Mods lock this, we have a winner!
No, wait…what I meant to say is that I should have called this thread “Fellow old timers”, or perhaps dropped it all together and prefaced it with “My fellow Americans”. I was a teenager already in 1975, so I figured people my age and older were becoming old timers.
Crap, I’m just digging a deeper hole, aren’t I?
Anyway, a lot of great stuff here; lots of things I’d forgotten about, including
Tacky over-the-top commercials exploiting the bicentennial already
Leisure suits
Draft number
Desegregation in public schools
Transcendental Meditation (don’t forget EST!)
Harvest gold and avocado green home appliances – green, gold and brown were popular colors for home decor (EARTH TONES! Oh I miss that orange lineoleum)
Mood rings (had one!)
Ouija boards
Bell bottom pants – not just jeans. I had a pair that were red/white/blue plaid, with cuffs (dear god - I had 'em, but not multi-color)
Narcs! (did that word go away?)
Dolphin shorts
50’s nostalgia
paraquat (took me a second, then I remembered what that was…somehow it never stopped us)
conversion to the metric system
Jarts (I had Jarts! WTF were my parents thinking??)
Paper dolls and other cut-out “crafty” type toys were faddish…
Holly Hobbie dolls
cat’s cradle (played it!)
beanbag furniture (had it!)
shag carpeting (had it!)
shiny wallpaper (had it!)
god’s eye
ankh pendants (friend had one! - was that you?)
Those blue Adidas ‘Starsky and Hutch’ shoes (I had those!)
Calf high athletic socks (with stripes!)
Earth shoes
Macrame (ugh…learned this and rug hooking).
You guys are great, keep 'em coming!
ETA:
Exactly the kind of stuff I’ve forgotten since then, and you’re right. It was perfectly normal to go into a restaurant full of smoke, and you didn’t think a thing about it. That also reminds me of another:
Riding in the backs of pickup trucks!
