing else comes to mind. Well, except for being in a group that was mooned by my soon-to-be-friend Harry, not that the mooning had anything to do with us becoming friends.
I do remember hearing people refer to it as the Buy-Centennial because of all of the products being hawked that year.
There were little PSA type commercials called "Bicentennial Minutes" that the networks would air, where some well-known person would mention something that happened “on this day in the mid 1770s.” Some were pretty trivial, such as [someone] had written a letter to [someone]. The only celebrity that I actually remember doing one was Wicked Witch Margaret Hamilton (sans makeup). At the time she was also doing the Cora character in some coffee commercial.
Add my name to the Bicentennial graduating class of '76. Our 50th reunion is in a couple weeks.
Regarding the Bicentennial Minutes, Wikipedia tells me they aired an astounding 912 episodes, from July 4, 1974 through the end of 1976. The final BM (if you will) aired on December 31, 1976 and was narrated by President Ford.
No time to post properly, but I remember the Bicentennial celebration lasted the whole year. I always watched the Bicentennial Minutes. I remember parades of tall ships. People were painting fire hydrants. One in my neighbourhood had a red-and-white, vertically-stripped body, and a blue top with white stars. There was another one I remember, that was painted like Uncle Sam. Somewhere around here, I have a penny flattened by the Freedom Train. The Bicentennial was a celebration that seemed to bring the whole country together. The Semiquincentennial seems to be an afterthought floating around in the background.
I’m the same-ish age as the OP. I remember it being a big deal. I watched the festivities on the TV and wished I was there seeing the tall ships. As an adult I appreciate why my parents didn’t want to participate in person. It makes me feel like we are missing out on the feeling this year for obvious reasons.
I remember the hype during the year-long run-up to the Bicentennial but pretty much nothing about what happened in July, 1976. Jaws was still in theaters, so I was probably surfing a lot and enjoying how uncrowded the line-up was. My strongest memory is that the Dennis the Menace comic books harped on the Bicentennial theme in every issue for about a year. There was talk in 1976 of a family trip to the East Coast to see the patriotic sights, but that all went south when my parents announced their decision to divorce in February.
I was 26 that year, and a little cynical about the whole thing. There was just too much of it, and most of it didn’t feel real. I think I watched the big fireworks shows on TV, but that’s all I did.
I think the feeling of unity, such as it was, mostly came from the fact that it had been 2 years since Nixon left office and the US ended its participation in the war in Vietnam, and nothing more serious than the President being slightly clutzy had happened since then. I think lots of us thought that a long ugly slice of history had closed behind us and we could move forward with a relatively clean slate.
I was 11 the Summer of '76, and I remember two things about the Bicentennial the most:
One was a big spread in Mad Magazine making fun of all the cheap schlocky Bicentennial merchandising; everybody rushing to make a buck off of it with all manner of Bicentennial branded products, many very silly. Ah, Mad Magazine…you did so much to foster and advance my precocious jaded cynicism, well beyond my tender years.
The other was a big Bicentennial parade in our town around the 4th of July, culminating in a reenactment of ‘The Battle of Bunker Hill’ that was to take place on a sledding hill next to City Hall. That was a big deal for us kids, especially the battle reenactment!
One big thing spoiled that day, though-- I had had my first big crush on a girl whose family had put their house up for sale in the Spring. They were planning to move to another state, the news of which had devastated me. But I held out hope that their house wouldn’t get any offers, since it had been on the market for months, and they’d have to stay. But then, as I was walking down the street checking out the parade and all the festivities, I ran into my crush, and we started talking. And she uttered the 4 words I had been dreading to hear: “we sold our house”
Two of my really good friends from college got married on July 2, 1976, near Fresno, CA. A bunch of us drove out from Kansas to attend the wedding. After the ceremony, we were all invited to spend a couple of days at a mountain cabin owned by the parents of the bride. We spent the Bicentennial watching the celebrations from across the country on TV, listening to music, drinking copious quantities of alcohol, and smoking a lot of weed.
I was 19 and a sophomore in college at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. I gotta admit other than Bicentennial Minutes on television, I have no memories of the bicentennial. At my best I am a marginally patriotic person and even then I wasn’t particularly interested.
I was 19 and between my sophomore and junior years at Michigan State. I remember the Bicentennial Minutes on television. There was a zoo in the state (I think it was Traverse City) that named their buffalo “Tennial”, as in “Bison Tennial”. I don’t remember any huge celebrations.
