Teen Suburban Life in the 70s?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Re: Video Games.

Pong was the only one you could have in your house during the 70’s. But the arcades were full of all kinds of video game machines, especially in the latter part of the 70’s. I spent way too much time there.

There were still some holdover non-video arcade games in those arcades as well. Ones that used little models, flueroscant colors, and light sensors. Pretty clever for its time, but probably a host of mechanical problems. (lot’s of moving parts)

I will say this a Philly resident in the 70’s: Atlantic City had a boardwalk, not a casino row.

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More things I recall:

For sex education we got a little permission slip that our parental units had to sign before we could learn the facts of life. I guess most parents signed because I don’t remember very many people missing the classes. The content was just basic information on puberty and how the body worked–the mechanics of sex. In health class we learned about VD–what it was, how it spread, what the symptoms were, and where to go for help if you thought you had it. (One teacher actually told students that she would drive them to the clinic herself if they thought they had the clap and were afraid to tell their parents.) Only syphilis and gonnorhea were mentioned; AIDs and herpes were still a few years away.

Although we were officially taught “Drugs are bad, don’t do them, mmm’kay,” the art teacher played the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” told the students it was about an acid trip, and encouraged them to paint pictures using the song as an inspiration. And she didn’t raise a fuss when students occaisionally painted pictures of ghosts with bloodshot eyes and the slogan “Get Fried!”

The local hard rock station actually played many other kinds of music. In the mornings they had a lot of lite pop-rock or folk; the harder stuff came on in the afternoon. Some evenings they had a jazz program, though I never listened to it.

Oh, and Polish jokes were very popular. I think they’ve all morphed into blond jokes now.

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I graduated high school in '75, growing up in the Hollywood Hills where my parents still live in the same house.

Things were a lot less crowded then. We had essentially the same infrastructure of streets and freeways, and way fewer people. If you wanted to go to the beach you didn’t worry if the main roads to the beach would be jammed with idling cars, or if you’d be able to get a parking spot. You just jumped in the car and went. Westwood Village was THE place for entertainment if you lived anywhere on the west side of L.A.

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Let’s see, my credentials are I graduated HS in 1980. I grew up in an originally rural suburb in Morris County, NJ. As I became older, it became less rural, and now the woods that I tramped around in are largely gone.

In HS I hung out with half a dozen or so closely knit friends whose big common interest was music. The core of the group were in the HS band. We liked the same bands, and at all our parties their music was always a central focus. We were into Genesis, Floyd, Yes, Rush, King Crimson, those types of bands.

The drinking age was 18 but I had a friend who worked at the local liquor hut and she would sell me beer and the harder stuff when I was 16-17.

We smoked bales of cheap giggly pot ($40 an ounce) and drank heavily. Someone’s parent’s were either out of town or out for the night, so often we had a place to party. If we didn’t party inside we partied in our cars or in the woods if it was during the day. We drank and drove big time. Incredibly no one got killed but a member of our group hit a telephone pole and was slightly injured. One of the big-time partiers in our class crashed into a chain-link fence and a pole entered his mouth and came out the back/side of his head. He lived and didn’t let that injury stop him. Legend had it that he would hold a joint to his trach tube and puff away.

I lived sort of a dual life. I was, I guess a good boy in school, never came to school high or drunk, got medium to good grades, was in the band, eventually made all-state. I was shy and kept everything on the down-low, as it was.

Coming into HS I was a soccer player and was on the freshman and JV teams for my freshman and sophomore years. I was also in the marching band during soccer season, so ultimately the two were incompatible and I quit soccer. Quitting soccer also gave me more time to indulge my alter ego party animal side.

My mom and dad worked during the day, so I would come home usually with my rock band-mates or some pothead friends and we would go up to my room, turn on the window fan that I had oriented so it sucked the air out of the room, and smoked our brains out and layed around and grooved on the music.

My sweetheart in HS was in the next grade up. I was interested in no one else. We were together all the time, it seemed like. She worked a lot. Turns out she was sleeping with an ‘older man’ who ran the deli that she worked at. She was getting beaten by her brother, but never really told any of us about it. All we knew was that she hated his guts.

The local mall went up in the early 70’s and killed the local downtown (Dover, NJ). We went to the mall mostly for record shopping. I don’t remember hanging around there much, except for seeing movies. Dover was where you went to buy hard drugs on sheeba (chiba?) street. That’s not a real street. That’s just what we called it. We never actually bought any drugs there. Well, one time we were desperate and walked down there and got ripped off. That was fun.

We would take the Lakeland Bus lines bus into the city to see concerts. Once the bus got on the road, us and our fellow concertgoers would light up our joints and pipes and start partying. Once in a while the bus driver would pull over and threaten to eject us but never followed through on that threat. One guy had wine in a bota bag and while we waited to go through the lincoln tunnel he squirted the wine out of his window into the open windows of cars waiting in line. That was a hoot.

That’s all I can think of at the moment.

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Oh gosh, where to start. Well, I grew up in Alaska where pot was legal until about the mid 80s when they made it a misdemeanor (it was legal to possess for your own use one ounce, but it was not legal to sell or buy it).

Matanuska Thunderf**k which I have heard now possesses one of the highest THC concentrations of any crop worldwide was known at that time as “ragweed” because it was so crappy.

I actually drove a Vista Cruiser, but mine was yellow and named the “Banana Boat”. Later on my dad let me use a cop car he’d bought at an auction. My cousin and I actually had matching used cop cars.

In Anchorage things are so spread out you had to have a car to get anywhere, so most of us teens owned or had access to one.

I remember it as being a time of innocence and fun. I watch that 70s show and recognize a lot of the attitudes my friends and I had “back then”.

Some of the stuff they show wasn’t really around yet, at least in our area, but the characters and the personalities they got right on. At least insofar as the people I went to school with and grew up with.

We used to spend a lot of time on weekends “cruising the strip” showing off our cars and meeting other teens. Which I understand is illegal in many cities now. How sad.

School functions and being “part of the crowd” was really important. I knew lots of “Jackies”. Going steady was the thing, being a “slut” was bad.

Keggers were on, we had Senior Skip day every year, and we would sneak off (yes, even those of us who weren’t yet seniors) to various parks for a party on those days.

Disco was fun, but as someone else said, it was “cool” to pretend Disco sucked. And hey, some of it did.

The 70s didn’t really have any meaningful “anthem” or theme to it. The 20s you had the “roaring 20s” bathtub gin, prohibition all that stuff. The 30s was the “Great Depression” The 40s was the war and rebuilding after the depression.

The 50s was the canonization of “the American Family” and also the “birth of Rock and Roll”.

The 60s? Hell, Free love, hippies, protests the whole “evolution” thing.

What did we get? Those of us that came of age in the 70s?
The Bee Gees and Disco Duck. :smiley:

I wouldn’t trade it for the world, it was a fun time to be a teen. It was a lot safer and freer than what the world looks like in this day and age.

(geesh! any minute now I’m going to say “whipper snapper” or something).

Maybe post some specific questions and we “old folks” can help you out.

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PS, just thought of some things.

Toe socks.

Lifesaver lollipops, for some bizarre reason it was a fad to carry one around in your back pocket.

“Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific” shampoo (it really did smell great, and you can still purchase it online for 15 bucks an 8oz set and a @#$# $20.00 shipping fee, if you can believe THAT).

“Farrah” hair was really popular as I’m sure you all already know, but what was a big fad in our school was to take “straw flowers (tiny little colored flowers)” stick them in your bangs and “feathers” and hairspray them into place.

“Sizzlers” were a type of minidress, they had collars and trim that matched a little pair of “bloomers (of the type cheerleaders where so that you can’t see anything)” that you wore under the dress.

Hot pants were popular (I had a pair of shiny black ones, but I snuck them, and the “Sizzlers” I owned, into my trumpet case so that my parents wouldn’t know and then changed into them at school).

My school had a smoking area for students. And yeah, on occasion more than just cigs were lit up in it.