This is not a very good article. inaccuracies aside it is also not well written and I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be. Misremembering the past isn't really an end unto itself in my eyes.
The world in 1975 (2007)
41–50 of 57 posts
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#42In '75, Vietnam had finished. I remember asking my Dad was this the war that'd been going since I was little? Man no longer went to the moon. Woodstock was Snoopys friend.
Towns were more compact. There were no traffic lights in my town, no traffic lights until you hit the inner suburbs. Shops had limited hours. 9-5 weekdays, 9-12 Saturday. Except banks. They opened 10-5 and were closed weekends. No Sunday shopping existed. Everything was cash only. Supermarkets hardly existed. Towns had grocery stores, big towns had markets. You got up early on Saturday and shopped for the week in the limited hours available.
Food had to be prepared. There were no fast food outlets. Fast food was limited to fish fingers and frozen vegetables. I could never imagine bread being a dollar a loaf. Milk came in bottles. Milk, bread and the paper were delivered to the house.
News arrived by radio, newspapers then TV. Newspapers printed several times a day. TV was limited to four channels and black and white. Radio was AM. There were a lot of stations but only a few rock stations. Lots of 50's and 60's music on the air. Vinyl was king. 45's were less popular than LP's. 78's was old music. Stereo was affordable.
Cars got smaller, a lot smaller due to the oil shocks. Petrol contained lead. Most families had one car, maybe a second smaller car. Divorce was a new word. More women were moving into full time or part time work. Finance was restricted. Most people aspired to buy a house. Housing and land was affordable. Asbestos was deemed safe to use as building materials.
The difference between the fit and unfit was less. A lot more people smoked. Drinking was institutional. Fat people hardly existed. Diabeties was an old people disease. Kids died in droves on the road. The road toll was more than double what it is now. Men retired at 65 and died soon after.
It was a lot colder and a lot wetter and greener in the winter time. University was free. The library was the place to find out new ideas in books. Calculators started appearing. I heard about time-sharing for the first time. A scientist I knew worked with computers. His username was "Stout".
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#43>To fly on an airplane, you just had to walk through a metal detector, and if someone was there to meet you or say goodbye, they could go all the way to the gate without a ticket.
>If a flight was longer than a couple hours, you got a free meal, sometimes two, and it wasn't bad.
Still largely true in Australia.
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#44In '75, Vietnam had finished. I remember asking my Dad was this the war that'd been going since I was little? Man no longer went to the moon. Woodstock was Snoopys friend. Towns were more compact. There were no traffic lights in my town, no traffic lights until you hit the inner suburbs. Shops had limited hours. 9-5 weekdays, 9-12 Saturday. Except banks. They opened 10-5 and were closed weekends. No Sunday shopping e…
Where? Much of this stuff you describe was true in the mid-60s where I lived (suburban MN), but not in 75.
>Woodstock was Snoopys friend.
And a famous '69 music festival.
In 75 my parents had credit cards (as did all of their friends). We shopped at a supermarket and shopping malls. We ate tons of pre-packaged food like TV dinners and spaghetti O's - far more than people do today. Fast food was MacDonalds, BK, etc. Milk came in cartons from the supermarket.
Newspaper once a day. TV had been color for many years and we got at least a dozen channels. Radio was FM for music AM for news/sports. 8 track tapes and cassettes were everywhere. Most people had touch-tone phones.
University was not free. I had been programming computers at school (junior high) for several years via dial-up time sharing.
I guess changes come to different parts of the country at very different rates.
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#45>Radio stations played a great variety of really good new music. Please. The lack of variety in the public sphere is exactly what led to the "underground" music scenes. In the 70's the new unheard music was punk and the like. When I left for college in '79 it was an absolutely jaw-dropping, exciting experience to find an entire music store filled with this "alternative" music that no one played (outside of college st…
It could be there was a lack of variety in mainstream broadcasting, but that doesn't mean it was bad. Underground music scenes weren't necessarily about quality; a lot of is is about rebellion and self-expression. Being able to express certain ideas lyrically as well as musically.
The Top 40 crap then was better than today, simply because it used real musicians and vocalists. Music wasn't put together like Lego blocks by some computer geek working with a music workstation. Let's not even get started on pitch correction of vocalists, good grief!
I was just cycling home in the dark and deliberately went the wrong way into a one-way street. The "One Way Ticket" Eruption song came to mind, man. I haven't heard that in over 35 years probably. Completely forgot about it. I didn't even speak English; now I understand what it's about, listening to it on YT.
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#46>There were no digital watches. And wind-up watches were cheap. LED digital watches arrived at my school in 1974/75. LCD watches arrived about a year later. >Headphones were giant things you used in the basement to listen to Pink Floyd. I had a pair of 424s in 1975. They sounded pretty good. http://www.tonepublications.com/old-school/sennheiser-hd-414... >There was no portable way to listen to music except transistor…
>It was horrendously slow. And every single individual item had to have its own price sticker - which often fell off, holding everyone up.
One of my first jobs was at a store where we manually keyed the prices (and produce code numbers). We often got comments from customers surprised that we were quicker than the stores that used scanners. Missing stickers for unusual products could of course cause a slowdown (same as a product that won't scan). But for most things, you typed them in so many times per day that you could just glance over the pile of things as they were being unloaded onto the checkout counter and by the time the customer had put everything on the counter, your hand had already keyed all the prices/codes in by muscle memory. Things that were sold by weight had to be weighed, but otherwise it was quick.
It took longer to wait for the response from the credit card processor than it did to enter prices for a whole cart full of groceries. That gave us time to bag the groceries. When someone paid cash, there was no need to wait for the credit card (or wait for someone to fill out a check), so that's when we had to call one of the clerks over to bag.
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#47In '75, Vietnam had finished. I remember asking my Dad was this the war that'd been going since I was little? Man no longer went to the moon. Woodstock was Snoopys friend. Towns were more compact. There were no traffic lights in my town, no traffic lights until you hit the inner suburbs. Shops had limited hours. 9-5 weekdays, 9-12 Saturday. Except banks. They opened 10-5 and were closed weekends. No Sunday shopping e…
Where? Much of this stuff you describe was true in the mid-60s where I lived (suburban MN), but not in 75. >Woodstock was Snoopys friend. And a famous '69 music festival. In 75 my parents had credit cards (as did all of their friends). We shopped at a supermarket and shopping malls. We ate tons of pre-packaged food like TV dinners and spaghetti O's - far more than people do today. Fast food was MacDonalds, BK, etc. M…
"Where? Much of this stuff you describe was true in the mid-60s where I lived (suburban MN), but not in 75."
Aus. In a lot of ways the US was far more advanced than the rest of the world in '75. You can see that in the every day technology. There's another cause, I lived right on the outer fringes of Melbourne [0] and to give you an idea how small, most of the kids I went to school were delivered by one of two local doctors. [1] The thing that strikes me re-reading my post, then yours is how shockingly fast the Australian caught up and passed the US in a lot of ways.
As a kid the US sounded like a large and interesting place. Somewhere you might be aspire to move too. Now? not a chance. Aus has mostly free medical care and education, little gun violence, less advertising, advanced technology [2] and I'm asking myself, "what the hell happened in the US from '75 to now to make it as it is now?"
Btw, this isn't a criticism of the people of the US. What caused the structural tangle of politics, violence and religion that makes the country a place to avoid?
"And a famous '69 music festival."
Duh, where do you think Shultz got the name? The point I'm making is the concert here was better known by a weekly comic strip than the music on the radio. Certainly available on LP though.
[0] Remember "Melbourne is the artichoke end of the world" ~ http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/
[1] http://seldomlogical.com/profile/
[2] Unaffordable housing, world #2 obesity rate, higher working hours, some political instability.
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wtf are you talking about? The guy is talking about what he experienced in the 70s. Are you seriously going to claim his memory is fucked and they were actually saying 'hot age' when they were saying 'ice age'? Regardless of what the scientific consensus was of the time, a pending ice age was reported in the mainstream media.
Don't have a tantrum. "Later on more work was done to get better global temperature proxies and it was decided that the trend was upwards." Anecdotal memories of an article or two on Ice ages in the Seventies do nothing to support that claim - It was wrong. nuff said
Support what claim? The claim that he had a memory?
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#49Pretend you are shopping for Christmas...
Re: The world in 1975 (2007)
#50> To fly on an airplane, you just had to walk through a metal detector, and if someone was there to meet you or say goodbye, they could go all the way to the gate without a ticket. Also, you could meet somebody for lunch at the terminal during a layover or have a meeting right in the terminal at a restaurant. I had a boss before 9/11 that had direct reports all over the country. He would sometimes fly out and have lu…
There was once an hourly air shuttle between Islip and DC. You just walked onto the plane and bought your tickets.