<p>Coureur said it best!
I grew up in N Calif, and the music of the late 60’s-70’s is what I remember and love best about that era. Not just what was coming out of SF those days- though Jefferson Starship, Santana, Grateful Dead were pretty great! Cream! Jimi Hendrix! The Byrds! Simon and Garfunkle! Chicago! Earth Wind and Fire! and so many more! The sense that change was truly possible was pervasive, and at the same time there was a sense that a life could be cut short at any time because of the war in Vietnam and especially because of what happened to JFK, RFK, MLK in only 5 short yrs- so why not live for the present!</p>
<p>No Title 9, so girls athletic opportunities were minimal. I loved to run, was good at it, and would have been thrilled no end if cross country had been a sport at that time. </p>
<p>I grew up in the Phoenix area, and it was a wonderland of empty lots, citrus orchards, gangs of kids roaming around, sometimes having rock fights, but play was endless, and I road everywhere on my bike. We could play in construction projects that would be walled off these days. The transistor radio was glued to my ear, 1964 Beatles invasion onward through acid rock, Motown, folk rock. An amazing era.</p>
<p>Going to college was expected, but career goals were minimal, and I didn’t know any working women, only women like my mom who ‘had’ been teachers and the like. </p>
<p>One of my best friends was being beaten up in the bathroom at school, because everyone thought he was a ‘■■■’ Well, he was, but didn’t come out to me till years later.</p>
<p>High School ‘70-74, college 74’-'78. I stopped buying any new music after '78. </p>
<p>In 6th grade my English teacher called me up to the front of the class and measured the distance between my knee and my skirt!</p>
<p>By 8th grade we were allowed to wear pants. </p>
<p>The drinking age was 18 so by 16 we were already going out to bars at night. </p>
<p>Since there were no cell phones our parents never had any idea where we really were and had no way to track us down. </p>
<p>I went to a uni 2000 miles from home, sight unseen, and by myself. All my parents did was drive me to the airport. </p>
<p>Albums were $5. </p>
<p>There were some great FM radio stations that only played album rock and broadcast concerts - Live From the BBC was on every Saturday night at midnight. </p>
<p>Levi’s were the only cool jeans to wear.</p>
<p>Late 60s to mid 70s…We had a dress code until my senior year. We still had a “Girls” and “Boys” vice principal. Since my kids and I grew up in the same area and went to the same high school: My friends and I went to the Strip and to the Troubadour where we heard people like Neil Diamond…in person…no security. Until the Manson murders we felt totally safe…the hippies were into love, until they weren’t. </p>
<p>My kids heard that they could be anything they wanted to be, accomplish anything…my generation was told that we had to marry well. And IF we had to work it would be because of a tragedy or because of a divorce or an underemployed father. Gloria Steinem started her revolution…but for most of us, the revolution started without us.</p>
<p>I missed the Vietnam War by a few years. But our neighbor was a soldier and came back damaged. Drugs took a lot of kids. And swimming pools weren’t fenced. Children didn’t wear seat belts. And we all read Fun With Dick and Jane.</p>
<p>My best friend had a wild crush on a certain famous actor. We saw him one day and she was off…with me as a passenger…chasing him up into the hills. He knew that she was chasing him. And she was a great driver. We did lose him (eventually). Today: one call on a cell phone…police…restraining order. Then: A ride to remember…</p>
<p>I love the whole San Fran psychedelic scene (Moby Grape, anyone?), Motown, the Beatles, etc., but music is still great these days! You just have to dig a little deeper!</p>
<p>-Someone born in 1993</p>
<p>Small town high school in the early 70’s: it felt weird to be out of the wave of liberalism that swept urban areas. (Interesting how many posters have mentioned the music; for me, it was fun to buy the albums and watch American Bandstand, but my first concert was The Carpenters - lol!) In my school, there were “hoods” and “socials”, and you really had to pick a group lest you be left in limbo. Life was good for me, but certainly not great for a lot of my classmates. I remember one girl who was totally ostracized because we heard in 7th grade that she French-kissed. Her floozy reputation continued through high school! Then there were the nerds who hung out in the Math Resource Center - yikes: kiss of death, socially. Artistic types did okay - they had their own wing of the school. We had one black kid in my high school, and he was kind of a celebrity. Girls’ sports options were extremely limited, and there was a bit of a stigma attached to playing sports - as opposed to cheering on the team. </p>
<p>Academically, high school was a non-event, and nobody could even talk to me about my ambitions to go to a great college. I was encouraged to go to an inexpensive nearby college, and that was that. I don’t know if my parents ever visited me before graduation - there were certainly no college search trips, and I got a ride to school with a friend for my freshman year move-in.</p>
<p>Being a younger kid in the 60’s was great: total freedom, could ride my bike anywhere, nobody worried about anything so parents were very relaxed. </p>
<p>What I’ve seen in my childrens’ lives convinces me that things are pretty great now, by comparison. They and their friends have seen so much of the world, and really have experienced a more inclusive, tolerant world. Their parents dote on them, and grease the skids whenever possible. It’s a bummer about the economy and lack of jobs, but this too will pass.</p>
<p>
That’s because the movie/book would be pretty boring if they didn’t jazz it up and pick and choose and invent what they portrayed. </p>
<p>There were some changing times back in the late 60s early 70s though in clothing that was permitted in school, from skirt lengths about covering the knees to short mini-skirts, from ‘collared shirts and no jeans’ for guys to that rule going away so guys could wear jeans to school (skinny ones then bell bottom ones). In a nutshell the ‘do your own thing’ mentality was starting to come to the surface and be permitted whereas in the past it wasn’t.</p>
<p>You can keep the Beatles, I’d be fine if I never heard another Beatles song since they were played to death, but I like a lot of other music of the times but there’s decent music from most decades including the current one.</p>
<p>Those decades were fine but so’s the current one and someday 30 or 40 years from now there’ll be someone else pondering how much more cool it must have been back in the 2010s since there are some good movies or TV shows about it and there was some classic music made back then (the classic 2010s hip-hop stations??).</p>
<p>No they won’t. Social networks instead of socializing? Music??? Movies?? Don’t think so. One step from sex with computers by yourself.
Never liked the Beatles–Rolling Stones and all blues based hard rock plus Cali folk rock.</p>
<p>Drugs and sex and rock and roll!</p>
<p>I was born and grew up in the San Francisco bay area starting high school in 1961. I remember the early 60s as bleak, full of poodle skirts, freshman frolics, pimples, run-around sues. A bright spot: the presidential election of 1960, JFK at the Cow Palace, the peace corps, the idea that the world was bigger than us and that in the end, after the Cuban crisis, there would be no nukes. I grew up being told that if the bomb happened, to walk to this mountain village in the Sierras, to relatives there and safety! I remember the bomb drills. It was a way of life. So close to graduation from high school and JFK had been dead and buried and they let us wear bermuda shorts once a year at school for a special day and sandals, I would drive to Sausalito across the bay, cut p.e., and go and paint on the rocks by the Spinnaker. We could make San Francisco from over the east bay hills in 30 minutes. No traffic so to speak, across two bridges. 1965. When I was asked that summer to go to San Francisco and see the Jefferson Airplane, I picture an airplane in a hanger. It must have been about then that everything changed. It was a huge leap of faith to ask for something more. For a brief moment, the potential was grand! That is how I see it from my vantage point, now across the world and very much older. I am reading Walt Whitman right now. It was that faith back then that moved us. And the black capped poets of the west and the white haired poet of the east. The music that had no sound studio to guide it. We dearly need more of it right now.</p>
<p>ah overseas,
your eloquent description of what life was like in SF in the 60’s has brought me to tears. The magic, the music, the hope for a new future that so many here felt, the despair at the dreams that were smashed by sick men with guns, the anger at those who sent young men off to die in a war that should not have gone on and on, all that that decade represented to so many is hard to describe to those who did not live through it.</p>
<p>1980s… graduating seniors going to college tended to favor the local community college, local state universities, or state flagship (which was not that hard to get into back then, except in a few very popular majors). The public universities were about half as expensive as now, adjusted for CPI inflation. An occasional student went to a super-selective school. Students took the SAT or ACT once or maybe twice.</p>
<p>The high school offered six or seven AP courses and was probably at the high end of AP offerings. Enrollment in the AP English and AP Calculus (BC only) courses was only about 8% of the total senior class. The high school had a designated smoking area. The high school was not an SAT or ACT testing site – students had to take the tests at other high schools.</p>
<p>In college at the state flagship, more than half of the freshmen had to take remedial English (probably under 10% now). This likely contributed to the very low (probably under 40%) four year graduation rate then (it is now much higher at around 70%). But there were some really sharp students there, such as math majors taking graduate level math courses as juniors (or even sophomores), and engineering students graduating with no grade lower than the few A grades that they got. Most residence halls were co-ed, with co-ed shared bathrooms even then. Entire classes of computer science students had to share (using 80*24 terminals) a minicomputer that had something like 1/25,000th the processing power and 1/1,000th to 1/16th the memory of a cheap desktop or laptop computer today.</p>
<p>HS class of '71. Watershed years around then. Generalizations.</p>
<p>Civil rights with race riots in the 1960’s. In the north different discrimination- not the same Jim Crow laws as in the south. The Beatles and other music, of course. Twiggy and skinniness. Long hair- both genders. Woman’s Lib- all sorts of changes for girls after my time but before many parents- paper routes, title 9. Vietnam- draft ended my soph year of college, campus unrest, war news, protests. Dress codes- no pants until senior year for girls. Noticed a big difference in hairstyles for seniors my freshman year and those from my senior class year. Space race culminating in landing on the moon while I was in HS. Hard to find teen jobs some years- economy. Childhood spent with the tons of kids in the neighborhood. Mothers generally didn’t work, nor had they gone to college. One car families. No seatbelts, carseats. Contact lenses became available. So did birth control pills- ending the large numbers of kids for most women. miniskirts in HS- rules about length/height above knees. No maxiskirts. Feminine products have gone through many improvements. Hair dryers- blow dryers not common. Credit cards, Debit cards not in common use. Home town banks- no branches allowed elsewhere. No ATMs until the 1980’s- a royal pain to deposit paycheck during banking hours. Some had extension phones- all needed cord and phone jack (no cordless)- usually one phone, max 2 per house. Party lines ended in my area during my childhood. Nickel candy bars. 7 cent daily paper. No Walmart (or Target- Kmart was there and more regional department stores). Mimeographs in school for worksheets- no copiers. TV math (in B&W). Filmstrips and reel movies in school. AV projectors- no Powerpoint. World Book and Britannica multiple volume encyclopedias in libraries, some homes. Reader’s Guide for periodicals to look up magazine articles for research. Hand written homework- sometimes in ink. No AP courses. Hippies, flower children who dropped out.</p>
<p>College. Apps- all snail mail, wrote for catalog, typed app on manual typewriter, sent in. No common apps, no computers. No cell phones. No need based aid, Ivies basically still all male. Coed dorms began at liberal UW my soph year. Senior year noticed how freshman women were better dressed- not the basic grubby blue jeans- more concerned about appearances- they didn’t have the social issues of Vietnam, Civil rights, Women’s Lib at the forefront like we did. No microwave ovens. McDonalds. Pizza delivery- used shared room landline phone, probably still rotary dial. No Subway, Taco Bell or other nonburger fast food. Sexual revolution- pre AIDS era. Cable TV rare. No video games, camcorders. Many of us still had only B&W TVs at home- color in dorm dens (none in rooms). Vinyl records- stereos. No CDs, DVDs. Drinking age and voting age lowered from 21 to 18. Wind up analog watches, that or electric analog alarm clocks- not digital, nor digital clocks. Wrote and cashed checks to pay for things. Student ID had no computer chip- nor did anything else generally. Some had electric typewriters, even with built in correction whiteout.</p>
<p>Religion- changes in the late 1960’s in the Catholic Church loosened up language, mass format- liberal practices on my campus.</p>
<p>Most cars US made. VW Beetle- original. No SUVs, minivans. Japanese cars small, considered cheaply made- as were their other goods. China goods unheard of. No outsourcing. All long distance calls cost money- few 800 #s? Gas prices went up in the 1970’s. Min wage around $1.85. Environment became an issue. Of course no email, internet- source of news regular TV, local newspapers. No USA Today. Most goods American made. Foods from US, seasonal- no tomatoes in winter, et al. No backpacks in HS, not that common in college either. Shoes- usually leather except for gym shoes. No flipflops except for the beach. Athletic shoes canvas usually, not ubiquitous like now.</p>
<p>No privacy acts. No Google, Apple, ipods et al. Yes- transistor radios came out in the '60’s. Finally- of course no social networking- facebook, chatrooms like CC, Twitter, texting.</p>
<p>I remember walking home from soccer practice in '76 and some older girls on my block started quizzing me. They could not believe there was soccer for girls! Where did you play? How could you join?</p>
<p>I remember sitting in my dad’s truck and using his CB radio. Breaker, breaker 1-9…Talking to complete strangers, mostly middle age men, across the waves! And my parents didn’t even mind. </p>
<p>We played outside until it got dark, we could ride our bikes anywhere. No one knew where we were or really cared that much. Families were bigger, things were unstructured and unprogrammed, and no adults paid us much attention.</p>
<p>In the 7th grade, 1976, we had our first dance. The teachers taught us two dances- ‘the bump’ and ‘the hussle’. And that is mostly what we did. I wore studs in my jeans to make them all fancy, using a stud machine I bought from KTel. </p>
<p>I graduated in '81. I had really big hair. We all did. A friend’s hair caught on fire because of so much hairspray. Its okay, we put it out fast. And I think we were all pretty flammable. </p>
<p>I was really into roller skating. We used to go with our radio to the park and skate to the Bee Gees.</p>
<p>Funny that elle mentioned the Manson family. For some reason, my parents let this 12yo read Helter Skelter, and it scared the hell out of me. My dad was in the military during Vietnam, retiring in 1970. While in some respects the times were scary for this sheltered Texas kid, in some ways it was wonderful as well. My much-older sister was a fan of Motown and bubble gum music; my brother was into Hendrix and the rockers and would play on his electric guitar. The music was great, and I’m in the minority, apparently of those who loved the music of the ‘70s and even disco. My sister and I burned through two copies of The Best of Bread. When you’re a nerdy preteen wishing she had a boy, what is better than to sit in your room and listen to a maudlin record over and over? Here’s an example for you youngins’ who may not know what I’m talking about: [Bread</a> - If (1971) - YouTube](<a href=“Bread - If (1971) - YouTube”>Bread - If (1971) - YouTube)</p>
<p>Then move on to the other syrupy stuff of Paul Davis and his ilk. Love it. I started the thread about Don Cornelius, so, obviously, I loved the Soul Train stuff. I used to win disco-dancing contests.</p>
<p>Life seemed simpler, for sure. But opportunities for minorities like myself were just opening up. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. It was a good time.</p>
<p>Graduated fr. h.s. 1980. Have sibs who graduated in '70 and ‘73. Shared a bedroom w/ my class of 1970 sister until she left for college. Loved hangin’ out in our bedroom when her friends came over. I was prob. the only kid in first grade who knew all the words to the latest Beatles/Motown hits. She drove me to school in 1968 in an old bright green Renault with giant yellow flowers painted all over it…a statement in our small southern town. </p>
<p>All EC’s then were school or church related. During the sch. year we rode bikes to school being careful not to catch our bell bottoms in the chain so as to avoid the telltale greasy chain imprint across the bottom of our pants. </p>
<p>In the summer, we biked all over town, swam at the town pool and swallowed our dinner whole to get back out in the neighborhood (drenched in OFF to ward off the clouds of mosquitoes) where we hung out til the street lights came on. Central air conditioning was a miracle that changed our lives in the south. In mid. sch. I was in love with David Cassidy and had the Partridge Family albums memorized.</p>
<p>Later…was thrilled to get an eight track tape player. My bf had one in his car. We were very cool cruising the streets with the windows down, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac blaring from his big 14" kenwood speakers mounted in the back. My first concert was Pablo Cruse. My first car was a '72 Pinto…manual,no a/c,no radio.</p>
<p>Took SAT once. Applied to one college…nearest state u. No co-ed dorms. Drinking age was 18. PJ, anyone?</p>
<p>I was the varsity cheerleader/honor student. One of my sibs “came out” in the 70’s while the other was into drugs. We were a regular 70’s made for TV movie.</p>
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<p>Seat belts were required to be in cars from the mid 1960s in the US, but use rate was very low until the 1980s. Of course, the 1970s was also the time when people started to realize that getting 8mpg (12mpg in a “compact” car, maybe 20mpg in a VW Beetle) and belching smog was not a good thing. Unfortunately, it was difficult to improve both at the same time with the technology of the time – performance, reliability, and drivability suffered in the late 1970s cars.</p>
<p>I haven’t seen anyone mention the campus riots. My dad was a professor at UW-Madison while I was growing up, he was teargassed trying to get across campus more than once. When I was in middle school, the Army Math Research Center on campus was bombed. Every night we watched footage of the war in Vietnam and the war at home on TV. There was no glamorization. We saw it all and it was shocking.</p>
<p>Very interesting reading through all of these memories. I’m struck by the fact that no one mentioned Watergate. My last two years of high school were consumed by it and we raced home after school to watch as much of the hearings as possible. It was better than soaps.</p>