I still have the ferris wheel and the dog. The people were lost in an unfortunate accident, I think in a storm drain. There’s also a Tree Tots treehouse somewhere.
My parent’s basement hasn’t changed much since the 70s.
They all float down there.
Earth tones
, gas station lines, great rock & roll, dismal future sci-fi, Radio Shack, going “off grid”
Rock music. That’s all, the rest of the seventies was completely boring and totally sucked.
Being young, flares, bean bags, music and every female looking like Susan Anton.
We got us a Convoy and other nonsense songs
The Great Gas Shortage. What bullshit that was.
The dramatic increase in drug use in the military, and the subsequent crackdown.
Good rock, good disco (no, that’s not a typo).
Nixon’s political demise.
Bell bottoms and butterfly collars, porn 'staches, and double-knit polyester leisure suits; WTF were we thinking?
To be honest, my first reaction is simply “everything fell apart in the 70s.” I think of it as being basically a straight line from “everything was fairly OK” (early 70s) to “everything has gone to Hell” (late 70s).
Started with US-made muscle cars…ended with US-made crap cars.
Started with good rock and roll…ended with way too much disco (even though there was good rock and roll being made in the late 70s).
Started with comfortable, casual fashions (for the average person)…ended with these unbelievably weird outfits.
I could go on. Leave it to the late 70s to make the early 80s look good.
“Everything was fairly OK” in the early 1970s? Really? Mired in Vietnam and the Nixon presidency? I thought the late '70s much more okay than the early.
The whole decade was pretty bad, Nixon & Vietnam finally gave way to the economy being terrible, wildcat strikes daily, deadly smog in far too many cites and of courses lovely things like river catching fire in Ohio & my own New Jersey.
Then their was the soaring crime rates, severe urban decay and our military being at probably its lowest point.
Mad Magazine.
Heavyweight Title fights on network TV.
I was around for the 1970s! And so, I have got some severely mixed emotions and conflicting impressions of what all was going on at the time. Wow, was there ever a lot of stuff going on!
Good: the '70s were a fine time to love rock music. There were all those great bands: Black Oak Arkansas and Nazareth, Iggy, the Pistols, Johnny Thunders, Led Zepelin (of course!), the Ramones, Radio Birdman, New York Dolls, Ruby Starr, Marshall Tucker, the Outlaws, Uriah Heep, Patti Smith, the Godz, Talking Heads, and a whole lot more. And the Rolling Stones were, if not at the height of their creative powers, still making some powerful tunes. Plus the 1960s were still recent enough that one could enjoy the good stuff from that era without being thought of as stuck in the past.
Bad: Disco. It *really sucked *, and it still does. There was also that horrid plague of “singer songwriters” from James Taylor on down. Worse still in it’s way was the output of bands like Yes and King Crimson and Genesis and Gentle Giant–soaring, silly-ass art rock and pretentious prog. The fucking EAGLES. The Captain and Toenail. Unescapable Elton John. Sha-Na-Na and that whole stupid 1950s nostalgia bullshit they triggered.
Good: sexual prohibitionism and moral intrusiveness were at a low. People all over the USA had taken a lesson from gay culture and opened up, got “promiscuous”, fucked for fun. Women were allowed to be into one-night stands and group sex without being ostracized as sluts and whores (like in past eras )or pathologized as victims and damaged humans (like now). Instead of trying to become as mainstream as possible, gay men were flaunting their differences and their entree to great realms of sexual possibility. Damn, we almost managed to achieve a secular, hedonistic culture!
Bad: ugly-ass fashions. Like platform shoes and jumpsuits on all sexes, the ascent of polyester, leisure suits, Farrah Faucet hair for women and disco hair on men.
Good: the drugs! Qaaludes (Rorer or Lemmon?), Preludin, gourmet flavors of cocaine, Thai sticks and Kona butter. Soapers! Black Beauties! Four varieties of hashish that I remember: red Lebanese, gold Leb, Nepalese fingers and temple balls, Afghani with the Royal Seal on it. A fairly recent edition of the Physicians Desk Reference was a good investment if you used recreational drugs.
Bad: those $20 ounces of leaf pot the color of pool table felt (if you smoked a fat joint or two to your head, you got high. Sort of.). Harsh-smoking, crumbly brown Colombian reefer that tasted like it had been left sitting in the hold of a cargo ship for six months. PCP or doggie-dust had a brief spell of popularity which still baffles me. Those utterly realistic looking fake pills that were marketed to rip people off with. Flavored rolling papers and other gimmicky dope-taking accoutrements. The government spraying poisonous Paraquat pesticide on pot fields.
Good: people were more cynical and skeptical about the government due to the aftereffects of the war and the exposure of corruption during the whole long stupid Watergate brouhaha.
Good: the *National Lampoon *when it was good. Creem. Crawdaddy. Circus. *High Times *when it was good. Underground comix. Heavy Metal magazine when it was good. A proliferation of pornography and pulp fiction. *New Times *magazine. *Rolling Stone *when it was good.
Bad: the fungus-like proliferation of the three horrid “Seventies colors”–Avocado Green, Harvest Gold (looked like a puke-tinged yellow), and whatever that awful shade of burnt-orange brown was called.
I also graduated from high school in 1978, then decamped from Cleveland to go east to college.
What i like to tell the Youngs about the late '70s is that a) the sexual revolution was over ten years old, AIDS was years away, and fucking was rampant. Dating no longer existed; people partied, eye contact was made, ten minutes later you were in the sack. B) Excellent drugs were cheap and plentiful. Weed from Columbia and Jamaica cost $35 an ounce (or lid). Fine blotter acid cost five dollars or less per hit, and University chem departments produced home style LSD which was often given away free. Cocaine was out of my personal price range, but I had wealthy generous friends. C) Disco could be easily avoided. These were great days for both the Old Wave (Little Feat, Grateful Dead, the Kinks) and New Wave (Talking Heads, Brian Eno).
I also managed to avoid the opprobrium of '70s clothing styles by dressing and wearing my hair like it was still the '60s. People laughed at me for being ten years out of date, but look back at those 1979 photos and WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, ASSHOLES?
Vietnam
Watergate
Bell bottoms
Peace signs
Poofy lettering
The rise of hair products for men
That’s the “Earth Tones” I spoke of earlier. Surprisingly, that particular color of brown sure seemed to get dirty easily. It was seen on cars, as shag carpet, polyester pants, furniture, as background for sales brochures… 
Not to forget: Earth Shoes
I googled Earth Tones and got a very ugly color chart as the first image. I guess it’s a little hard to pin down an exact color.
See “Chevy Van” by Sammy Johns. “She’s gonna love me in my Chevy van, and that’s all right by me.” That song pretty much sums things up.
For that matter, custom vans. Take an ordinary Chevy van (or Ford Econoline), customize the back of it (shag carpeting was a must), add a teardrop window, and you’ve got a shaggin’ wagon. You could be in the sack in less than ten minutes, if you had a van in the parking lot.
You remember the 70’s, but not the early 70’s…
In 1972 everyone wanted out of Vietnam-and Nixon promised (again). The vast majority of the country believed him. And he delivered-of course that meant S. Vietnam fell to the North, but I don’t remember anyone feeling like that was a mistake. Sorry about how it proved the whole war was a mistake, but not sorry it fell. Inflation hadn’t started, the last moon landing was in 1972, we would win the war on cancer, clean up the environment with the EPA, solve the racial divide in the US with one more law, etc.
The 70s were mostly the decade where our problems, and their solutions, were discovered to be much harder than we thought. To me, that was the defining theme of the 70s.
And in defense of the 70s, while it was a terrible time, I graduated from college in 75, it had the grace to demonstrate to the US and the world that the problems we faced were a lot harder than we thought and it would take more smarts and more work to solve them. And we put the smarts and work into solving them.
Inflation was awful-and was at 3.2% by 1983 which except for a brief spike in 91, 92 (which brought us “its the economy stupid” Clinton) it has stayed near or below since.
Technology focused on making chips smaller, not rockets larger. Which benefited a lot more fields than building more bombs and the means to drop them. Which also improved, but it stopped be quite the national obsession it was the 60s and 70s.
We actually made progress cleaning up the environment and changing the way we did things to improve the air and water.
Cars stopped getting worse and slowly started getting better. I think we simply had to put up with 10 years of lousy cars to learn how to make better ones-those improvements are continuing.
Race relations were recognized as a lot harder than we first thought. Solutions were sought, and occasionally found. Many people thought that integrating the schools would solve the whole race problem. I remember those discussions quite clearly. By the 80s we realized that civil rights were retail, not wholesale problems. And they improved. Anyone who doubts that need only visit the civil right museums and see what it was like to be black in the 50s and 60s. Yes, we had significant problems in the 80s and still do today, but there was a sea change in the 70s. All but the most ardent Jim Crows backed off and the local laws and customs started changing. Blacks still got pulled over disproportionately, but they were no longer run off the road and beaten. You might be uncomfortable in a store or restaurant, but you could go there and not get arrested. I am not ignoring the problems we have today, or had in the 80s or 00s, but they are certainly a different order of problems than the 50s and 60s. Just ask President Obama. 