I didn’t emerge until the last quarter, so I don’t remember.
That’s all I remember doing that I can pin down specifically to that year. I didn’t think they’d be valuable though; I just thought they were cool.
I started teaching at the University of Chicago in January 1976. My wife got pregnant around March as our son was born in January 1977. We bought out first home (a Co-op apartment) very late in the year. My wife had said we’d buy a place in Chicago only over Daley’s dead body. He died December 20th shortly before.
Yes I moved us when we had a week old son. I was crazy in those days. Fortunately we have much less stuff.
In 1976 I wrapped up my freshman year of college in Baltimore, MD and began my sophomore one there too, living with 4 other guys across from the university. The 5 of us were great friends and had a lot of fun together, but were pretty heavy duty into academic coursework and getting into research projects at the same time. Pre-med nerds, all of us.
In between studying and exams, we listened to a lot of Springsteen, unsuccessfully pursued female companionship (except for me, who was still seeing my HS sweetheart), drank a lot of beer and smoked the evil weed. But only when it didn’t interfere with our coursework! The occasional road trip to Georgetown in DC or down to Annapolis or College Park for an away lacrosse game also amused us.
Pretty pathetic, looking back. But we did have our fun and it did seem to pay off, at least in terms of achieving certain career goals.
I’m still close to those 4 guys, and still married to my HS sweetheart. And we still all go to Springsteen concerts together. I did give up the beer and evil weed, though.
I freed myself from the confines of the womb. Good times, good times.
I was rocking a pair of stars and stripes speedos, just like Mark Spitz!
I even had the abs for it, but not the mustache…since I was only nine at the time.
I was in the Junior Collegiate Players (drama club) at my community college. We hired a newly- minted theatre professor to direct our minimalist production of Feiffer’s People that spring. As a publicity stunt, we parked a hot air balloon about 60 feet above the campus parking lot, dangling a muslin banner advertising the play one afternoon.
Our director went on to run the main Shakespeare theatre company Orange County, CA, and is now the theatre department chair at Chapman University.
It was a year of massive changes for me. I began the year as a cluster of rapidly multiplying cells. By midyear my every move was attracting commentary and interest from members of my family, particularly my parents. In September I underwent a life-changing event that is recorded in government archives and I closed out the year a bigger and more independent person than I started it.
Pot was decriminalized in CA in 1976, which coincided with my freshman/sophomore year of High School. I gave up pot before I graduated, but sure enjoyed a fair amount starting in 1976. I also honed my mad pinball skilz that year.
Me and friends were really into bands like Zeppelin, Stones, Who, Kinks, etc and would get to see them by 1980. MONSTER airplay for Hotel California as well Songs in the Key of Life.
Ok I have to ask, what happened after that. Highlights are fine.
I was two years old. We had just moved back from Israel, and were living in my grandmother’s house in Teaneck NJ. My parents were both getting their graduate degrees at NYU.
A year later grandma would sell her house and we’d move into the city, to the university housing in Greenich Village. The day of the move is my earliest memory.
My family’s house burned down and we almost all died. Well, not really. We all escaped unharmed, but we could’ve died if my Mum hadn’t woken up after smelling smoke.
We got a whole new house later that year, though.
I was living in a tipi with a dirt floor, working on a hippie farm. No electricity there. The rules were, always shake out your clothes before putting them on, and don’t eat salad after dark.
Wow, and I thought my parents were crazy for having brought me to see Star Wars at six or seven weeks old*, and camping at nine weeks. They put off moving until I was ten months old.
*They learned quickly, though. We got cable the week my little brother was born
1976? There was alcohol involved.
I spent July 4th on a road trip in a '59 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, from Eugene, Oregon up to Portland on Highway 99W. In those days, every little town had an outdoor beer garden in a big tent. We hit every beer garden from Eugene to Portland. By the time we got to Portland, we were pretty trashed, but I do remember the fireworks over the Willamette River in what was billed as the largest bicentennial fireworks display west of the Mississippi. Not long after, I passed out curled up in a blanket on the trunk of the Caddy, which was slightly larger than the average king size bed. I do not recall how i got home to Corvallis.
In 1976, I was a Journeyman Carpenter. There was a lack of union work and I spent that summer working on a non-union crew building houses. By the end of that summer, I had left both the union and the trade. There just wasn’t enough steady work. By fall, I was working as a maintenance technician for the apartment complex where we had been living. The recession during the first half of the 1970s were hard times.
The old stories you don’t remember quite well because of alcohol are always the best stories (or sometimes the worst, if you got told the truth by others way later :smack::D).
The Bicentennial was a huge deal in Baltimore that year, my father had been recently appointed as a Fed Judge in the US District of MD, so we could park downtown at the courthouse to enjoy the festivities, I was 14, I had a ‘real’ GF (LOL! I was so young)…
The Tall Ships were amazing as they pulled into the harbor, we saw one fireworks display, it was crazy, but a sense of, “This is really important” was in the air…I say, ‘one fireworks display’ in the harbor as I think they had multiple that summer…
That was also the summer I saw my first rock concert, my older brother and his friends were not a good influence upon me and my friends, well, it depends upon the perspective I guess, from a parents point of view, no, from a little brother point of view, oh, yeah…that was the Winter Brothers at, I think, UMBC? I just remember an auditorium, a lot of drunk kids and loud music…
And that September, the two of us went to our first Grateful Dead concert, as a parent of grown children, I cannot imagine the thought process of my parents saying, “Oh, you want to borrow one of the cars so that you can take your 14-year old brother to a concert at the Capital Centre, what’s the name of the band, the ‘Grateful what’?” He was a freaking judge, she was a director of nursing, wonderful people, but naive, I guess, to this day, my brother and I marvel at that one…
!976 was a good year for me…
Oh, and I forgot to mention, my father took us to see, “Logan’s Run” and “The Outlaw Jose Wales”, I loved them, now “Logan’s Run” is completely hokey, but TOJW remains one of my favorite movies, I love it to this day, I’ve watched it probably 30 time since, and I’ll watch it again…
1976 was my second year as a font character-spacing and kerning specialist, a position very few of us ever held. I had it for seven years.
Bought my first car: a yellow VW Rabbit.
Built my own Heathkit receiver. It actually worked, connected to my Technics turntable (which I still have).
Got my first season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.
Went to the New York harbor to watch the tall ships.
Photographed the Macy’s fireworks on the 4th. They were spectacular that year. I then walked to Chinatown to pig out.