I know this is a strange question, but over the last several years, I’ve been realizing that things have changed more than I might understand since I was born in 1982. So, I’m wondering if we could do a little exercise. How was the world different when I was a child (essentially, the mid 1980s).
Here are some examples of the stuff I’m looking for:
What was the environment like in the U.S.? What environmental regulations were not yet in place (DDT? aerosols?)? What about things like baby toys that posed health risks? Leaded gas? Paint?
Race relations?
International: how integrated was the world economy? Was there a general understanding that the world economies were becoming so closely linked?
Little things: When I was a kid, most shops still closed on Sundays, and beer also couldn’t be sold on Sundays (I’m from the south). What other sorts of things like that were there?
When you were born… There was no INTERNET! (As we know it today, or even as recently as the late 90’s)
General information was gained more through newspapers, magazines, and the library. School papers were likely turned in hand written, through high school at least, and you went to the library to research it.
Seat belts weren’t all that big of a thing. In 82 I was probably just about too big to ride on the big back window deck in my fathers car… as we drove down the highway without seatbelts, or hanging over the seats themselves.
Russia was the USSR.
We had an actual fear of a full out nuclear war with the USSR.
Music came on tapes, or records. Hair was entirely too “big.”
Mostly, (I was a teenager in the mid 80’s) we were ignorant, and we were happy about it. Now we know more, and are far more concerned with so much minutia of hazards in our every day life…
This is a pretty wide open question, as you could (and folks have) write a book about any single part of that question.
Thanks, Butler1850. I know it’s vast, but I figured people would be interested in it.
I’ve thought of another thing: demographics.
Growing up in South Carolina, I don’t ever remember hearing someone speak another language. I’m sure I did, but it certainly wasn’t normal. Now, I can’t even walk through Charleston’s historic district without hearing Chinese, Japanese, French, etc. (I’m certainly not complaining).
I’m wondering how populations have shifted since the 80s (Charleston, for one, has had a noticeable influx of people from up north), foreign students in the US, and tourism changes, too (when I was a kid, Charleston wasn’t quite as “glamorous” as it is now).
I’ve been going on vacation to Charleston since I was a child (specifically to the Isle of Palms but we always visit the city of Charleston), and I can assure you, it was a tourist destination. In 1982 I was in college and I’m pretty sure I was there in either '83 or '84, '86, and then again in '89 right before Hugo. My guess is that as a child you weren’t aware of the allure of your very unique city.
The use of home computers is the biggest change between the '80s and now. I remember seeing my first Mac c. 1989; I didn’t have my own computer until ~1995, though of course I used one at work.
Many things were the same; though there was no Internet and fewer cable stations, there certainly was mass media. Anyone alive in the '80s remembers the Iran-Contra Hearings and how they turned Oliver North and Fawn Hall into overnight celebrities.
The word “AIDS” didn’t even exist. It was called “GRID” (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) or “Gay Cancer,” and nobody knew how people got it; nobody even knew it was a virus.
The STD that most worried heterosexuals was herpes.
If you wanted to carry music around with you, you got a Walkman. You could play a cassette that held 45 minutes on each side. And sometimes it ate the tape. At home, people still had turntables.
Mullets were cool.
TV news was mostly reported by white men.
Americans were not worried about terrorism. Terrorism only happened in the Middle East.
There was East Germany and West Germany, and there was a wall through Berlin. If anyone tried to relocate from East Berlin to West Berlin, they probably got shot.
Depending on where you lived, you could also probably still smoke everywhere. Not just bars and restaurants, but grocery stores, schools, airplanes, etc. My girlfriend, who’s about the same age as you, remembers that her mom never took her to McDonald’s as a child because it was the only place in town that was non-smoking.
Oh, one other one that seems huge today is that in many states, drunk driving wasn’t even a criminal offense. It was just like a traffic ticket.
I agree that the biggest change since the early 80s for me was the emergence of home computing. Sure you could use computers at work or at school. At school you still had some batch processing although time-sharing became more prominent during that time. At work it was similar and you dealt with mainframe computing (JCL, COBOL, etc.). No one had his own computer (let alone a terminal) at his desk in those days. PCs starting showing up in offices in the mid-80s. The monitors were monochrome and hard drives were an expensive luxury. And starting salaries for programmers were in the $20K range, good money in those days! Video games were quite primitive compared to today’s standards, but I remember heading to the store to pick up the latest versions of Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy for my Nintendo.
On TV, Dallas was must-see and Knight Rider was a kick every week. Of course, TVs were big and clunky and a 25" screen was considered huge! I listened to music on my stereo which had a real turntable record player. My video camera was as big as a small suitcase and weighed a ton, but I lugged it along on vacations. Those recordings on VHS are cherished possessions today.
Cars didn’t have any computer-assisted controls or airbags. You used maps and AAA to figure out how to get to your destinations. No GPS in those days. Gas prices were still under $2 a gallon, but went lower after the energy crisis at that time.
DDT had been banned decades before you were born. CFCs were still being used (I knew a guy who washed out laser parts in a bucket of Freon half a decade later). There were plenty of regulations on baby toys, and had been, long before 1982. Leaded gas had been stopped long before then, too (I don’t think I ever used leaded gas, and I’d been driving for a decade before then. Nevertheless, people still talked about “unleaded”, and the gas pumps bore stickers saying that the gas contained no lead.)
The SuperFund cleanups were going along, because the SuperFund actually had money in it, unlike now.
They were every bit as cordial as they are now. Actually, I believe that things have gotten incrementally better. There’s more acceptance of differences now than there had been, IMHO.
The economy was globalizing and jobs were being offshored, although it was a lot quieter back then. One example – in 1983 American Optical celebrated its 150th anniversary. In 1984 they started breaking the company up and moving jobs to Mexico.
Up in the NorthEast they had changed by then. I remember back in the 1960s Blue Laws kept stores or parts of stores closed on Sundays, but by the 1980s that was gone, and most stores were completely open on Sundays.
There were Home videogames, but they were poor, low-resolution things for the most part. The widely-anticipated Home Version of Pac Man came out about then, and looked nothing like its arcade companion. But I knew of copies people were running on their lab computers that were awesomely good.
Color Video Games had appeared in arcades only a couple of years before, bringing life to a genre that had been monochromatic (or had color plastic overlays) just before.
1982 was a good year for fantastic cinema. We had **Poltergeist, Star Trek II, Tron, E.T., Conan the Barbarian, Firefox, Bladerunner, ** and Swamp Thing all in that summer. Return of the Jedi, the last part of the Star Wars trilogy, wouldn’t come out until next year.
MTV was a year old, and pretty awesome, not having devolved into non-music stuff.
Reagan was our president still (which I didn’t particularly like), and Iran-Contra was in full swing, although not revealed. It was months before Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech.
The Space Shuttle was in operation, and pretty impressive. The Challenger disaster was still three years in the future, so the Space Program looked bright.
Police Squad! was on TV, a six-episode bright spot in the programming calendar. It would tide us over until the same guys came out with Top Secret! a year later, and the Naked Gun movies many years down the road.
Little things… let’s see… snakeskin miniskirts for one (ugh). Sammy Hagar filled in for Van Halen. Reality TV hadn’t yet replaced sitcoms and game shows. Springsteen and Madonna were radio stars. There was U2 and Blondie and music still on MTV… woo-hoo-hoo! It was 19-19-1985!
I’m not sure which states you’re talking about. Certainly in California and Massachusetts if you were driving drunk you were arrested. You don’t get arrested for running a red light.
Now the *sentencing and punishments *of drunk driving have escalated hugely since then, but in my memory (driving since 1973) it was never like a traffic ticket.
Well, okay, maybe that’s understating it a little, but from what I understand at least in most western states you’d spend the night drying out in jail, but in the morning you’d just pay a smallish fine and be on your way. It wasn’t really until the mid-80’s that MADD and others really started demonizing drunk drivers (deservedly so) that the laws and society at large really started treating it like a serious problem. The whole concept of “responsible drinking” with designated drivers and all that hadn’t even been invented.
Yes, some of this is my perception, but have you been to Charleston since, say, the late 1990s? Back in the 80s, as I remember it, and as most Charlestonians are fond of complaining, Charleston was more authentic. Sure, there were carriage companies that carted tourists around, but now there are buses, boats, and pedicabs (for whom I worked). A whole industry has grown up around Charleston (which, again, Charlestonians love to complain about even though it has helped our economy immensely).
What I mean by the “glamorous,” is that back in the day, when you came to Charleston, the houses were still old rickety houses and the people who lived here were the people who’ve lived here for generations. Now, most of the old houses have been gutted and renovated, and many people have moved out to the suburbs. A lot of the most beautiful houses in Charleston are summer homes for people whose principle residences are elsewhere. Places like King Street and the Market used to have shops that you could only find in Charleston, selling things you could only buy in Charleston. Now there are Apple Stores and trinkets that were made in China.
Heck, I sound like my grandmother.
Even a lot of what is above is perception, but I know most older Charlestonians wouldn’t dispute that the glitz of Charleston seems a little too manufactured, too polished.
Anyhow, you’re very right. I didn’t appreciate this place at all when I was a kid. It had to leave it before I realized it’s not like this everywhere else.
The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 had not yet been made (let alone enacted), and coal power plants were belching out tremendous amounts of sulfur dioxide and NOx.
Before 1982 medicine didn’t come in tamper-resistant packages, they might have child-proof caps and a piece of cotton but no foil covers or anything. And kids actually went trick or treating on Halloween (at least around here). The poison Tylenol changed all of that.