We had PONG on our black and white TV (and marvelled at the technology), and I wore a leisure suit to teen dances with those lovely 70’s earth tone brown suede shoes. Everything was earth tones. We used to buy wine before going to the teen dances. Nobody cared much about drinking ages. Very few of us had cars. Any teenager who did have a car obviously came from a “rich” family (unlike today where just about every teen gets one for their 16th birthday). Many families only had 1 car.
Hari krishnas would dance through downtown daily, banging on their tamborines and chanting. We only ever saw them when we went downtown. They were never out in the burbs where we lived. Occasionally you’d see a newspaper clip of someone streaking, and usually someone in the neighborhood had actually seen the streaker (or at least claimed they did).
I went everywhere on my bicycle. I worked in my uncle’s hot dog restaurant. We had two Burger Chef’s and no McDonald’s. School papers were written on a typewriter, not a computer, and I had to borrow a neighbor’s typewriter and was fortunate that they had one. If they didn’t I would have had to take the bus downtown to the library and use one of the public typewriters there, which were in small typing rooms in the basement.
There were always rumours of the beatles getting back together, until John Lennon was shot.
We went shopping downtown. There were no “malls” in the area. Sears had the ugliest puke green walls you can imagine.
Interstate 70 ended about a mile from my house. It wasn’t completed until the end of the 1970’s. 2 lane roads were used a lot more by trucks and such. Our neighborhood ended at Rt 40, so these trucks were constantly going by our neighborhood. There used to be train tracks across the road, which were ripped up in the 90’s and converted into walking paths. We used to walk the tracks to school. It was reasonably safe because the terrain was mountainous and the track curved, so the trains were never going more than about 15 or 20 mph there. Sometimes they would go slow enough that you could grab a hold of one of the coal cars and ride the train to school. On the way home from school we would stop by a store that sold paint and hardware, and we would buy a bottle of coke, which we would always toss off of the train trestle later on our walk home (the bottle would be empty by then). The larger bottles (not the ones we bought from the paint store) could be taken back to the grocery store for a refund.
Beer cans were made of a much heavier and stronger metal than today. Being able to crush one with your hand meant you were strong. Towards the end of the 70’s they started to be made out of cheaper thinner metal, but teens still liked to crush them to show off their manliness.
The grocery store on the corner got automated doors in the late 70’s. It was the first grocery store in our area to get automatic doors. Every time the sun hit them the doors would open. It took them about a month to get them working right (must have been infra-red sensors).
We had jiffy pop popcorn, in the aluminum foil pan that the top got bigger and bigger as you heated it over a stove top.
Schools went through this experimental phase. They decided it was better to learn things in “pods” which were big open rooms, divided into 3 or 4 classrooms but had no divider or anything between them. Kids in one class were always distracted by the other classes, and after a year or two they put up dividers to split them back into single rooms again.
We had a lot less technology (no microwave, no computer, just a black and white tv), so we didn’t sit around and play game boys and segas and such. But otherwise life was pretty much the same as for a teenager today. We went to school, we had crushes on girls, we hung out and did stupid things…
Actually, in a small Wisconsin city dope could be incredably hard to get in the 70’s.