I had a wall calendar for 1976, printed on some sort of linen, that bore the legend “200 Years of Freedom.” I’m a painter, so I changed the legend to read “200,000,000 Million years of freedom” and I changed the picture of the American flag to depict the first fish crawling onto land. I don’t know if I should have added another set of “000” for greater accuracy.
I’ll suggest it was a bigger deal in the northeast original 13 colonies part of the country than most of the rest.
I was a senior in high school in Southern California that year. Lots of Bicentennial-themed national marketing campaigns. E.g. Coca Cola in red, white & blue cans, etc. Pepsi was especially happy with the colors of their logo.
But the idea that every fire hydrant in the USA was painted, or that bunting was everywhere all year, nope. That was a northeast-ism. IME/IMO.
I can’t speak to the whole USA, but they certainly were in Alameda County, California, which is where I was in July of 1976. So not just a northeast-ism. I don’t remember them being painted to look like figures, just tricolor. But we’re talking the memories of a preschooler of nearly fifty years ago, so all I can be sure of is that the fire hydrants changed paint for the bicentennial.
Anything else going on wasn’t happening at my eye level.
Edit: something must have impressed me, though, because I can remember planning to live until 2076 so I could see the tricentennial. Not impossible, though perhaps a bit ambitious.
Did your yearbook feature Spirit of '76 on its cover, like my high school yearbook did for that year (in foil, yet)? They didn’t have a big budget for color photos back then, so we were told to dress in red, white, and blue clothes on the day they were taking “impromptu” pictures.
There’s a movie called Something Wild with Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, and Ray Liotta (really good movie). It came out in 1986, and one scene is at a 10th high school reunion. The theme is “Spirit of '76,” and it’s like you fell into an old bucket of Bicentennial. It’s just a bit of background detail, but anyone old enough to watch that movie in 86 was around in 76, and got the joke.
No, and no. We weren’t some hotbed of commie sympathizers, but excessive flag waving was considered a bit déclassé
I was living outside Philadelphia, in sight of Valley Forge in 1976. I gotta say it wasn’t the big deal it was supposed to be. We had an unelected president, we were trying to get over losing our first war (the one where we didn’t lose a single battle but marked it down as a loss, not the one where we lost every battle but chalked it up as a win), there was runaway inflation and high unemployment too. So I’m not surprised it wasn’t as big a deal as it should have been.
I was a Junior in high school. The year book was Spirit of '76, the hydrants were Red White and Blue, and my mom walked for her GED graduation with the Senior class; the colors were Red White and Blue. I remember a lot of fireworks locally and on TV all across the country. We lived in Western Michigan.
I thought that the reasons you gave were why it was made a big deal of: as a morale booster when there wasn’t much else to feel good about.
We had a Bicentennial Bathroom Scale. The surface you stepped on looked like the logo from “Love, American Style.” We discovered after awhile that the scale got progressively wronger the more weight you put on it; at 100 lbs, it was off by 5, at 150 it was off by 25 and at 200 it was off by 50 lbs. Here we thought we were being good Citizens keeping our weight under control, but we’d been had. Is that symbolic of something?
Yeah, the bicentennial was a huge deal. That was before we got woke and felt guilty about slaughtering all the native Americans. and the whole slavery thing…
I think that’s why 250 wasn’t a big deal. Too awkward.
When are you posting from? I wasn’t going to celebrate the semiquincentennial until 2026 at least.
If people can celebrate the turn of the millennium a year early, they sure ought to be able to celebrate the US’ 250th anniversary about 3 years early! 
Or something like that.
There was build up to the bicentennial for years leading up to it.
I think it’s more that humans just have this thing for even, rounded, turn of the odometer milestone numbers. 250 doesn’t quite do it. If the USA still exists as an independent sovereign nation in the years leading up to 2076, I bet it will be another big rah-rah blowout. Maybe even bigger than the Bicentennial.
I occasionally commiserate with someone by saying something my elderly former Marine Corps Blockbuster boss used to say:
“You look like you’ve been shot at and missed, and shit at and hit.”
It was an attempt to do that, but the build up had been going on for years but fizzled out under the political turmoil. There were parades, concerts, and fireworks on July 4th, but most of the year 1976 what we got was crass product marketing under the bicentennial banner and paint fire hydrants. I hate complimenting Ronald Reagan for anything, but he did use the Olympics and the Statue of Liberty centennial among other efforts to boost the nation’s morale with the kind of celebrations the bicentennial should have been.
It is a similar problem now looking at the 250th anniversary, we should be celebrating the tremendous progress made in the last 250 years but a sizable minority in this country would rather undo the whole thing.
What does the word ‘Blockbuster’ mean in the context of the Marines?
Were you defending America’s videos against foreign threats? 
He was my boss at Blockbuster. He used to be in the Marine Corps.
Regarding the “eye-ther” and “nigh-ther” pronunciations, since reading this thread I’ve noticed more than one audiobook or podcast narrator using those pronunciations, and they don’t sound old.