Growing up in the 1970s

We published our entry on Growing up in the 1960s, back in 2019.  I had intended to immediately followup with one on the 1970s, but like so many others of our 200+ backlog draft posts, I didn't get around to it.  In this case, however, I thought I'd actually published it until I looked for it to tie into our recent post, The Voice of Generation Jones.

As noted, we did an earlier one on Growing up in the 60s, so it might seem odd to have the same topic here, but set in the 1970s.  I'll also note that this one is quite a bit longer as, well, I was older and accordingly recall a lot more.

The high school, where I spent what seems like a lot of the 70s, but which was in fact only three years.

I'll also note that as I've taken a slightly different, indeed worse, approach to this post than my one on the 60s, it duplicates part of that accidentally, which I realized when I went back in read it. As I noted in that post, decades aren't really defined precisely by the calendar, and when we say "the 60s" and the "the 70s" we're not really speaking about 1960 to 1969, and 1970 to 1979. For that reason, my earlier post actually covered the first four years of the 70s, and they're covered here a bit again. They probably had to be.  Indeed, in that post, I noted:

So I was in school in the last three years of the decadal 1960s, but in reality I was in school for most of the 1960s, as the 1960s really ran from our commitment of ground forces to Vietnam until Nixon's resignation on August 8, 1974.

Well, nobody grows up in one calendar decade, that's now the way things work. Given that, every human's youth spans at least two decades, if not parts of three. And, as we've already noted in that entry, the 1960s really run from 1965, when the US put conventional ground forces in Vietnam, to August 8, 1974, when President Nixon resigned, as I stated before.

What about the 70s?

Well, in this post, I've covered the early 70s again, probably boring my readers, to the extent there are any, but that sort of had to be done.  So this actualy covers all the way back to 1970, and because I was in high school when the decade ended and the next one began, it runs to 1981.

As I've also noted, I was born in 1963 and I was in grade school until the Spring of 1975.  I was in what was called junior high from the fall of 75 through the spring of 78, and graduated from high school in 1981. So I started off the 70s for discussion purposes here, in what culturally were the late 60s, as I've defined them, while I was in grade school (and the calendar 70s in grade school as well) and was in school for the rest of them.

Beyond that, the way I'd calculate it, I'd put the end of the 1970s in November 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected President. Things after that had a much different feel, in every fashion, to them.  So I'd begin the 70s with Nixon resigning and end them with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan.

A short decade if you will.  And not a particularly good one.

My post, however, runs more or less to 1981.

In the last post, I noted that the politics, and perhaps implicitly, the larger cultural zeitgeist of the 1960s didn't really penetrate its way into the lives of us kids as we were in grade school, something I also noted in my recent post on Generation Jones.  The 70s were different, perhaps simply because I was older in the 70s.  Or perhaps because the things going on were so big that they were unavoidable.  Or maybe both.  Because of that, however, I have to set things a little, I've decided, as if I don't, I'll end up interjecting it here and there in a confusing fashion.

Before I move on, in my earlier post on the 1960s, I noted some dramatic depictions of childhood, and I'm going to do that again here.  This is not to suggest that depictions of prior eras are prefect, but sometimes they can lend a lot to understanding an era.  In the thread on the 60s, I posted this:

That grade school experience was a lot like the one depicted in A Christmas Story, which is a bit odd if we consider that the movie is set in the 1940s and based on the author's actual recollections of growing up in the 1930s.  I'm not sure what that tells us, and the answer to that question might in part be found with more recent generations and whether or not they find the movie strongly recalling their own childhood.  If that's the case, it means something completely other than what I think it might here.

While its an aside, in terms of depictions of the era featuring childhood, I'd also note that The Wonder Years, which was set mostly in the 1970s, was remarkably accurate for the era.  Other depictions roughly set in the era hit and miss.  Stand By Me, set in rural Oregon in 1959 would precede these experiences by about a decade, but they are remarkably accurate for our lives in rural Wyoming in the 1960s.  The Sand Lot, set in 1962, doesn't seem familiar at all, however.

In reading that, I note that I mentioned The Wonder Years again in my recent The Voice of Generation Jones post, noting the following.

means that it was really all the way into the 1970s before people like me were aware of what was up, and had a feeling about it, and that came with the backdrop of the 1970s.  Indeed, the experience is depicted really well in the television series The Wonder Years, which is specifically set from 1968 to 1973.  That means that it involved children who were older than I was, but the setting was pretty accurate.  And keep in mind, that I'd place the high school graduating class of Generation Jones as starting at 1976, whereas The Wonder Years is dealing with the class of 1974.   I debated where to put that line, but 74, the year after the active participation in the Vietnam War for the US ended, would be another good place to put it.  All in all, it has the feeling right, and the characters would have a little more of the late stages of the Vietnam War whereas folks in my line would have a little more of the rampant inflation of the 70s.

In any event, The Wonder Years does a really good job of showing how the "60s Generation", the real Boomers, were observed from Generation Jones from the outside.  We didn't participate in the events of the 60s, but they were background.

I'm noting that again as that television drama concluded with high school, and even though it is set in an earlier era, it does catch a lot of the feel of the early 70s very well.  That doesn't carry over much, however, to the late 1970s.  I don't know of anything that does, frankly.

Wyoming in the 1970s

The alley behind our house in 1976.

Wyoming of the 1970s was wide open.  And I don't mean that in the wide open spaces sense, which would of course be true, but rather in the rough and ready, rampant crime and decadence sense.

Seems like a pretty broad statement, to be sure, but it's true.

Wyoming has always been that way to a degree, but the 1970s brought in an oil boom that was only comparable to the ones that roared in during World War One and World War Two.  Like the one from the Great War, it came all of a sudden and because of war, although oddly enough, not an American war, or at least not directly because of one.

From the early oil age up until some time after the Second World War, the United States was not only a major petroleum producer, which it always has been, but an exporter as well.  It is again, in fact. But it stopped being one in the 60s, or perhaps in the 50s.

That was the same period, of course, during which the post-war economic boom flooded the US with automobiles. Americans used to love cars, right back to at least the Model T, and their love for automobiles came out in full flourish after World War Two.  Between 1946, when cars really came back into production, and 1960, cars grew in size, shape, and horsepower.  In 46 when they really came back onto the market, the relatively fuel efficient 6 cylinder engine dominated in American autos. By 1960 the V8 was king.

If you want a visual image of what sort of status cars had obtained by the 1970s, a good look at that is presented by American Graffiti, which was set in the early 1960s.  It's weird to think of, but the movie, which is inaccurately associated with the 1950s, depicts a fairly typical American summer night of the 60s and 70s, with young people burning gas in the American version of what used to occur in Mexican towns in the evenings.  It's a sort of peculiar proto courting ritual of parading, but in the American case it involved automobiles.  More on that down later.

The king wasn't fuel efficient, however.

The 1973 oil embargo hit the nation like a punch in the face and soon thereafter oil exploration in the West took off at the boom level.  Oil booms, like any boom, have a major impact on the target of the boom and nearly every town and city in Wyoming was impacted.

In the case of Central Wyoming, what that meant is that not only were there a lot of jobs in the oil industry, but a lot of oil workers came in.  They tended to come in from regions of the country where oil exploration never really ceased, principally Texas and Oklahoma.  So Wyoming had a big influx of Texans and Oklahoman's.

It also had a big influx of young men with lots of cash some of whom were rough characters.  People might like to imagine that every male of the 1960s, by which we'd include the early 1970s, was a peace loving hippy, but that's a long ways from true.

Indeed, one of the real changes from the 1960s to the present date is that in the 1960s the majority of the American workforce was engaged in manufacturing, and therefore the majority of the workforce consisted of laborers.  That's something that's really easy to forget in the Flower Child vision that we have of the era, but it's a fact.  It may be the case, and indeed is the case, that the GI Bill set the United States on the path towards being the most college educated nation in the world, but that process was ramping up in the 60s, it wasn't complete.

Indeed, as we've noted here before, and one of the topics will touch on below, having a college education in the 60s and the 70s was really a ticket into the white collar world.  Part of the reason for that frankly was that the majority of Americans didn't have college educations.  In the 60s and 70s it was still the case that a lot of Americans went right from high school to work, and to work that they planned on being in for their entire lives. As we'll discuss below, that was really changing, but as we're just setting the scene right now, we'll get back to it down below.

Following on, however, not only was it the case, in the 60s and 70s, that a lot of Americans had no college educations and expected to work in labor their entire lives, it was also the case that a lot of American men still dropped out of high school to go to work as well (again, more on that to follow).  Dropping out of high school was universally seen as a disastrous thing to do, but it was still done enough to not be uncommon.

I point all of this out as the economic times were changing, but they hadn't fully changed.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s it was still possible to join the armed forces with no high school degree, for example.  And it was also perfectly possible to enter industrial employment.  Lots of men did just that.

That's distinctly different from the world as it is today, and that plays into Wyoming's nature at the time.  Employment in the working end of oil and gas is still an almost 100% male job today and its still one that's very physical.  It still attracts its share of rough folks. But it also, today, is mostly occupied by individuals who have graduated high school with some having gone to college.  Almost 100% of them have had training, if they've lasted in the field, beyond that, and therefore nearly any long term oil and gas workers is educated in a way that they were not in the 1970s.

Oil and gas work is dangerous today, but in the 1970s, it was much more so. Being on a drilling rig in 1975 resembled being on one in 1945 more than 2015.  People didn't test for drugs.  Companies didn't worry about roughnecks drinking on their off hours.  They do now, and in spades.

The reason that I note this is that the oil boom of the 1970s was wide open in a wide open state in a way nothing has been since.  Young men making huge salaries flooded in.  A lot, probably most of them, worked hard until the collapse of the early 80s and then went on to something else, often college as they were there when I was. But there was a selection of them that spent a lot of time whopping it up, to put it colloquially, and not always in a fully safe, and certainly not always in a fully legal, manner.

Wyoming, up until the late 1970s, had a really  high tolerance for certain types of vice anyhow.  Gambling was technically illegal (and I don't really regard it as a vice) but was widely tolerated everywhere, and openly in some places.  Indeed, that had long been part of the local culture.  One famous downtown bar in Casper ran sports stats behind the bar specifically so a person could place bets there.  A newspaper corner store in downtown Casper which was an institution for decades not only sold milkshakes, malts, and newspapers, but pornography and accepted bets.  The Sandbar district of Casper had been an epicenter of illegal activity for decades.  Prostitution was conducted openly in the area for many years and was still a feature of the district when I was a kid.  Liquor laws existed, but even in a state in which the drinking age was 19 years old the lower age limit was really winked at.

All of this is noted because in an atmosphere in which the region already figured that vice was a personal matter, really, an oil boom provided a market for the existing vice to really expand.  And it did.

It was a lawless, violent decade.

And a decade of turmoil everywhere

That was in Wyoming, of course, but there were things going on in the country and globe, other than the Arab Oil Embargo, that provided the background hum to the decade, and which, at the age we were then, you were aware of in ways that we were not aware of when we were younger, in the 60s.

One of those things was the messy conclusion to the long Vietnam War.

I've already addressed the war in our thread on Growing Up In the 1960s, but by the early 70s, we were aware of the war in one way or another.  For one thing, it was on television news every night.  Indeed, the first time I can recall watching something to do with the war was when the United States and the Republic of Vietnam invaded the Parrot's Beak in Cambodia, which happened in April 1970.  As I recalled in our thread about that:

It surprises me to realize that at the time I was six years old and in 2nd Grade.  Indeed, that simply amazes me in recollection.  I've long known that I recalled this event, in a certain way, but I'd associated it with being older.  Not six and almost seven, and not as a 2nd Grader.

In 1970, the year I was in 2nd Grade, I was in my second year of attendance of a grade school that was later sold by the school district in a sale that I still question, even though I have no real reason to.  I'll forgo commenting on that, at that time grade schools here worked the way that they do most places. They had a territory.  Later, in a controversial move that I still very much question, that practice was altered so that there were no home schools, leaving parents to struggle to place their children in a district housing over 60,000 people, as they also juggled their daily lives. But that's another story.

Looking back, I realize that I entered public school in the Fall of 1968, completing the year as a newly turned 5 year old.  So by extension I completed first grade having just turned 6 in 1969 and I would turn 7 just before school was let out in 1970.  In April and the first of May, 1970, I was still 6.

We 6 and 7 year olds didn't think much about the Vietnam War.

Our house in about 1958. This was before my birth.  My mother is to the left of the house, the only ones my parents ever owned.

The events of the war that followed that one I can also recall.  I recall Richard Nixon, for example, breaking into nightly television to inform the country that Hanoi harbor was being mined from the air in May 1972.  By that time it was clear that the country was working on getting out of the war, and the Paris Peace Talks were a source of constant news.  When they arrived upon a supposed settlement of the war in January 1973, that was big news, and it was huge news when American POWs held in North Vietnam began to arrive home that following month.  I can recall that happening.

Still, even at that stage, the Vietnam War was really background news to our early lives.  The 1973 Yom Kippur War stands out as nearly as memorable, from that period.  It wasn't until 1975 when the war really started looming large to us, or perhaps to me.

1975 fits in with the 70s and how individuals of our generation recall it very strongly.  In 1972 the war was ending and Nixon could look forward to a triumph.  In 1973 Watergate hit the news and everyone, including young people such as me, then age 10, were very much aware of it.  Nixon resigned in 1974 in disgrace, something we were also aware of.  In 1975 South Vietnam collapsed, and the Communists won, an obvious disgrace to our reputation.  For a time I followed the advance of the North Vietnamese Army on a National Geographic wall map, until it became simply impossible.

In 75, I was 12, and by that time I was becoming very aware of the world.  

The following year, 1976, was the nation's Bicentennial, a huge event I'll note more on below.  I was in junior high by that time.  Jimmy Carter became President that year, something which even at our young ages was somewhat surprising as he was from the South, which hadn't contributed a President since Woodrow Wilson, who had come into the Oval Office via Princeton.  Inflation had become rampant following the Vietnam War, and Carter rode discontent over the Vietnam War, Watergate, and inflation into the Presidency, and then proved unable to do anything about inflation.  During his administration Iran fell into a theocracy and our embassy was seized, which we proved unable to do anything about.  The hostages were released when Ronald Reagan was elected, with that election effectively brining about the end of the 1970s.

That took me, and many others, from our early childhoods right up to the cusp of high school graduation.  In that period, we went from full involvement in a major war, to our defeat in it, to an economic disaster, and national embarrassment.  Locally, we went from an oil heavy and agricultural economy to one absolutely dominated by the oil industry.

So, what was it like to grow up during those times?

School Days

In my prior entry on the 1960s, I really started off with school.  I've been a bit late to do so here.  Having said that, for somebody of my age school was the dominant feature of my life, as I was in school the entire time.  So we'll start there.

At the start of this decade, 1970, and this era, 1973, I was still in grade school.  I completed that in 1975 however, and was then off to junior high. That's why I set the background above.

I noted in my earlier entry that I had not been happy to go to grade school, but I was happy to get to junior high.  I guess it just seemed that I was growing up and therefore glad to be out of grade school.  By that time, grade school was too set, it seemed to me.

In that era, unlike now, we had no choice of public school.  We went to the one that was in our district.  Such choices as there were, were very slight.  Some rural kids, who would have gone to a different junior high, opted to attend the one I did, but they were few. Their election was provided on the basis that they had to travel in anyhow, and at least in some cases, as young as they were, they drove themselves in.  One of my junior high colleagues, for example, drove a ranch flat bed truck into junior high every day in 9th Grade, the last year of junior high.  Some other rural kids attended an extra year at one of the grade schools, which oddly had an extra year of school for kids who lived near it, although they didn't have to attend there if they didn't want to. Finally, the Catholic school extended to 7th and 8th grade, like a Middle School, which seemed odd at the time but which in retrospect put them ahead of the game as the public schools later went to that model. Those kids didn't transfer into to the junior highs until 9th Grade.  I knew some of them, somehow, particularly the girls, although I'm not sure how.  They were exotic in the sense that their education had been different than ours, and moreover, their smaller numbers and concentrated nature made them close-knit.

The old St. Anthony's School.

I should note here that the current phenomenon of "homeschooling" or multiple private schools simply didn't exist at the time.  You either had attended a grade school based upon the geography of where you lived, or you'd gone to St. Antony's Catholic school. Those were 100% of the options in so far as we were aware.  There are other options today, but I have no idea when they came about.  Some may have existed then, but if they did, they're student base must have been tiny at the time.

St. Anthony's, as I noted in my thread on the 60s, is a school that my parents would have sent me to, but it was full and couldn't accept more students when I was a kid.  So, a major life path, really, was determined at that time.  My oldest friend today I met in Kindergarten in grade school.  I stayed friends with him when he went to a different junior high, based upon geography. We were assigned to schools based upon where we lived.

As we were assigned districts, we got the demographics of the district, and during an age of gigantic expansion of the town's population.

In the case of the junior high I went to, it included a big patch of the central area of the town.  It seemed like the districts were set out like the French Tricolor, just big districts north and south.  So in our case the area went south to the mountain, but omitted the wealthier areas in the west, right through the center of the town and downtown, and took in all of North Casper, which was the poorest area of the town.

I noted in my post about growing up in the 1960s that the geographic boundaries of the districts made our grade school economically balanced, for the area. This was even more the case for the junior high, and it would be again even more for the high school.  In both instances, because of the way the districts were drawn, rich and poor were taken in. And because North Casper was included for both, it also meant that both schools included minorities such as there locally were.

North Casper was home to most of the African Americans who lived in Casper at the time, and most of the African American kids went to the same junior high and high school that I did. Because of economics, most of the Hispanic kids in town also went to the same junior high and high school. This probably had the odd impact, at the time, of making the other schools nearly 100% white.  For Wyoming, our high school was incredibly diverse, which wouldn't make it like a modern inner city school by any means.  Most of the black and Hispanic kids went to the high school, most of the Catholic kids who had gone to St. Anthony's, and all of the ranch kids to the west of town.  This would have meant that the other high school was whiter and richer, FWIW, than ours, which isn't to say that we didn't have kids who came from the top and the bottom of the economic ladder.

As noted, the town was wide open and both schools had their share of rough characters.  Going to junior high was a little like walking through No Man's Land even though I didn't live very far away.  There were always rumors that gang fights were going to break out, although they didn't, in junior high.  Having said that, junior high was the first place I saw leg manacles, with a kid being taken out of the school chained up in that fashion.  

Whether any male got out of junior high without a fight is an open question.  I did not.  I was jumped by a kid when walking home from school with a friend and, for the first and only time in my life, beat somebody up.  The assailant was bested in the fight, but I lived for some months after that with the fear of a rematch on my way home.

The violence of the era, region and school had seemingly even spilled over to the faculty to a degree, or maybe this just reflected more of an old-fashioned approach to things.  An English teacher in once class kicked over a desk/chair combo of a kid who was leaning back in it, not even missing a beat in his lecture.  A well liked gym teacher was legendary for his willingness to go toe to toe with students if called for.  But it was an art teacher who was most notable.

In art class I recall him throwing a pair of scissors at a student.  As I was at the same table, we all had to duck to take cover.  He was almost my home room teacher and I can recall him lighting a pressurized stream from a spray can and pointing it at a kid, who had to back way up to avoid it.  Most memorable, however, was the time when another kid was bothering me about fighting after school.  When he asked what was going on, I simply noted it, and he nonchalantly said "oh" and "take it out in the hall".

The other kid simply dissolved.  He was a bully, but small, which his saying something as I'm small.  Not being personally keen on fighting, I also couldn't publicly shun a fight, so I stood up to go fight.  The other kid did not, and complained that the teacher couldn't do that, as he was a teacher.  The result was a public humiliation from the teacher.  The kid never challenged me again.

Now, much of this would get somebody fired.

High school was considerably less violent, but even there, in my senior year, which would have been 80/81, there was a bizarre riot which resulted in shots being fired.

The remarkable thing about that event was not that somebody had access to a firearm, as everyone did.  That was a universal at the time. Lots of boys drove to school with rifles and shotguns in their trucks so that they could go right out hunting after school.  No, what was surprising about that was that it was an AR15, in the pre AR15 era.  Nobody was injured.

I don't think anyone was arrested either, as the rioters scattered when the police showed up, or so I'm told. I wasn't there at the time, as I was already attending college classes in my senior year of high school.  But that says something also.  Not only was the era simply more violent, not much was done about it when it occurred.

The riot was a bizarre byproduct of a homicide in which a member of our class who had been held back several times, but who was still below the drinking age, was shot at the BT Club.  Trade union clubs could get special liquor licenses at the time which allowed them to stay open after bar hours had passed.  This fellow as at the BT Club when he got into an altercation with a small illegal alien who probably didn't know what was going on. The argument was over a girl.  The immigrant went out to his truck with the other fellow challenging him, retrieved a pistol, and shot him dead with a single shot.  That resulted in a sort of series of odd events centered on race, even though the fellow who got shot had always been a friend of various Hispanics in our class.  The police arrested the shooter, but he was simply deported.

No charges resulted either when a member of our class shot and killed her father.  He'd been molesting her for years, and apparently he was starting to molest her sister.  It was a rural killing and the police simply turned a blind eye.  The police turned a blind eye to a lot of things in those days.

One thing a lot of people turned a blind eye upon was drinking. The drinking age was 19 years old at the time, almost shockingly low in comparison to 21 years of age now.  19 meant that a lot of establishments turned a blind eye to 18, and of course with the voting age just raised to that age recently, and with the draft only barely over, 18 seemed plenty adult to many adults. For that matter, so did 17 and 16, and things were far loser in this area than they should have been.

Some of that may have reflected the influx of drugs during the 1960s, oddly enough.  For the most part, most of us avoided drugs at all costs and would have nothing to do with them.  But it seemed everyone knew of somebody older who had a problem with drugs.  Many adults may have sort of figured that if the kids were drinking beer, which they pretty much stuck to if they drank, they weren't doing drugs.  Anyhow, beer was readily available to kids in their mid-teens and kids of 17 and 18 getting drinks at a bar wasn't unknown by any means.  For the most part, most of them didn't get into trouble while doing it, although one of my grade school friends began a descent into alcoholism, and ultimately drugs, which killed him at about age 40 around this time.

Junior high and high school, as The Wonder Years, set in this era, portrays tend to be the age during which boy meets girl and vice versa comes on strong, or at least the myth of it comes on strong.  It's interesting to note, looking back, the degree to which that wasn't true and may not really be true now.

The entire time I was in junior high and high school I lacked a girlfriend, which isn't to say that I didn't have any dates, but it was very darned few.  Indeed, of the five boys I was really close friends with in high school, only one of them had a steady girlfriend for a time in high school.  Of the remaining four, or I guess five of us, probably only me and another had some, but darned few, dates. Another lived the embodiment of that portrayed in American Grafittis, so he definitely had plenty of female contact.  The other two probably went the entire time without even a single date.

Considering it overall, if I expand that out, there was a circle of girls that was associated with our circle of friends, in sort of an intersecting circle of friends sort of way.  Of those girls, one of my friends dated one of those girls, who was also my cousin.  Of the remaining five girls in that circle, and one who was ancillary to it, I'm the only one who dated any of them ever, and only once, that being the sister of my friend Jim.  Otherwise, while these girls were our friends, we never asked a single one of them out.

It's odd in retrospect as at least one of them was practically in both circles of friends and was very smart and witty.  She's single to this day.  Another was very pretty and lively.  Nobody apparently even thought about asking them out.  We thought about asking other girls out, but not ones we really knew.  It probably says something about how immature we really were.  Whether they ever thought about us asking them out, and it was men who asked out girls at the time, rarely the opposite, remains a mystery save for one, who had a definite crush on the American Graffiti character, but who did not have reciprocating feelings for her.

On the boy girl topic, I'll note here that something that was very much different is that if less in this area was going on that a person might otherwise suspect, overall less was going on in every sense.

My graduating class was about 500 in number.  Of that 500, I know of, or knew somewhat, four who became pregnant while in high school.

One of those girls was married, and her pregnancy wasn't an accident.  She'd married a welder while a junior, and then later became pregnant. That seemed pretty odd at the time, but not so odd that we treated her oddly.  If not a close friend, she was a classmate of ours and two of us had chemistry with her, and she was in our associates in that class.  We had high school conversations with her that sometimes ended in odd ways when she talked about going home to cook dinner for her husband, something way outside our experience.

Of the others, the results were kept so quiet that we didn't know until after high school in two cases.  As it was, both pregnancies were very near the end of school which made that possible.  Both girls married the fathers.  The final example was rumored to have ended in an abortion, which was a rumor that circulated while we were still in school.  The girl was a very nice girl, but she never looked the same after that.

Having said all of that, I realize that I've omitted an example, also from this time period, in which two sisters in the same family both were pregnant by the time they graduated.  I don't recall either one of them being there after they became pregnant.  One was an excellent swimmer and on the girls swim team while I was on the boys.  She was also a real beauty.  Her brother ended up getting a girl pregnant while we were in high school as well, meaning that 100% of the children of that family had this experience in high school, something that must have been mortifying for the parents and which, in retrospect, I have to wonder ended up with some sort of visit from the authorities.

At any rate, you never saw children with children in high school at the time. And I can't recall seeing a single girl who was obviously pregnant.  In contrast, if you go to a high school graduation now, seeing an obviously pregnant girl isn't a surprise.

One thing before I move on this, the one member of our circle of friends who had a steady girlfriend was dating one of my numerous cousins.  That is, one of my cousins was his girlfriend.  I have a lot of cousins and quite a few of them were in high school at the same time as me.  As a result, we tended to know where he and my cousin had gone on any one date.  In a sense of frustration over that, at one time he told me that "if you (i.e., me) marry" a member of another very large family, but one I wasn't related to, "you'll be related to everyone in the county".  Oddly enough, when I did marry years later, I in fact married a girl from that family, although I certainly didn't know her back in high school (she's a decade younger than me).

The key, I suppose, to being able to date a girl was to have an automobile.  Indeed, that was and is the key to being able to do anything in the West.  I had one at age 15, a full year younger than the legal age to drive.  It was the start of my long and sometimes unfortunate association with motor vehicles.

My first car, a M38A1.   The fender damage pre dated my ownership of it.

My first car was a 1958 M38A1 Jeep.  It was cheap as it had engine problems.  In retrospect, I'm amazed that my father let me buy it, as Jeeps are really dangerous.  But then, as I'll note further below, we did a lot of things that parents wouldn't let kids do now.

I don't remember now how long I had the Jeep, but I think it was a couple of years.  It was a pain and really needed a new engine, which I couldn't afford, so I was living out the line in Iris Dement's song Our Town when she sings about her first car "it turned over once, but it never went far".  Before I graduated from high school I'd sold it and had a 1974 Ford F100 which my father helped me line up from a traded in truck at my uncle's Mercury dealership.  It was a well-used pickup I had only for a year before trading it in on a Dodge D150 of the same vintage, but fewer miles, but that's getting solidly into the 1980s, so I'll pass on discussing it here.  At least I think I didn't have it until 1981, but my memory could be wrong on that.  The only thing that causes me to wonder is that I think I can recall cleaning my Dodge D150  to take Jim's sister out on a date, in which case I must have had it when I was still in high school.

My 1974 Dodge D150.  This replaced my 1974 F100, which I don't have any pictures of.  My father went on to own this truck after me.

Automobiles meant freedom, and rural freedom at that. From age 15 on I've never been without at least one 4x4 vehicle, and frequently with more than one.  Having a 4x4 meant that after school, of if twas summer work, or during the weekend year around, I was free to wonder which I often did, normally with friends. We hunted a great deal, but otherwise, we often just wandered around.

Some of that entailed gathering at Jim's house which, in retrospect, must have been a pain for his parents.  We'd all gather there, and then often just wander around.  Also in retrospect, I was a lot more social at the time, if not very social overall, than I am now.

No mention of cars can be mentioned without mentioning "the strip".  The strip was a stretch of connected streets which ran either clean across town or nearly so, depending upon when you drove it and who you drove it with.  It must have been massively irritating to full adults, but on Friday and Saturday nights, teenagers drove back and forth on the strip. Every homeschooler did it to some degree, even those who weren't into "cruising".  Most of us were not, but we all did it somewhat.  No matter what a person might say of it, a group of boys in a pickup truck on the strip were hoping to meet a group of girls and, things working the way they actually did, you were really hoping to run into girls that you actually knew.  You probably weren't actually going to. We never did.

On this topic vaguely, as the topic is American Graffiti like, both junior high and high school had school dances.  The junior high ones, which I never attended, were called "sock hops".  The one high school one I remember attending was a simple affair with recorded music from a loud music system.  It was in the gym, and for whatever reason, the gym lights were set to incredibly dim.  It followed a football game and coming out of it we were challenged to a fight by a rather high student who was cruising the strip.  My friend Joel talked our way out of the fight, which I was certain was on, through a rather complicated conversation involving scheduling the fight like a social affair, which the opposing would be combatant was unable to schedule into his rather busy schedule.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention clothing, although that's really a fairly trivial thing overall.  Looking back, however, appearances changed a lot in a decade.

As a kid, I didn't become very concerned with clothing, and not that concerned then, until I was in junior high.  In grade school we wore pretty basic clothing, and as noted in our earlier thread, our parents made no distinctions between school clothing and other clothing.  You had clothing. The clothes I wore to school in 1971 were the same ones I wore hunting for fishing in 1971, which were the same ones I wore to Mass on Sunday.  If something really special was going on, and by the early 70s some of my older cousins started to get married, I had a "nice" shirt and a "nice" set of trousers, which frankly weren't very nice as my parents weren't very style conscious in the first place and it being the 1970s, the fashions were hideous.  "Nice" trousers were some hideous poly blend in a weird pastel color.  I still recall having a pair of dress polyester powder blue trousers.  Massively ugly.

Regular trousers were blue jeans and once we got into junior high, they were Levis.  In the very early 70s the jeans were still bell bottom, but starting when I was in junior high, so in the mid 70s, Levi 501s came back in style.  I can still recall the first time I saw a straight leg pair of Levis at school, and I went right home and asked my parents to buy me a pair.  I've never liked bell bottom jeans and still don't.  Some girls, usually girls who were affecting a slightly wild look, kept wearing bell bottom jeans through high school however, with the giant "elephant bells" still around to a very limited degree as late as 1981, when I graduated from high school.

Girls at a pep rally, 1979/80.  Soe of these girls are probably wearing early Rockies, but others are wearing Levi 501s.

For much of the 70s girls, however, if they wore jeans, also wore Levi 501s. The practice was to get a pair that would fit over their hips, and then sit in a bathtub with them, and then wear them until they dried out.  They "shrink to fit" after all, and they'd do just that.  As late as the mid 1980s a lot of college aged women still wore men's 501s even though they aren't form fitting for women at all unless something like that is done.

Same pep rally, every gril wearing jeans.  Woman sitting is probably a teacher.  One girl is wearing elephant bells.

The 70s were the start of the "designer" jean era, however, and manufacturers realized that women, for whom they really didn't make jeans, were the natural market. By the late 80s a lot of high school aged girls wore "Rockies", a brand of jean manufactured for women.  No matter what they were wearing for trousers, however, the 1970s, or at least the second half of the 70s, were the age of trousers.  Girls very rarely wore a skirt or dress to school.  Nearly never.

Clothing was changing for our parents as well, and by the 70s my mother normally wore trousers in the winter, made for women, or shorts in the summer.  She had affected "dress jeans" which were a popular early 70s style for women which never looked good, and which she retained as a style for the rest of her life.  My dad had gone to clip n ties by that point in time, which were in vogue, and in the early 1970s he still a sports coat and tie to his office every day.  If I had to wear a tie, which was very rarely, I just wore one of those.

Shoes, in the early 70s, were like shoes for us in the 60s. In the summer, we wore canvas basketball shoes. If we were lucky, they were Converse shoes. Usually they were Keds.  As soon as the weather turned poor, we switched to boots, and they were always, at first, Red Wing childrens' boots, just like the 1960s.  

By the time we were in 6th Grade, however, hiking boots had come into vogue, and soon we had "waffle stompers", i.e., hiking boots of the type that some mountaineers still wear and which hey all did then. Check out the foot gear in The Eiger Sanction or Where Eagles Dare, and you'll see what I mean.  I got a pair of them right about that time.

Also, about that time we evolved away from canvas tennis shoes, but at the same time, athletic shoes started the long expensive evolution that they have been on ever since.  Basketball shoes really improved and many of us had those in junior high.  I had a high top pair, which still existed at the time.  By high school, however, running shoes had come in and were actually cheap. We all adopted those as a result.  Dress shoes were another matter and we usually didn't have them outside of having a reason to have them.

Unlike now, I can't recall kids wearing cowboy boots in junior high and ranch kids really didn't affect a  different style than city kids.  By high school that changed, however and you'd see cowboy boots at school.  You'd see cowboy hats too, but they were strictly and exclusively worn by kids who were really from ranches.  It was limited to ranch kids alone.  They were cowboys and they looked the part.

Even their hair was shaggier, I'd note, than cowboys before that or after.  It was a shaggy era for the most part, although not for me, as I've never liked having longer hair.  Most of us didn't have long hair, I'd note, but longer hair than we had later or earlier.  

I didn't part my hair then, and I don't know why.  I wasn't the only one.  I think that this was because, oddly enough, we retained some of our childish appearance a lot longer in the 70s than was done prior to that, or after that.  Looking at our old photos, we looked like kids when we were in high school at least up to our senior year.  When my own kids were in high school I was shocked how much older, or more adult like, kids looked like then, and they went to the same high school. And my father's high school class, also at the same high school, looked very much like adults when they were there.  Even teh classes of the 1960s, there just before we were, did, as the more formal style of dress that preceded the 70s was still the high school norm.  The 60s may have broken formal dress down, but it didn't really hit until the 1970s in wider circles, so there we were with t-shirts and the like, looking a few years younger, in context, than our fellows who came before and after us.

Indeed, in junior high and high school we were a t-shirt wearing bunch at the time.  Not everyone, to be sure, but a lot of us and even when we weren't wearing t-shirts, it was often pretty close to a t-shirt.  I hardly ever wear just a t-shirt now, but at the time I did, and that wasn't uncommon.

The schools tried to enforce some rules, with little success, based on the commonality of t-shirts.  There was a rule, for example, that prohibited t-shirts with beer brand names on them, which I do recall being enforced.  Halter tops and tank tops were not allowed either, although I remember at the junior high level that being routinely ignored.  In junior high we were even more child like in our appearance than in high school, and the rule against halter tops struck everyone as odd probably in part because in those grades the girls had a very childlike appearance and the reason for the prohibition wasn't obvious.  Girls hardly ever wore skirts, so if there was a rule there, we didn't know what it was. Boys at that time never wore shorts to school, like they do now, so if there was as rule on that, I don't know what it was either.  For that matter, boys almost never owned shorts unless they were tennis players.  I think of my male friends, exactly one wore shorts in the summer.

Outwear was heavy at the time, and it always amazes me the extent to which this is dispensed with now.  We didn't go to school without coats.  I walked to school for that matter, even when in high school.  And I wore a wool sweater cap in the winter as that well, and often wore gloves if it was cold enough.

Unlike now, nobody carried their books in backpacks. We just carried them.  We did use our lockers, which later generations of students don't seem to do.  One of the advantages of being on an athletic team was a second locker in the locker room, and we used both, staging books where we needed them to be so we didn't have to carry them as far.

Our high school education wasn't as good as it would be in later years, and it probably wasn't as good as it had been in prior ones.  When we were in junior high and high school the system was swamped with students for one thing, but it was also the victim of relaxed standards.  People complain about relaxed standard now, but having witnesses it first hand, the standards have climbed dramatically since 1981.

In junior high and high school I had both some really good and pretty bad teachers.  I suppose that's always the way, but by and large they were better than not.  Some were really excellent.  A few were still around, and they were the good ones, when my son and daughter were there years later, but then one of the gym coaches in junior high had been a legendary football coach when my father was in high school.  There was some continuity.

One significant change at the high school that had come on only recently, but which we didn't really appreciate, is that JrROTC had only recently been made an elective.  This occurred just before I went into junior high, so I missed it by three years.  I didn't take it. The mandatory nature of the program was a casualty of the Vietnam War, even though it had remained a requirement during the war.  None of my friends took it, myself included.

A military like atmosphere was contributed by the high school football coach, however, who ran his program as if he'd been a Drill Instructor, right down to requiring the high and tight hair cuts common to military recruits and starting off the season at the National Guard's Camp Guernsey.  I'm a small person and I didn't have any interest in football at all, so I didn't participate in that.  I was a competitive swimmer at the school, however, in an era in which its program was bigger than when my son later was in it.  Even then, however, we fared poorly compared to the across town high school.'s team.  

I had a heavy aquatic association at the time, something I abandoned when out of high school, which was brought about by my parents worrying about a childhood asthma condition. They had reason to be concerned about it, and it continued on up until just about my high school graduation, although it diminished significantly over time.  Swimming was part of the reason why. Swimming is good for asthmatics as it develops the lungs.  I not only was on the swim team at the time, but a swimming teacher and lifeguard as well, holding the certificates necessary to do that from the American Red Cross.  My son later reprised the same job.

Being a lifeguard is something that's popularly depicted in movies and film, for some reason, and not surprisingly its pretty much nothing like its popular depictions for the most part.  It's actually fairly tense as you worry about missing a kid in trouble, and if you are a lifeguard you are going to see kids in trouble.  One area that is realistic, however, is the faked drowning by a member of the opposite sex, which is actually more irritating than cute in real life.  It's one thing in movies like The Sand Lot, but in reality if you are a 16-year-old lifeguard you aren't really super keen on having to pull the same 14-year-old girl supposedly in trouble in the pool multiple times, but it's going to happen.  That's just embarrassing.

While I missed, intentionally, ROTC I experienced something like it in the Civil Air Patrol.  They recruited at the junior high level and I joined it, figuring I'd do three years in it and then JrROTC.  I did do a little over three years in the CAP, but none in JrROTC as mentioned.  

The CAP was interesting as it involved airplanes, which I loved, and it was at the airport, which had been a World War Two training facility.  I was in it for three years.  

The Civil Air Patrol still exists, but this was during the Cold War and therefore society worried a lot less about these things being really martial in nature, as opposed to now, so it had a real Jr.ROTC feel to it.  We were issued a mix of old uniforms, the Air Force's current dress uniform, but also OD fatigues that dated back to the 1960s.  We also were issued leftover stuff from the Vietnam War, including, for small stature people such as myself, Tiger Stripe" jungle fatigues and tropical combat uniforms, none of which were very suitable for Wyoming but which we felt looked cool.  Also, they issued us jump boots, which the Air Force issued to Air Policemen and which, again, due to my small stature, I was an accidental beneficiary of.  My jump boots were my first post Redwing high topped boots, and Corcoran jump boots are a very well constructed boot.

Whatever my initial intentions were, I didn't follow the CAP into high school.  I'm not sure when I dropped out of it actually, but I think it was that summer before high school.  Just stopped.  Outgrew it, I suppose.

I also outgrew a hobby of mine that's slightly connected, with that being building plastic models.  I had a huge collection of them.  I built them all the way through grade school into junior high, and then just stopped.  I tried to resume it from time to time, but I never could muster up the interest anymore.  There are plenty of people who do this hobby as adults, but I guess I'm not one.  I still admire the well done ones, and I help the kids build a couple, but that's the limit of my post junior high experience in this area.  My last ones, I'd note, were extremely carefully done.  I didn't keep them when I moved to go to university and through most of them out, which I regret.

One thing that I didn't throw out, however, were Avalon Hill, that is hex and counter, type strategy games.  It's in the 70s I took them up, and I still have them.  I still love them too, although its hard to find anyone to play them with.

Sounds of the 70s.

The band Blondie, which I was a big fan of in the 1970s.

One of the things that's common about recollections from growing up is to recall the music of the era.  Indeed, any work recalling the 50s and 60s tends to be thick with music.

I was only 7 when the 60s ended, so I have very little in the way of personal recollection of the music of that era, outside of which was played at home.  I naturally have more of the 70s, with some aspects of that which are more than the routine background noise of the era type recollections.

In our city, radio was AM radio up until the late 1970s.  If there were FM stations, nobody listed to them, and a brief check into it suggest that the first FM station wasn't licensed until 1977.  That'd make sense ot me because, as a high school student, we started listening to FM as a new thing.

Prior to that, we had two or three AM stations.  The most popular one was a general station, KTWO, that covered everything, news, sports, and music.  When it played music, it played popular music.  I can vaguely recall hearing Downtown on that radio station, but when is another matter as the tune dates to 1964.  I can actually also recall  hearing Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze being played on it.  A check on that station's history shows that it first went on the air in 1928.

Another station in town, KVOC, played only country music. The country music of the 1970s was freaking awful, and we rarely listened to it, thankfully.  That station went on the air in 1946, but a check on its history confirms what I thought about its history.  It only switched over to country music in the late 60s.

Country Music isn't the indigenous, if you will, music to the West.  It was imported by oilfield workers who came up from Oklahoma and Texas, and therefore their regional culture impacted the local sound.  We started hearing awful Country Music about that time and on into the 70s, although I didn't know a single person of my generation who listened to it.

When you are young, of course, you listen to the music your parents listen to.  My father wasn't very interested in music at all, and his small record collection featured military music, i.e., marches, which he liked.  He rarely played a record, however.  My mother liked music more, and her taste was somewhat more varied.  She liked Elvis Presley a great deal, but also Tom Jones, and Sonny and Cher.  Sonny and Cher had a television show, which was one of the very few things she ever watched on television.  They both watched The Lawrence Welk Show, which was part of the surprising background music of the 60s and 70s, and of nursing homes now.

In grade school I learned to play the trumpet and I continued on playing it in junior high.  I was not great at it.  I learned a little guitar in junior high as I wanted to learn it.  My mother had picked up guitar on her own and had both an acoustic and electric one.  My son and daughter later learned to play guitar and became very good at it.  I can't say that I ever did, showing a lack of self-discipline, I suppose.

The switch to guitar probably showed an evolution in musical taste that really started about the time I went into high school.  At some point me and my friends picked up listening to New Wave rock music, which was definitely something of our time.  We really liked it.  That lead to oddly enough to my being the music reviewer for my high school newspaper when I was a junior, which in turn meant that I started listening to a lot of Rock & Roll in that capacity.  About that time my interests widened a bit to where I was listening not only to bands like Blondie and the Boomtown Rats, but out to more classic acts with a little more history.  I became a Linda Ronstadt fan at that time.

But it was listening to "hard rock", which I never became a fan of, which lead me to Jimi Hendrix, as I kept seeing references to him. Hendrix was a shocking revelation as he was a completely different sort of musician.  Upon hearing Hendrix, I became a diehard fan, which I remain.  Hendrix lead me both back to the rock of the late 60s, some of which I became a fan of, but more importantly to the Blues.  The Blues was like Hendrix, once you listened to Muddy Waters there was no going back.

It was that experience that changed my view towards music entirely  I don't know the extent to which most people become audiophiles of some sort, but I definitely did.  That's waned somewhat due to, well life, but my taste in music was rapidly fixing, although more would be added in the 80s, which I'll address when I get to that.

All that tended, I'd note, to confirm that Country Music was just junk, an opinion I've only diverted from slightly as in recent years I've picked up a fondness for very early, pre 60s, Country Music to some extent.

One thing I'd note is that if we weren't listening to Country Music, we hated Disco, which came in during this time period.  Just hated it.

Before moving on, one thing I'd also note is that our school had a juke box in the lunchroom.  It had a wide selection of music on it.  The music I recall us causing it to play included Blondie's Heart of Glass, which I was a huge fan of at the time (and still like) and Steve Martin's King Tut.

Television

One of the things about Generation Jones that's been noted is that they grew up with a television always in their house.

That's not actually true in my case and I can remember our very first TV.  My mother bought it, in the 60s, as a gift for my father.  It was certainly a gift that he appreciated as the TV tended to be on when my father was home, no matter what, except very late in his life when that changed for some reason.

Prior to that m father turned on the television when he came home and turned it off sometime prior to going to bed.  He usually read before he went to bed.  For most of the 70s, maybe all of the 70s, we had only three television stations and when things like HBO and the like were first added, we didn't add them.  It seems to me that at some point the options expanded, but I don't really remember it very well.

That's probably as television was really my father's thing, more than mine.  And indeed the 70s would reflect a decline in my interest in television, which has remained pretty permanent.

Early in the decade, for me, television meant cartoons on Saturday mornings and then, on weekdays, reruns of McHale's Navy or Gilligan's Island until my father came home and switched to the news.  But by junior high that was pretty much over.  From there on out, the television I watched would have been the 70s sit coms that my parents watched, or my father had on. MASH was a show that I liked and followed at the time.  Other shows my parents watched, and we liked included The Bob Newhart Show, WKRP In Cincinnati, and the Mary Tyler Moore Show.  I still like all of those shows today, although only MASH, which I rarely catch on television, is commonly rerun.  Rhoda and Alice were television shows that were on, but which I didn't like then, and still don't.  All In The Family was a show that was hugely popular at the time, but apparently it wasn't with my parents as they very rarely ran it, and frankly I don't like it today.

Police dramas were enormously popular then, like they remain now.  That's in fact been the case since the 50s.  My father always liked them, and therefore they were often on.  The private investigator series The Rockford Files was one that my father liked, and I did as well, and still do.

60 Minutes had its heyday int the 70s, and it was a show I did look forward to watching.  That probably developed my taste for news shows of that type, although it came on more strongly in the 80s.

The 70s was the dawn of the miniseries, and the first one I really recall was Roots, Alex Haley's drama detailing the history of African Americans.  My recollection is that we were encouraged to watch it at school, which I know that I did. Lonesome Dove is probably the only other miniseries I've ever watched, beginning to end, although there are certainly many others, and the 70s featured others.

70s television also experimented a lot with themes of the times in a positive and negative way.  Television shows featuring women and African Americans as major characters were common, although African Americans had made their entry into television in that fashion in the 60s.  At the same time, however, it was the era of "jiggle television" which riffed off of the Sexual Revolution and which portrayed women in 30 minute series time slots mostly as window dressing. The funny thing was that with both of these developments in the 1970s it was impossible not to know what was being done or attempted, which is sort of a rare example of being aware, even when young, what the media is doing while it's doing it.  People were supportive of trying to incorporate minorities into wider American life, and where it was done on television, such as with Sandford and Son, it was widely liked.  There were some complaints about jiggle television shows, however, although surprisingly not much.  The portrayal of women in them would not be very much appreciated today, and perhaps for that reason those shows aren't played often as reruns today.

None of this is particularly revealing except, looking back, I probably knew as much or more about television of the 70s than I do about it currently.  As noted, the television tend to be on, but I didn't tend to be the one turning it on.  Sports were very frequently on, and as I really didn't care for football, it disassociated me quite a bit with TV.  I’m not a manic opponent of television, I just didn't develop into a huge fan of it the way some people are.

One television item I should note, due to my time frame, is MTV.  I'll just note it, however.  I can remember the very early broadcasts, but MTV's first broadcast was in August 1981.  So it's outside the time frame of my focus here, and definitely outside the timeframe of the 70s as I've defined them.

Nostalgia for the 50s, Looking back on Vietnam

Something that unmistakably a part of the 70s, was nostalgia for the 50s.

50s nostalgia really got rolling with the release of American Graffiti in 1973.  The film itself is actually set in the cultural 50s, not the actual calendar 50s, as it takes place in Modesto California in 1962, something that often surprises people about.  Undeniably a great film, it set off a near worship of the 1950s.

Looking back on the 50s had actually started some years earlier, surprisingly.  Sha Na Na, the 50s reprise band, existed in the 60s and had played at Woodstock with a high tempo look back at the music of the 50s while dressed in 50s "Greaser" style.  But it was American Graffiti that really ignited the fire.

American Graffiti is a bittersweet, and actually somewhat dark, movie if considered in depth.  That it ignited the 50s fire isn't surprising in some ways, as it portrayed the cultural 50s as the last good American era. Even in the film there are constant hints that the era is dying and we know that the characters in it are all about to enter the real 1960s and their adult lives forever.  This is made even more plane in the final sequence which depicts what becomes of the characters.  And there are even a few minor hints that not everything is right with the world within it, although most things are.  Depicting a world before Vietnam, before widespread drugs, before the Sexual Revolution and before the Counterculture, Americans embraced it even as it lamented that it was all about to pass.

College sock hop, 1948.

American Graffiti resulted in televisions Happy Days, which stripped the 1950s from any downsides at all and really celebrated it.  Americans were happy to fully embrace it, both in watching and in appropriating its characters.  Even the "bad" character from Happy Days, the Fonz, wasn't bad at all, in comparison to the gang characters in American Graffiti, who really were.  It was a sanitized artificial portrayal of the 50s, but the country loved it, and soon bits and pieces of what it portrayed, such as the aforementioned "sock hops" were in vogue.  50s music, then twenty years old, came back into style and new bands playing that style, such as the Stray Cats, became hits.

At the same time, the country struggled with how to recall the Vietnam War, and did so in a manner much different than it would do in later eras.  In 1978 Hollywood released The Deer Hunter, which showed the war as debased and debasing, ending with a crushing rendition of God Bless America.  The same year features a similar theme with Who'll Stop the Rain and The Boys In Company C, none of which has a really cheerful view of the war and only the latter of which can be regarded as really fully supportive of the men who fought the war.  Apocalypse Now came out the next year, again showing the entire war and even the United States as basically debased.  While the movie MASH and the series were set in the Korean War, and based on the novel set in the war, they were really both about Vietnam.  A big change had occurred from a depiction such as that featured in The Green Berets.

All of this contributed to a sense of national disillusionment, and reflected upon it as well.  And they all held, save for the Boys From Company C, that the men who had served in Vietnam had come home permanently debased by it.  Veterans of the war were distrusted, adn often didn't mention that they'd been in the war at all. The military was looked down upon more than it has been at any time in the country's history.

Indeed, this reflected itself even here in Wyoming, where there had always been support for the war and the highest volunteer rate in the nation.  As noted, high school ROTC was no longer mandatory at the high school that had it. But more than that, it wasn't popular.  Classified as a physical education credit, most boys in the school avoided it like the plague as it took on a sort of pansy atmosphere to it and was regarded as populated by boys who were afraid to be in the rough and tumble PE that the school featured.  And to some extent, that reputation was deserved, although not fully as it also contained kids who knew that they were going into the service after high school.

When PE was rough

High school physical education was in fact something else at the time.

By avoiding JrROTC we were signing up for a Lord Of The Flies scenario that was played out in front of the female student body.  It wasn't pleasant.

The year I went into high school, the school had adopted PE electives for the first time. It didn't work as some were under subscribed.  To make up for that, we were forced into sections we hadn't signed up for.

I drew gymnastics and boxing.  It was a combined class, i.e, you learned gymnastics, and boxing.

Not too surprisingly, the kids who wanted to be in gymnastics and boxing were models of physical fitness and had been at one of those two athletic endeavors for years.  The rest of us conscripts had not.

That was bad enough, but the class was full of girls who only had to do gymnastics.  Most of them either had signed up for it, or were naturally good at it.  Most of them were also really good looking, as they were physically fit.  This was a source of some anxiety for those of us who weren't good at gymnastics or boxing.

But not as much anxiety as joining JrROTC to avoid PE would have been.

High school boxing, by the way, was a thing.

Our school had the C Club Fights, in which boys could challenge each other to box.  Matches were held during school and after it.  

One more way that there was a Lord of the Flies aspect to school back then.

After a semester of regular PE, I joined the swim team.  This wasn't to avoid PE, I just did it as I was a swimmer and my parents wanted me to, rightly.  The team practiced twice a day, really early before school and then again after, and being it exempted you from being in regular PE.  It also meant you got an athletic locker.  Both developments were very welcome.

The Bicentennial

Well within that time frame was the 200th Anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence.  It was a big deal.

I was in junior high when the Bicentennial arrived, and it was definitely a topic that was focused on in school, but not only there.  It was country and culture wide.

Indeed, looking back, it's amazing how widespread and genuine the celebration of the 200th Anniversary of American independence was. Cynicism of the type so common now simply didn't feature in it.  There were no retrospectives about forgotten figures or those who were oppressed or on the other side. It was universally accepted and celebrated that the struggle for independence was a just cause, and every community did something to mark July 4, 1976.

In some ways, it's hard not to wonder now if the big celebration, beyond being simply genuine, was relief for a lot of things that had gone recently wrong.  We'd lost in Vietnam.  Some people were already wondering if we'd left prisoners behind.  We'd evacuated Saigon just a year prior.  Inflation was out of control.  The nation was dependent upon the Arab nations for oil, and that wasn't looking good.  Traditional western culture had taken a beating from the young (but not as young as we) and that had been supported, in some odd ways, by the Courts, which had elevated themselves to their current status.  Roe v. Wade, which wasn't something that was on my radar at all, had been decided three years prior.  People needed a break, and the Bicentennial provided it.

On July 4, 1976, I went up on the roof of my parent's home so I could see the fireworks fired off from the golf course, which wasn't all that far away.

Church

In my post on the 60s I noted that the 1960s featured Vatican II, but, as a young kid, it didn't figure into what was going on with me, consciously, at all.

This is pretty much true I'd note of the 70s, and then not true as well.

Like a lot of the great hinterlands here and there, it's not as if Vatican Ii and the "spirit of Vatican II" hit and everything was different. The big thing that changed, and which people often note, was that the last of the Latin Mass forms yielded to the new Mass, which is now called the "Ordinary Form".  That happened in my lifetime, but frankly I don't remember it at all.  The only Mass I remember is the Ordinary Form.

Indeed, as the Church just experienced some turmoil over the old Latin Mass, I looked into it a bit and was actually stunned how different it is from the current Mass. Quite frankly, I like the current Mass better.  I don't know how people felt about it at the time, but I don't remember anyone really getting upset about the change and expressing an opinion about it at any point in the 70s.

What I do recall is that some Priests began to make some physical changes to the structure of our Church, and people did not like that at all.  Much of the focus on that was monetary.  I.e., people had paid for things in the Church, like the confessionals, and the altar rails, and now they were being taken out or reduced.  This went on for some time until one Priest, who later would be a very beloved one in the Church, made some changes which just went too far and people made it very well-known they didn't like them.

Be all that as it may, one of the things that strikes me is that you don't really know what you've lost, sometimes, until things have long passed by.  I'm not pining for the Latin Mass, but within the last decade one of the Priests began to restore things in the Church, and to the Ordinary Form of the Mass, that had been long omitted.  It was then you realized how much you missed them.

Along these lines, the 70s were an era in which the Latin Rite introduced some things that have been grating on people's nerves ever since. The Guitar Mass, for one thing, came in, which people either love (my mother did) or intensely dislike (I intensely dislike it).  And the 70s were marked with a certain superficiality that came into the Church in an effort to follow up on Vatican II's desire to re involve the laity.  For some reason some felt in the United States that following that laudable goal meant introducing superficial music and superficial artwork and things like that.  Even as a young person that era when that was done, you felt it to be superficial.  Much of that is now thankfully gone.

An additional thing that occurred was that Catechesis became rather poor, something that's now a common item of conversation in the Church itself.  It went pretty far in a poor direction and its taken a long time to overcome it.  Thankfully younger Catholics are often very well self Catechized, thanks to the Internet, and know an enormous amount at a much younger age than we could have.

There's no denying, however, that the 70s caused problems in the Church that still exist in the United States. The same problems crept into the Protestant denominations as well, and to some extent Protestantism crept into the Catholic Church.  The Church is struggling with those problems now, but then an ongoing struggle exists in many places over the rise of the Baby Boomers and their refusal to yield where they gained in the 70s.

All in all, however, at the time, I frankly noticed only a little of this. The appreciation of these things came much later.

The Great Inflation, the Reagan Recession and the sense of National Despair.

If the Bicentennial as a big, genuine, national party, people otherwise weren't feeling too much to celebrate about in the 1970s and the economy provided a big part of the reason why.  Ironically, in Wyoming, you could simultaneously worry about the economy a great deal while not suffering the unemployment problems that existed elsewhere.

The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo combined with the drawdown from the Vietnam War wrecked the economy while causing constant rising prices from that date forward.  That helped the government inflate its way out of the Cold War debt that had been wracked up, but it ate away at people's savings and their ability to just get by.  A sense of desperation set in quickly and efforts by President Ford to address it, after Nixon's downfall, failed.  Jimmy Carter came in, and his efforts failed as well.  In Wyoming roughnecks went to their jobs on the rigs, and geologists went out in the sticks, in droves, while people complained about the price of gasoline at the pumps and bread in the stores.

Even for the young, it was impossible not to notice.

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1976.  He had the inherited Carter economy through 1977, but he threw the country into an intentional deep recession as soon as he could.  It was a calculated economic move and one that worked.  Droves of people lost their jobs, but inflation ended, and has stayed dead until just recently, now revived by Biden's inflationary economic policies.  People had seen their savings inflated away, and now they saw their jobs going out the door.

In Wyoming, it took longer, but come they did.  Old refineries started closing in Wyoming in the 70s. They'd existed in droves, but the oil boom of the 1970s focused attention on Gulf Coast refineries which were constructed on a much larger scale.  Smaller refineries all over Wyoming started to close.  By the late 1970s, oil exploration was slowing down as prices were stabilizing and demand decreasing, due to a depressed economy.  Uranium production, something that had boomed in Wyoming over the prior decade with a large-scale interest in nuclear power, began to decline as well as the public panicked over the Three Mile Island incident.  Coal, which had also boomed, was slowing down.

In the 70s the state had become completely dependent upon the extractive industries in a way that exceeded anything it had experienced before.  As late as the 60s agriculture remained a major economic player, but the state went whole hog into the extractive industries based on a seeming belief that they couldn't fail.

This meant that for those of us growing up in the era, for the first 3/4s of it there was a knowledge that no matter what happened in school, an oilfield job was there for you if you wanted it.  People dropped out of high school and went right to work on rigs.  Lots of high school aged boys saw futures as welders or truck drivers.  No matter how poor a person's high school education may have been, there was a job waiting for them.

It was a rough and tumble economy that was also much more dangerous than the one that exists today. Accidents were common. Crime was everywhere in every town and city.  People simply acclimated to it.  People were injured or killed routinely, and it was all fairly accepted.

That crated a real old-fashioned boomtown atmosphere everywhere in the state, but it was combined with a feeling that things weren't going well overall.  Inflation was eating away at everything.  Old American standby industries, like the automobile industry, were facing competition from Japan.  

That contributed to a certain sense of despair.  I can recall a lawyer friend of my father's, commenting on everything that was going on at the time, expressing the opinion that he'd lost faith in democracy.  Lots of people had.  It seemed like there were no political or economic answers.

Uncertainly has a demonstrated psychological impact on the young.  Generation Jones turns out to be a lot like the Silent Generation, and that's a lot of the reason why.

If there was a sense that there were jobs out there, there was also one that everything might go away, and that it would be a disaster.  People in high school didn't worry about "finding themselves" or plan for an adventurous life.  They hoped to find jobs that would last in an economy they knew.  A lot of them, in the 80s, were about to get the opposite.

The Disaster

One thing that definitely colors your experience of your formative years is a personal disaster.   And the 1970s, on into the 1980s, featured a significant one for me and my father.

I've referenced it here from time to time, and I'll mostly only reference it here, rather than get too detailed.  But in the 1970s we suffered such an experience.

Now, as Americans have become more touchy-feely over the years its become more and more popular to attribute all ones ills and whatnot to a difficult early experience.  I think the observation of my friend Keith C that such an experience might also be responsible for a person's positive character in adult life to be just as valid.  Indeed, I think the really tricky early experiences may be those that are in no way exceptional, but just debasing. There are probably a lto of those.  Anyhow, while this deals with a tragedy, while living it it idn't really dawn on me that it was exceptional in any way until it was really in its later stages.  Otherwise, tragic even though it was, I would have and did regard myself as living a normal, and even a lucky, life.

A severe illness afflicted my mother.

It's hard to describe it as it was never accurately described by anyone.  Her physicians couldn't explain it early on.  Later explanations may have been right.  That would make her recovery miraculous, and that is in fact how I regard it.

When I was about 13 something started happening to my mother.  She was a highly intelligent person and always extremely opinionated.  Around that time, she began to lose her moorings.  It's impossible to explain if you haven't experienced watching something like this.  At that time, when I was 13, she would have been 40 years old.  Perhaps because of her age, much of what was occurring with her, and she knew that something was occurring herself, was attributed to a "change of life".

At that time mood swings, and things of that type, were often attributed to menopause in women.  And it is a big physical and psychological event.  I don't hear nearly as much, however, about this anymore.  Anyhow, she started suffering from this fairly severely, with it going form mood and physical problems to outright hostility to me and my father.  She was always a fit person, but her physical condition began to decline as well. As this occurred, her mental outlook radically deteriorated over time.  Over time, she became demented, but aggressively so in a way that was frightening to be around.  An element of subtle aggressive violence crept in, although it was destructive to property, not us personally.

As I've raised this, I'll play it  out and note the progression so that its not some sort of weird cliff hanger.  It started, as noted, around 1975/76.  It advanced, in retrospect, failry rapidly, but she was still more or less okay, most of hte time, for most of my junior high years.  By high school this was no longer true and it accelerated during that time frame, but oddly by that time we were acclimated to it.  It grew worse, markedly so, in the early 80s and declined to the point where she was on death's door by 1986.

I prayed in that latter stage that she recovered.

In 1986 she fell so ill that we had to have her taken to the hospital by ambulance.  Within a matter of a couple fo weeks, in the hospital, and without explanation, she'd dramatically started to recover.  She was released from there inot a nursing home, where she continued to recover for several months.  She was let out with my father's consent at that time, dramaticaly recovered.

How do you explain that?

Well, without intervention outside the temporal sphere, you can't.  The doctors could not.  Indeed, it was directly contrary to their prognosis.

To play this out until the end, she was never 100% okay, but by the time she recovered she was much more like the person she ought to ahve been at that point.  My father died, at age 62, in 1993, so that meant their last few years together were much better than that long decade plus had been.  After his death, she was okay for awhile but then began the mental decline that so many experience in old age.  It was never as bad, however, as what she'd been through.  None of that she ever remembered, which was a blessing.

Anyhow, I don't look back at this time period much in regard to it and think about it.  People really do block such things out of their mind.  When I tend to, I tend to remember how bad it got and just block the whole period out as universally uniformly bad, but in reality it was a progression.  Even as late as high school she could be perfectly lucid and rational.  It was early college, really, if I think about it where things got perpetually bad.

Be that as it may, this certainly was major impact throughout my entire teens, and beyond that.  And over time what it meant, and by over time I mean by the time I was in  high school or even late junior high, that my mother was less and less of a figure in my life and my father more, and frankly I was more independent than normal for my age.  One of my close friends who has known me my entire life claims that I was never a child, and in some real ways, this is true.  It's partially true that as an only child, I was around other children less than other people with siblings, but it's also true as starting in my teens there were a lot of things I just took care of for myself.  In comparing other people's lives, I often note this to be the case.

So growing up in the 70s, I reached my adulthood quicker than others really.  You don't realize it while its happening, it just happens, if that happens to you.

Feral

A process that had already begun but which was amplified in the 70s was going feral.  As soon as I had wheels, my own wheels or anyone else's wheels, I was out in the country, hunting, fishing or just wandering around.  My parents made no effort to preclude me from doing this, and frankly as my father had the same inclinations, I was perhaps acclimated to it by my family. 

I was already an established hunter and fisherman well before I ever drove, but having the ability to drive liberated me from the schedules of others.  There was no turning back.  Only necessary schedules precluded me from being out all the time, something that has continued on to be a factor.  Indeed, one thing I didn't appreciate then that I now know is that the schedules of full adulthood were massive in comparison to those of the teenage years.

That nature of my character must have been apparent to others in a way that wasn't to me.  I recall the highly eclectic mother of one of my friends loaning me the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang simply because, as a feral person, she'd figure I'd identify with the characters.

Looking forward

About the same time I became fully feral, I started to have to look to my future.

As a kid, and into my early teenage years, my love of history, which was a feature of the characters of both of my parents, had made me think that I wanted to be in the military.  Indeed, the love of the outdoors did as well, as I figured, in my childishness, that soldiers worked mostly outdoors.  Something after my mid-teens really began to change that, probably right about the time I left the CAP and entered high school.  It wasn't anything to do with the times, but rather having a deep attachment to the wild and my state.  I was changing my views on what I wanted to do.

I decided for a time on becoming a game warden, but my father warned me that there were a lot of unemployed people around with wildlife management degrees.  My father so rarely gave advice of this type that I really headed it and took it off my list.  All in all, taking counsel of his advice here was in retrospect probably a mistake, and it certainly was a road not taken at the time, but the opportunity to do that did twice resurface, so I can't blame him too much.

I'll note that I can't credit the school much here at all.  We had "guidance counselors" employed at the school, but they were completely worthless.  You needed their signature that you'd been counseled, and my enduring memory of my counselor is that, like Major Major in Catch 22, you could only see him when he wasn't in.  I ended up going to school really early one morning so that I could secure his signature, and remember his crestfallen look when he rounded the corner and saw a student waiting for him.  He signed my form.  No counselling was offered.

My  mother had been employed as an oil and gas secretary in the 60s and early 70s, and she loved the petroleum field.  Indeed, an uncle of hers had been an Albertan millionaire on oil and gas exploration prospects, a career he took up after having spent his early youth in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  She encouraged geology, and ultimately that's what I decided to pursue.

I actually started college before I graduated from high school.  The odd thing on that, looking back, is that I was nervous and not optimistic about college and university.  I'd never really learned to study in high school, and I was skeptical about my ability to get through it. But that's for another post.

Related Threads:

Growing up in the 1960s

The Voice of Generation Jones

Additional key labels I couldn't fit in this long post:

Alcohol, Automobiles, boxing, Civil Air Patrol, Clothing, Crime, hobbies, Iranian American Conflict, JrROTC, Music, Radio, Standards, television, The relationship between men and women, 1950s, fishing, Hex and Counter Games, hobbies, hunting, Military, Models