Party records! Oh hell yeah. Redd Foxx, Cheech and Chong, even Bill Cosby.
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!
MY first new car was a brand new 1972 Ford Pinto. Showroom floor price $1800
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.
Didn’t the Ford Pinto fall out of favor because several caught fire after being rear-ended? I seem to recall something about that.
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!
Once in awhile I still see someone’s prized 70’s Quadraphonic system for sale on ebay.
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.
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.
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.
Manufacturers made corded remote controls in the late '40s to the mid-'50s. By the late '50s, all the remotes were cordless. But rare until the 1980s.
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.
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.
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!”
They were invented in 1975. They didn’t show up in the marketplace until several years later. (Can’t retool all those machines overnight.)
I stand corrected. But the only ones I saw in the early-'70s had cords. It wasn’t until people started getting cable (with a row of buttons on top of the box to select the channel) that I remember seeing a cordless remote.
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.
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.
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.’
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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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Our first new car was a '72 Chevy Vega. I think the price was also around $1800. Absolutely the worst machine I’ve ever owned, ALL of the horror stories are true. Just one example: rusted out holes in the paneling between hood and widshield, big enough to put your hand through, the car having been subjected to the harsh San Diego climate. Got rid of it two and a half years later. Some guy gave me a couple of hundred bucks to tow it away.
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