Parents of the 60's70's80's

Parent Cafe
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<p>I graduated from high school in 1972.</p>

<p>The dress code was not changed to allow girls to wear pants until I was in 9th grade. Even in the harsh Connecticut winters, we girls had to walk to school or stand at bus stops in short skirts and mostly bare legs, and this was the era of the miniskirt. I can still feel how badly my legs hurt, especially when the bus was late. </p>

<p>Only girls were allowed to take home ec; only boys were allowed to take tech ed. Some kids who wanted to take a course intended for the other gender made a fuss, and a few of them actually got permission to take those courses, but it was an uphill battle.</p>

<p>Some people’s parents were willing to pay for college for their sons but not their daughters because they felt that the daughters would have no use for the education since they would simply get married and become housewives. Many of these women did in fact have to support themselves – and sometimes their children – at some point in their lives and were less prepared for it than they should have been.</p>

<p>Many colleges, especially in the East, had only recent gone co-ed or were in the process of doing so. I went to Cornell in part because it had always been co-ed. I didn’t want to be part of someone’s experiment. </p>

<p>Some people’s older brothers were killed in Vietnam. This was not cool at all. The boys of my class were worried about being drafted, but it turned out that the war ended before they would have had to serve.</p>

<p>If you refused to get in a car driven by someone under the influence of alcohol, you were a coward. If you complained about someone at your job or in your family hitting on you despite the fact that you had clearly indicated your disinterest, you were a whiner. If you refused to earn money by babysitting because you didn’t like being driven home by drunken fathers who propositioned you in the car, you were lazy. If you objected to people smoking in your car or house or office, you were a – never mind, nobody objected to that, even if they hated the smell and the irritating effect of the smoke.</p>

<p>I saw men walk on the moon on TV, but I also saw footage of the funerals of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention, deaths at Kent State, and nightly Vietnam body counts.</p>

<p>I don’t remember anything glamorous at all, and I wouldn’t want to go back to that time.</p>

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<p>^ @emilybee - same! LOL Maureen Dean was like Grace Kelly to us young girls, sitting there day after day the picture of cool blonde reserve.</p>

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<p>I was a teenager in the 70s and graduated college in 1979. I lived in India. I absolutely don’t look at that period with any sense of “it was better” or anything. It was just a more innocent time in India. But right now is a great place to be in the US and in 2012. </p>

<p>I read Coureur’s post and that about sums it up…so no need to elaborate. We did not even have TV until the late 70s in India (at least where I was located).</p>

<p>I have been working since I graduated college and I am pretty sure if I had entered the workplace in India when I was 22, it would be much harder for me to succeed. Lots of prejudices, imho, against women in the workplace.</p>

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<p>eyemamom: </p>

<p>*Seems to me no one was that concerned with kids drinking beer in high school and drunk driving was not talked about yet. I remember when the seat belt law came in and people had fits over it.</p>

<p>I saw mtv on it’s first day back when they had vj’s and video killed the radio star. My cable tv had a long cable attached to a box.</p>

<p>I played outside as a kid all day outside with the neighbors - kick the can, ghost in the graveyard, stickball.*</p>

<p>Ditto to just about everything in your post. Did you grow up in my neighborhood? :)</p>

<p>My first album was the Partridge Family, but my first concert was Springsteen on his Born to Run Tour. Heaven.</p>

<p>Went to a small Catholic all-female high school which had a smoking lounge outside for the students. Wore topsiders and duck shoes and carried pappagallo purses. No prep whatsoever for SAT, no counseling about college. Applied one place, public school about an hour away. </p>

<p>Played Atari in the wood-paneled finished basement.</p>

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<p>Me too. Especially when robots will be more ubiquitous than they are now in daily life. They are ubiquitous in manufacturing and now entering daily life too. I am very excited about Siri and Watson, but that is just the beginning. Machine learning will advance. Not sure of the economic consequences of all that, though.</p>

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<p>Oh, and shared a car with my brothers. It was my grandpa’s old car, which comfortably sat 4 of us across the front seat.</p>

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<p>Snowdog, I lived in New Haven and remember the protests vividly. The Black Panthers were also on trial there. Even though we had moved to upstate NY in '69 we went “home” to New Haven on weekends and my parents let me go down to the New Haven green. It was wild. </p>

<p>I also have a vivid memory of Bobby Kennedy being shot after winning the CA primary. :frowning: We had stayed up past midnight for the results to come in.</p>

<p>My first concert was Elton John 1970 at the War Memorial in Syracuse. They only opened half the arena. He did handstands while playing the piano.</p>

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<p>See the third paragraph of post #7. :)</p>

49

<p>YouDon’tSay: I actually looked at the house that was built on the site of the Manson massacre on Cielo. My broker let me look around. When I said that I liked the house he told me that it was THIS property.</p>

<p>I left…fast. I don’t believe in ghosts…but…no thanks. My husband, who doesn’t believe in karma or ghosts said that this house and the Phil Hartman house (my friend lives on that street) would be a no go.</p>

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<p>My first concert was Kiss in 1979, they were touring with John Cougar (back when he was still Cougar and not Mellencamp). My parents had no idea who Kiss was and I guess they thought it was some sort of romantic group or something because they let me go with my cousin who was 2 years older than me. I was grounded when my parents figured it out a couple of days later. My cousins had Pong on their TV and that kept us entertained for HOURS. The nightly news used to start off with Frank Reynolds announcing how many days the hostages had been held in Iran. My senior class had 63 people, but only 47 were eligible to graduate. I remember being in sociology class (freshman or sophomore year) when the principal came over the loud speaker to announce President Reagan had been shot. We used to go to the local convenience stores and truck stops to play Pac-man, Donkey Kong or Asteroids. Before Madonna, the girls in my hometown either looked like Blair from “Facts of Life” or Pat Benatar. Girls were only allowed to compete in basketball (half-court at the time) and track/field. No golf. No softball (although the school had a baseball team). We all had the biggest crush on Michael J. Fox, because of his weekly TV show “Family Ties.” Before MTV, we would watch “Friday Night Videos” but I can’t remember what channel it was on. Before Friday Night Videos, we would watch “The Midnight Special” but that was only if you could sneak into the family room and not wake your parents to watch it. Our TV was a huge console thing, like a hutch. It was massive and we didn’t have a remote, well, us kids were the remote. Dad would yell, “Flip the channel!” or “Turn it down!” LOL We transitioned from 8-tracks to cassettes, which were magical because you could fast-forward to your favorite song and rewind it to hear it as many times as you wanted. You could buy 3 cassettes for $1, and record your albums onto cassette and suddenly you could take your music everywhere with you. We had hand-held electronic games like Merlin or Simon Says. My little brother had a Speak-N-Spell.</p>

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<p>Watergate basically marked the end of the '60s. The social/political/ musical concept of “The 60s” did not quite coincide with the calendar decade. “The 60s” basically went from the assassination of President Kennedy to the resignation of President Nixon - from Nov. '63 to Aug. '74.</p>

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<p>I went to a really laid back HS in Marin County ,1968-71 . I always wished I had been born at a different time . We didn’t have a Prom ,but a class hike . . People were always getting "stoned ".I was a more conservative girl in hippie times . Not a lot of nostalgia about my HS years !</p>

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<p>I don’t remember anything glamorous at all, and I wouldn’t want to go back to that time.</p>

<p>me either.
not to mention the clothes and hairstyles.
My H did have a pretty rockin’ stache though. ;)</p>

54

<p>I periodically get “friended” on FB by old high school chums wanting to reminisce about the great times in HS. I wonder what they are possibly referring to. Where we even on the same planet? Life wasn’t fun for me until '81 when I was out of grad school, living in Hollywood, drinking too much, rocking in an arty punk band, and basically living in night clubs. It had nothing to do with the 80’s, but everything to do with the state of being young,unattached and fabulous. Watching MTV on it’s first year? I was ON MTV it’s first year.
I get the impression that anyone’s golden decade has little to do with the cultural history of that particular time, as much as it has to do with your personal state of mind during that time.</p>

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<p>My H who has mostly no hair, had hair. The kids laugh and laugh at his high school graduation picture. He says the last couple months of high school he spent mostly in the principal’s office because the rules at high school for guys was hair could not go past the top of their shirt collar and he had long wavy thick tresses. He also was the first guy to wear jeans to school - Levi’s of course - and that was not allowed. He was such a rebel LOL. I’m surprised the principal didn’t cut it off…back in those days principals and teachers could do pretty much whatever they wanted…and parents backed them up.</p>

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<p>“Watergate basically marked the end of the '60s. The social/political/ musical concept of “The 60s” did not quite coincide with the calendar decade. “The 60s” basically went from the assassination of President Kennedy to the resignation of President Nixon - from Nov. '63 to Aug. '74.”</p>

<p>My formative years.</p>

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<p>My first concert was the Eagles. Great performance.</p>

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<p>I agree.</p>

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<p>Circa 1973 I saw the Eagles as opening act for the Stones. My thought at the time–not bad for Cali-rock. Might have a future.</p>

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<p>Jobs were easier to come by. You walked in and filled out an application and had a three or four-question interview. If you didn’t have a car then you hitchhiked everywhere, and it was safe and usually a lot of fun. I listened to underground FM radio to hear live coverage of the police breaking up peace demonstrations. Nobody thought twice about having coolers full of beer and wine in the trunk or back seat. Drinking in a car was not frowned upon like it is today.</p>

<p>We played neighborhood pickup games of all kinds of sports after school and made up our own rules and had a ball. Seventeen year olds would play with twelve year olds. Battle of the Bands was every Friday night and you usually knew a few band members. My schools divided us into a few advanced level classes, several general level classes, and the bottom two classes made up of jd’s and slower learners. One day I got on the school bus after school and heard about JFK’s assassination on the radio. I waited at the school bus stop one day watching the sky and searching for the missiles coming any minute from Cuba.</p>

<p>When I pledged my college fraternity, my “brothers” all wore suit jackets and turtlenecks and carried briefcases and smoked pipes. They liked to get together to watch TV and drink beer. They hazed us for 12 long weeks and I’m surprised I’m not still serving time for some of the “pranks” they made us pull. Within a year or two my fraternity brothers and I mostly wore army jackets and faded jeans. We played cards while rolling joints with zig zag papers and drank cheap wine. And we listened to some of the greatest music ever written. </p>

<p>Change was very fast back then too.</p>

<p>The Vietnam War split us apart from our parent’s generation. We rebelled, questioned authority, and grew independent. I was unlucky and drew a 53 as a draft number. Some of us joined the military, some stayed in school, and some left for Canada to begin new lives in a foreign country. Every day’s newspaper or TV news show had a major new crisis to cope with. Maybe we aged faster during the late 60’s and early 70’s?</p>

<p>It was the favorite time of my life.</p>

60

<p>I first saw The Eagles as the opening act in a three band concert: The Eagles, The Edgar Winter Group, and Yes. What a combination of bands! </p>

<p>My first rock concert was The Jimi Hendrix Experience. That was an auspicious start.</p>