<p>I saw REO Speedwagon perform in my high school gym. My first concert was the Eagles with Linda Ronstandt as the opening act. In college (late 70’s) we danced to disco and attended “glitter parties” made up to look like the guys in Kiss. (we knew a guy who wanted to be Gene Simmons. One weekend he went to a Kiss concert in a neighboring state and we never saw him again…).</p>
<p>College was very preppy, big greek scene, wore polos and topsiders. Drinking age in Illinois was 19 for beer and wine, but you could usually drink with a college ID (I was 17).</p>
<p>High school in the early 70’s. No sports for girls until senior year except cheer and dance. Clubs were huge.Everyone went to football and basketball games and school dances. Afterwards we went to the drive in (like Al’s on Happy Days). Seems a little corny now, but I had a lot of fun.</p>
<p>I graduated from high school in 1973 and consider myself more a child of the 60s than the 70s. I remember waiting for the school bus and giving people directions to demonstrations. My parents used to bail kids out of jail and put them up in our basement and towards the end of the war we went on anti-war marches as a family. We spent much of senior year consumed by Watergate. (I was in DC at the time too.) Junior high I remember as one assassination after another - and of course Washington burning after the MLK assassination.</p>
<p>I was a goodie-goodie in high school and drugs, sex and rock and roll mostly waited till college where I enjoyed them all. I even enjoyed disco - though that was also where I learned to jitterbug.</p>
<p>The class ahead of mine was the first to integrate my prep school. Yale and Princeton had just gone co-ed and lots of girls in my class were accepted and attended. There was only one AP science class at my high school. I didn’t take it. (But I did take AP Calc, Art, English and Euro.) Took the SAT twice. Applied to three colleges. U Penn was my safety. :eek:</p>
<p>My first rock concert was “The Guess Who” in our high school gym. My first album was probably Simon and Garfunkel or Blood Sweat and Tears.</p>
<p>Oh and speaking of dress codes. I got called to the principal’s office in junior high for a skirt that was too short. We had a uniform in high school, summer was a hideous cotton green skirt that looked terrible on everyone, winter was grey wool and much better cut However we could wear “well tailored wool slacks” in the winter. Senior year someone persuaded the headmistress we couldn’t all afford wool and we got to wear jeans. Usually in the spring we were told to go back to our uniforms, but no one ever did my senior year. Uniforms died a very quiet death.</p>
<p>I don’t recall seatbelts in cars sold to my family at all- but then, our car was 12 years old in the late 60’s when I started learning to drive. They could have kept the 3 kids in the back seat in their own “territory”.</p>
<p>Snowdog- was in the Madtown suburbs back in riot days but too young. A goody two shoes I never went down to State St in HS unlike some classmates. The smell in the back hall where the junior boys’ lockers were was, interesting… A medical school classmate from a small town wasn’t allowed to go to UW-Madison because of the August Sterling Hall bombing (where that army math research center was located as well as the Physics Dept) just before our HS senior year (a physics grad student from CA trying to finish some work late Sat before leaving on vacation was killed- leaving a wife and kids).</p>
<p>Read a post from someone 10 years younger- wide age range for us parents.</p>
<p>No smoking rows on planes didn’t prevent the stench. Just a few years ago I was well used to smoke free McDonalds and saw a “No smoking in line” sign at one in IN, near KY.</p>
<p>Nuclear attack drills- under desk with hands on neck in grade school. Chocolate flavored goiter pills with school snack milk- must not have had iodized salt back then. Figured I couldn’t be an astronaut because I was a girl.</p>
<p>There was nothing awesome or magical about growing up in the 60’s or 70’s if you were trans. It’s very difficult now for trans kids, but it was far worse back then. And it’s pretty much the same for being LGBT in general, I think. There was a time in the 70’s, after Stonewall but before AIDS, when things seemed to be improving rapidly, at least in some parts of the country, but that progress was obviously set back (to put it mildly) in the 80’s. Anyway, I am extremely grateful that my son was born when he was, and not 25 or 30 years earlier. I have no real nostalgia at all for those days. In at least some ways, the world is a far better place now. </p>
<p>New York City is safer now than it was for most of the time when I was growing up, too. Although, ironically enough, I was allowed to do things like go to Central Park with just a friend and no adult supervision by the time I was 8 or so, and was taking the subways by myself all around Manhattan by the time I was 12 or 13. Neither of which I would ever have allowed my son to do had we lived in the City when he was growing up.</p>
<p>^at our school in the late 70’s to early 80’s, there were a few gay students that I knew. They were well liked and we all got along. No one really made a big deal or talked about their sexual preferences. Looking back, I wish it were still that way. </p>
<p>Re: college searches consisted of going to the “career center” where a counselor had book shelves of college catalogs. I can’t believe that’s how I did some of my search. My 4 friends and I hopped into my dad’s van and drove 2 1/2 hours into Los Angeles to check out UCLA and two other schools. We used a folded map for directions and called our parents from pay phones to let them know where we were. </p>
<p>I was on the yearbook staff and we had to type the text in triplicate. If we made too many mistakes we had to do it all over again. Our page layouts were done by hand on huge sheets of paper. Today, they use computers to do almost everything.</p>
<p>Polls indicate that the generation that went to college in that time (boomers) is still significantly less accepting of gay marriage than the generation that is in college now (millenials), although the boomers’ acceptance of gay marriage has increased the most over the past decade and a half.</p>
<p>I don’t know if the difference was Harvard vs Columbia, or the times (1974-1978 vs 1979-1981). But I knew one out gay undergrad and one out gay grad student at Harvard. By the time I got to grad school, I knew too many to count. And going back to my Harvard 25th - everyone was now out too. That’s been a huge change for the better IMO. (If for no other reason, I’d know which guys weren’t interested in me. )</p>
<p>^ but I wonder how many of them survived the AIDS epidemic. At least 6 of my close friends died of AIDS between 1982 and 1987. It was not a good time to be gay.</p>
<p>I lost touch with the undergrad guy, the grad student died of AIDS. Amazingly I only know one guy from my time at Columbia who died of AIDS. I think I know just as many who died of heart attacks probably caused by abuse of cocaine in those same years.</p>
<p>Apparently crime levels in NYC are now down to their 1950s levels. I lived in the city in the middle of the crack epidemic and it was definitely a bit scarey then - especially living right next to Morningside Park.</p>
<p>I graduated high school in 82. In my perception, true or false, the 70s/early 80 s was a time when the adults didn’t care that much about kids. We roamed free because no one was watching us. There wasn’t this worry about where kids would go to college or what they would major in. Adults kinda assumed we would muddle through without them having to do too much. My public school education was pretty bad, and I don’t think my parents really cared that much, or thought anything of it, even though my father was a college professor. Am I crazy, or can anyone relate?</p>
<p>Redpoint: Such a difference! My youngest was born in '82. He was at the beginning of the Better Baby Institute. When he was 2 or 3 there was the nursery school sex scandal just south of here (where everyone was acquitted)…It was a time of hovering and fear and safety about EVERYTHING. </p>
<p>When we moved from the suburbs to the city some of the neighborhood kids came over and asked my son (then 11) to go out for coffee. In the suburbs we drove our kids even a block. We then made sure the door opened and the mother or housekeeper waved the all clear. They never rode bikes anywhere. They never went to the movies alone. It wasn’t me, it was the culture.</p>
<p>I almost ruined my son’s life: The girls at the door were very developed (and I thought much older) as was the boy. They were in my son’s class. I almost said, “He’s never crossed the street by himself!” Thank God I didn’t say a word…’</p>
<p>Elle: Maybe it was the generational difference between my parents (20s/30s) and the next generation? Or maybe it’s just my experience. I was roaming free through the neighborhood before kindergarten. My sister always reminds me when we lived in a suburb of London for a year, she and her friends in 6th grade would take the train into London and run around the city. I have a 6th grader now, and I cannot imagine.</p>
<p>I remember than preschool sex-abuse scandal, that was huge.</p>
<p>Redpoint: I think that you were lucky. I too roamed the neighborhood because both my parents worked. When I got to high school the mantra was: get As and we don’t care what you do…And trust me, where I live(d) you could get into LOTS of trouble.</p>
<p>I remember my youngest doing a commercial for a tracking system.</p>
<p>My dad, who would have been 89 this year, would tell the story about himself at the age of 5. He walked about a mile or more from home (not sure with others or by himself) and climbed to the top of the town’s water tower. The old kind with four stilt like legs. Can you imagine if that happen today? I never climbed the tower but I was all over town and my kids had a lot more freedom than many of their friends.</p>
<p>I remembered NYC during the crack epidemic…I was attending elementary school back then. Even so, most of us kids spent hours on our own with little/no parental supervision from very young ages. I was a latchkey kid and started riding the subways by myself at 6. Wasn’t that unusual, either. </p>
<p>Am a bit taken aback by the marked increase in micromanagement/overprotectiveness of more recent high school/college students as shown by the free range NYC mom who allowed her 9 year old to take the subways by himself. NYC over the last decade is a practical Disneyworld compared to what it was in the '80s when I was an elementary/junior high kid.</p>
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