Well, somewhat. High school and college were pretty good for me. And we didn’t yet have to worry about AIDS. But I don’t miss the inflation and the energy shortage, the air pollution and the smoking, the threat of nuclear annihilation.
I was a kid in the 70s (born 1969). I still like the music, don’t much care for the visual aspects (fashion, decor, etc.). Seems like TV and movies were a bit better back then, too.
Me, too! Exactly this.
Being born in late 1941, I spent my 30’s in the '70’s. There were ups and downs and many things to like and dislike. I remember some good music, good movies, weird political and social events, great football, fun personal times and all sorts of things both pleasant anf unpleasant.
If I had the ability to select a decade I have lived through and to stay in that time period indefinitely, I’d have a hard time getting a more varied one than the '70’s, but I don’t think I’d really like to stay there. That’s true for each of the eight I’ve participated in so far. And from what I’ve read (and seen in movies) I’d have a hard time picking any decade to spend all my time in.
It’s the luck of the draw when we get to live, isn’t it?
During my early internet years in late 1990s, kids online would open dozens of threads about the 80s, swearing it was the best decade ever. Well I’d consider the next generation lucky to have lived in the 80s. These days, kids talk about the 90s and that decade to me is simply meh. Honest, the most I can remember of the 90s were the Spice Girls, Titanic, Michael Jordan playing basketball, and Michael Jackson playing with little balls. Ok, that last one’s wrong. What else? It may have been the last decade of blissful America —before 9-11.
I was born in 1978, and this sort of thing is something I’ve wondered about sometimes. I’ve seen several movies from the 70’s, and while movies and tv shows are not necessarily true to life, they can tell you a lot about the culture that produced them. One thing I’ve noticed is that things seemed to be really dirty–trash blowing around in alleys, etc. Plus we know from the historical record that pollution was far worse then than it is now.
And then talking about culture–I saw one 70’s movie that had a family with one son as a major part of the plot. I could hardly stand to watch a lot of the scenes, because the son’s hair was longer than his mother’s! Then there’s disco balls and the flashing light–really, really hard on the eyes.
I read one description of the 70’s that mentioned art that “clashed with everything, including itself.” And of course, there was the iconic (in a bad way) shag carpeting (even in bathrooms!)
Then there was Watergate, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc, etc. In short, it seems to me that the 70’s were a really dirty, depressing, and downright weird decade.
It was great/horrible to be a kid in the mid 60s to mid 70s.
Awesome Sat morn cartoons, STAR TREK on Channel 39, DOCTOR WHO on PBS Channel 8, KLOL 101.1FM on your runaway radio dial playing a self programmed menu of rock music, toys that could maim you, minibikes you could tune with your fingers and a pocket knife, albums with lyrics, pics, and band bios in the sleeves, KODACHROME, perfect fries at McDonalds, Coke that could eat metal, TG&Y fishing lures 3 for a dollar, Zebco, kits to build your own stereo amps, carnival rides that made you sick, damn dirty apes, meat for diner every night, cars that accelerated so fast you had to poop, girls in school with miniskirts, we landed on the MOON, cameras that did things mechanically…
Bad things (for me in LA and then Houston): smog alerts cancelling recess, Nixon and the Viet Cong on my TV, cops with attitudes, getting pops for being tardy to class or for chewing gum, Zodiac Killer scaring the hell out of us, power brown outs, fire ants, overpopulation is going to send us back to the stone age, 55mph, multi day stay in hospital for appendicitis, why can’t my black friend stay over?, my wonderful cars being robbed of power, no more Moon missions, big earthquake, big hurricane, OPEC, Sammy Davis Jr crying when he won the first ever (and only, I think) Disco Life Style Award…
Ooooh, guys with long hair! Another benefit I forgot to consider.
80s kid, here…I regret not seeing the milestones in space exploration made during that era for myself. I think that’s about it.
Somewhat (I was born in 1970), but my two-year-old son, for some odd reason, is REALLY nostalgic for the ‘70s. He loves to find original Electric Company kids’ performances* on YouTube (on my IPhone) and dance to them.
*The kids called themselves the “Short Circus”. Irene Cara was one for a while. Very 70s – the outfits, etc. Each song was about some spelling or grammatical or phonetic theme, as per the goal of the show. Always introduced by Morgan Freeman as some DJ who just stepped out of a blacksploitation flick.
Those born in the 60s and 70s are the Sesame Street generation. If there’s a complete series run that should be archived and aired continuously, it would be Sesame Street (episodes are numbered.)
I was born in 1970, so yeah, I’d have to say those first ten years were pretty good ones. And the more I remember/learn about the decade, the more hilariously bizarre it seems. It’s fascinating in its weirdness.
This exactly. When you started hearing the word “yuppie”, the 70s were over. 
I miss the stream of new songs heard on the radio that we now know as classic rock. I miss the muscle cars, the Challengers, Judges, Camaros, 442s and Shelbys you’d see on the street and in the H.S. parking lot. I miss sports when the salaries weren’t astronomical and steroids weren’t ubiquitous. I miss dating and sex when diseases weren’t rampant and possibly deadly.
By the late 70s most of that was gone and it really, really sucked as that realization began to kick in.
I can’t trust my evaluation of the decade because I was obliged to endure adolescence during its tenure. However:
Did the decade of your adolescence have the same level of condescension from your elders? The 70’s were full of 50’s nostalgia, above and beyond Happy Days on TV each week. The people who had been teenagers in the actual 1950’s were at the height of their powers in the 1970’s, and considered themselves to have been history’s first teenagers. We were just grinding their same old gears
True, we hadn’t progressed much in 20 years: sometimes we watched videotape instead of film in class, but not usually. PC’s didn’t exist for us yet, so we were just like the earlier generation scribbling away on paper. Our parents hated us hanging around the house, but weren’t afraid of serial killers yet (that didn’t come until the 80’s), so we hung out mostly at the park (Ye Old Malt Shoppe didn’t exist: merchants don’t want kids with no money taking up space). Not much happened for us until dances in the school gym, and we tried but mostly failed to have sex with girls. Pretty much like the 1950’s, but still it sucked being a living cartoon character of somebody else’s nostalgia.
The 60’s former teens were even worse, always reminding us that we just missed the really great stuff. The guys were still young enough to pull the girls from our age group away. And, like the 50’s former teens, they had their point: we had no war to either fight or protest, no new drugs to do, and yet no new technology as important as PCs and later hand-helds would become. We were just marking time while the economy sucked.
So it was an awkward era to be an awkard age: after the archetype of the 50’s and exitement of the 60’s, but before the tech of the 80’s, redeemed only by the advent of Punk. I’m nostalgic for Punk, and Barney Miller and the Odd Couple. Nothing else.
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It had only recently been deemed socially acceptable for “good” girls to engage in premarital sex and almost all of them jumped on the bandwagon, either to stay apace with their peers or to satisfy a genuine curiosity or need. I was ok with either rationale.
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I spent much of the decade high and/or intoxicated. At that age, time and place, that was ok, too.
Ages 0-10 so I had Star Wars, nuff said
Wow… TG&Y. I hadn’t thought about that place in years.
But yeah, I was born in 1972 in San Antonio, and we moved to Houston when I was 10 months old, so a lot of this rings true for me as well, especially the Channel 39 Star Trek!
I’m nostalgic for the 1970s, at least as far as anyone’s nostalgic for their childhood. One thing that does/did creep me the hell out is when that Farrah Fawcett 1970s Charlie’s Angels hairstyle came back into vogue in the early-mid 2000s. It seemed really odd to me to be hitting on women with the same hairdos that some of my mom’s friends had back in the day.
Disco, Watergate, leisure suits, 13% inflation, Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell, Ma Bell, three TV networks, mainframe computers, gas shortages, smoke-filled offices, my miserable childhood . . . God, I’ve got to stop before I depress myself.
Personally, one of the first words that comes to my mind is . . . creepy. Looking back, that decade just gives me the creeps.