late 1970's / early 1980's

I think the mini-midi-maxi and hot pants and gauchos were already over by late 70's. I was out of college and working. Skirts were still short, but the micro minis were over. See-thru blouses fell in that time period, so did platform shoes. THat was prime season for disco--BeeGees, etc. But Urban Cowboy fell in there too--the first go 'round for country western dancing. The first video game: PONG! Fondue parties. Houses were decorated in earth tones--plaid couches, etc. Shag carpet was going out. Limited edition animal prints were popular. The first Star Wars movie came out, so did Close Encounters. Men piercing one ear (one side meant gay, the other meant "macho"). The Village People. CB radio was popular. Uni-perms ("afro" hairstyles for men and women). Leisure suits for men. Mustaches.Microwave ovens and crockpots and electric skillets were all big. Toaster ovens. Corning ware finally introduced some new patterns instead of just the little blue flowers. Coors starts being distributed east of the Mississippi. The original Halloween movie comes out.
The US bicentenniel in 1976. Smokey and the Bandit. Apple computers, pre Macintosh. Belly Dancing classes for suburban housewives. Aerobics and dancercise.

I'm the same age as you are (and also on this board last year. More interesting than the 40s) Except for Star Wars and the Rubiks cube, all that stuff like the pet rocks was before college. I first heard Queen on the radio in Jr. High.

I do remember that my freshman year, every guy in the dorms seemed to have the same poster of Farrah Fawcett Majors. You know the one, I'm sure. Backgammon was big then, too. There was punk and new wave and disco and hard rock during my college years, and the frat boys were also into Beach Music, but that may have just been in NC. Kind of white R&B, and you danced the Shag to it. People also danced the Hustle. There was the Bump, too.

I think this is also when the Rocky movies started. And either reggae got big, or this is when I discovered it. You could buy both leaded and unleaded gas.

Good speakers were huge, bikes were 10 speeds, and pot was sold by the ounce. Preppie girls wore Fair Isle sweaters, add-a-bead necklaces and a bunch of stuff from LL Bean. Suitcases with wheels were new, and didn't work well. They were pulled by a strap, and used to fall over.

I know this is sort of random, but it was fun remembering.

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World events? Soviet Invasion of Aghanistan...boycott of Olympics, Reagan elected, "star Wars", Russia the "Evil Empire"
The Iranian revolution, hostages in the embassy for a year, failed rescue attempt, Imelda Marcos' shoe collection...

Confutus
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2009 NaNoWriMo: Road Walker (in progress)

IBM launched their Personal Computer in 1981.
Before that there were computers, but no PCs.

To me, currently 50, the late 1970s were a period of what I would call confusion in hindsight; dressed as a belated hippie i was moving in my musical tastes in between Woodstock, reggae music and the brand new thing of punk and new wave. My hair style tended towards dreadlocks, yet my reddish blond hair wouldn't fit in the picture. Then there was jazz, as it always had been around for me from about the age of 4, thanks to my father, on whom I'm writing now. Suddenly, jazz got electric for me; Miles Davis's Agartha in my favourite hang-out struck a chord deep in me. And from that moment on a new world opened up; the Talking Heads, James Brown, U.S. hard core not quite yet, I only got to know this from the mid-1980s … So far, so good; it seems, at that time I was collecting the ressources for what I am now. Well, I guess at any given time in our live we're collecting resources, aren't we? Good luck in writing! Everyone's a winner, babe!

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Wow, that's making me go through the time machine. I remember the early 80's as fun. I worked evening shifts and then we'd all go to gay bars in downtown Seattle and often ending up at a friend's loft until 3 or 4 am. In 1985, things became less fun as rumors of the 'Gay Plague' hit the streets. I left to go overseas and when I return, all those all places were closed and the development of downtown took my friend's loft for condos.

Also in Seattle, the confluence of old hippy and new yuppie taverns - the Half-Moon and the Rainbow, where there were jazz, blues shows several times/ week. I saw Sun Ra there.

I remember it was easier getting health care. Before Reagonomics closed most of the US Public Health Service Hospitals, you could get low-cost in and outpatient care. I had to use this option one time for emergency surgery.

Have to think some more. I remember the personal stuff and the history, but the cultural stuff I wasn't much into. I was and still am, a cultural illiterate.

I'm trying to remember specifics that haven't been mentioned. What I do know for sure is that life was much simpler then. Of course, I was a graduate student so my life was simpler anyway, but everything was easier. Someone mentioned health care. I had my first child in 1982 and we didn't have insurance. The cost for everything was $1500, which we managed to pay from our university fellowship salaries. From the late 70s, before I got married, I mostly remember disco. I was living in a small college town but disco was still all the rage, everything from the BeeGees to Disco Duck. Oh, and what about leisure suits?

Jamilah Kolocotronis

Author of the Echoes Series books:
Echoes,
Rebounding,
Turbulence,
Ripples,
Silence.

Don't forget John Lennon being killed during that time.

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2009 Dark Inheritance

I graduated from college in 1980. Spent the Bicentennial year 1976 working for a Congressman on Capitol Hill so if you need any Washington, D.C. stuff, I was there.

It was the age of Jimmy Carter, Iranian Hostage Crisis, John Travolta in tight pants on the dance floor, the Bee Gees.

In 1977 I moved to California where Prop 13 passed in California defunding public education and ruining the future of the state's school children today. There were crazy people wandering and living on the streets because Ronald Reagan wanted to save money and not provide health care for the sick in mental hospitals. Literally, you'd see people with this big shiny round scars on both sides of their foreheads from where they had performed the lobotomies.

Indiana Jones, Star Wars and ET came out and totally changed the movies. Well, maybe not ET, but I remember liking it a lot. I wore bell bottoms in college, but then that turned into big shoulder pads (a la Dynasty) with bunny bows on silk-like charmeuse blouses to feminize the work uniform of skirted suits. Nancy Kissinger got in trouble for wearing fancy evening pants as she accompanied her Ambassador husband because 'women had to be women.'

There was still a lot of discrimination in the work place and when I applied for jobs, I was asked how fast I typed, unlike the men who graduated with lesser grades. They were groomed for management. And I also used carbon paper because Xerox machines were rare and expensive. Computers were the size of buildings and somewhere in the mid 80's I acquired my first answering machine, microwave and someone in 1990 had a mobile phone the size of a shoe box on the set of a movie I worked on. Wow! Hot stuff. Really, the phone was hot and that guy probably did get brain cancer from it.

There used to be pay phones on every corner that mostly worked. But I used to carry my own phone books around in my car because you never know.

Julia

Yeah... what they said but "gay plague" later called AIDS was coming into awareness before 1982. I was in college and working evenings tending bar. We went to after hours gay clubs after work. Some of my co-workers went to the bath houses and were talking about it. The only other thing I can add is cocaine was huge in the '80s with all social classes.

ATMs were new in the late 80s and tellers had to push a lot of us out the door of the bank to go try them out. So it was a challenge if you ran out of money on the weekend.

What the hell was a cell phone? The new thing was converting from dial to touch tone on landlines.

In school they didn't let us use calculators. We had to learn slide rules -- one part of the seventies and eighties I DON'T MISS AT ALL, thank you...

I was and am a child of the radio. (I love being able to plug a few words of a nearly forgotten song into a search engine and find the entire thing! I just love it!)

You have cut yourself a shape on the air -- Christopher Fry

What I recall of that era:

Marijuana was plentiful, at $35-40 per ounce. McDonalds had just introduce the Quarter Pounder, so the drug people I knew glommed onto the freebie shirts stating "I'm a Quarter Pounder Person" to announce to anyone that knew what was going on who they were.

Cocaine was starting to show up. I recall several gatherings where weed was being smoked, and offered freely to any that wanted to smoke, but coke was a more private affair, small whispered gatherings that moved away from the public eye.

I was listening to the radio more, but enjoying it less. I found "my" band, the Rockford, IL based Cheap Trick. Ted Nugent released his live Gonzo double elpee, putting a sudden halt to the hold disco had in our dorm room.

The Moonies went door to door, selling candy in our dorm.

I heard the elpee Ultravox! in this time period, and became aware that there was an entire music scene going on that was not on the radio.

Jonathan Edwards "The Shanty Song" (We're gonna lay around that shanty, mama/and get a good buzz on) was played every Friday at 3pm and again at 5pm. It was known as The Friday Song, which screwed me up when I was trying to find the recording.

Harry Nilsson, John Lennon's drinking partner, was still recording. Lennon died in 81. -- I had spent that night in a bout of heavy drinking and dorm room bull sessions about the fate of communism, which was still a viable system (we thought) and I declared that the founders of the movement were probably doing tailspins in their graves. When I got back to my room that night, feeling no pain, my roommate told me that "Lennon was dead." I answered, "Lenin has been dead for years."

Walter Cronkite was still CBS's anchor, and Goodnight Chet was always followed by Goodnight David.

The US embassy in Iran fell to a mob of people who were highly agitated for reasons that were at the time (to us, anyway) mostly unclear.

Gold shot up and through the roof, to such an extent that when a drug person stopped by my room one night and announced he "had just bought an ounce of gold," we actually thought he meant the precious metal.

Elvis was still alive, for a while, and it wasn't until his death that we heard him on the radio with any frequency.

Plaid slacks were quite the thing for a while, and a wide bottom at the cuffs was perfectly acceptable. I had a pair of elephant ear bell bottoms that made it look like I was wearing a dress.

Discos were full. Several men made their reputations by simply walking through the noise, lights and smoke (we could smoke in public places then) and simply ask every available female "Do you suck?" Rejection was meaningless as they would progress through the crowd until, eventually, they went home with somebody.

Herpes ended the whole disco scene in one fell swoop (at least in Kalamazoo, MI). There was a cover story on Time magazine about a new strain of STD that was incurable, and the next weekend, the places were empty. I recall that my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went to a place called The Light Factory the week before, and SRO was a misnomer, you could barely walk, let alone stand, and the week after the article came out, the place was empty. (I recall they served a terrible rendition of what they tried to pass off as a strawberry daquiri, and it was like a nasty, cheap kool-aid.)

Gays, lesbians and bisexuals seemed to be everywhere, but few noticed and fewer cared.

I read National Lampoon faithfully, and had seen Animal House one time too many, most of my out of control drinking binges came about from trying to live up to what was seen in that movie.

The drinking age was 18, until it was put to a vote, and most of us under 21 were too busy doing what would be illegal in a few months.

Gas prices were astronomical: almost 75 cents a gallon!!

My then girlfriend/now wife and I went out to see a movie with Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon called The China Syndrome, and that same week the world became aware of Three Mile Island.

John Anderson ran as a third party candidate after breaking with the Repulican Party, saying that we needed an energy policy that would include a 50 cents per gallon tax on gasoline, mostly to repair what he said was our nation's crumbling infrastructure. (There are some folks in Minnesota who would surely agree with that one!)

In this era, we were all "As mad as hell and we weren't going to take it anymore!"

Cars were losing their curves, and by the 80's everything from Detroit seemed to be box like.

WOW- thanks to everyone for your thoughts and memories. I might swipe that story about Lennon/Lenin, if I may, some time in future, if you permit? There were many things I had forgotten (Marcos' shoes, fondue, etc). My friends didn't do coke; they did grass and shrooms and a few other things I preferred not to know about. In the novel, I reference a professor who lights up and passes a reefer around during a meeting at his house; this happened to me and I was very wobbly about what to do because when my friends lit up I would leave, but this was an important meeting about a class project.

And you mentioned Rocky, but I don't recall anyone talking about midnight showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Now THAT was a cultural phenomenon in which I paritcipated. Usually I was "out of the loop," but it fit my sense of whimsy. One night we were on our way and my friend's VW Bug broke down; we sat in the rain wearing our newspaper hats and squirting each other with water pistols til our help arrived. And my dad (who never saw it 'til it came out on video in the 90's) used to trundle through the house singing "Toucha-Touch Me" in this adorable falsetto. Okay, so maybe I listened to the cassette way too much for anyone's mental health.

Again, ***many thanks*** to all who contributed. If you all need more diversion, feel free to post back here; I am in the 20k-30k dead zone and need inspiration as desperately as Elliot needed Reese's pieces. ;-)

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"It is perfectly okay to write garbage -- as long as you edit brilliantly." ~ C. J. Cherryh, quoted in _The I Love To Write Book_ by Mary-Lane Kamberg

Lennon died in 1980, December 8th.

Barbara/Myth Maker
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