The 80s, myth and reality?

[HadleyH1]

I was in my 20's through the 80s. Meh. It was just another decade we lived through. No more or less ridiculous than those that have come and gone since. Hindsight will show us the excesses of the current time as well.

Agree.

Every decade has it good and bad.

Nothing is all good or all bad.

That's life.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Horrible hair, too much glitter and too large shoulder pads!

on the other hand..

some lovely music and .....

" Tear Down that wall Mr Gorbachev! " the immortal words of Ronald Reagan! Amazing!!!

That's the 80s in a nutshell for moi!

Politically, I was far different in the 80's than I am now. I think that if 80's Me encountered 2017 Me he'd cry out in agony, "Get that #@!##@ old hippie outta here!" This really isn't so much a comment on politics as it is on how aging has changed me. You're supposed to become more miserly, reactionary, and intolerant as you become older, but I think that I have morphed to the other extreme. So be it: I can live with that.

All I know is that I'm puzzled as to why a lot of people seem to throw around the label, "Champagne Socialist" as if it's a bad thing. They accused the late John Mortimer- English barrister and author of the delightful Rumpole of the Bailey books- of being that: he replied that he rather thought of himself as a "Bollinger Bolshevik." I won't champion any political view with this post... but I reserve my right to a vote of confidence for a good bottle of bubbly. Tying this in, Perrier-Jouët was my "drug of choice," if I had one, during the 80's.

 

[AmateisGal]

And how could I forget the farm crisis of the 80s...my family went through it after all! Maybe I just blocked it out.

It was a lean time for us. Mom baked bread and would freak out at the grocery store if we spent too much. We tried to cut corners wherever possible. We had a farm sale and the bank tried to foreclose on our land, but we somehow staved them off - not sure how. One Christmas we had no money for presents, so my mother's sisters bought presents for us. I think that was when I got my Cabbage Patch doll.

It was a tough slog. Many other farmers - some our relatives - had to get out of farming altogether and sell their land.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Well, as a child of the 80s, I have a few comments; graduated high school in 1989.

-Firstly, so much of what's in the media is honestly cartoonish. Sure, all the girls at Knoxville Central had big hair, and I remember the strong odor of Ultra Net outside the girls' bathrooms. All told, though, there was very little of the garish neon that so characterizes period pieces in the media. Pegged pants and stonewashed jeans, sure, but neon and stuff like in The Breakfast Club was mainly just in the movies.

You mean like these cartoonish neon monstrosities?

That's how normal people typically dressed in the 80s, yet there is this image that we all walked around in lime green leotards with purple hair. The 80s lags behind perhaps only the 50s as suffering the most wild revisionist history of everyday life.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Thank you so much for all your comments!

 

[green papaya]

The early 1980's was similar to the 1970's, disco was still around but phased out quickly by 1981, they still had disco techs with the big glittering ball like in Saturday Night Fever, but not for long.

by the early 1980's break dancing and hip hop type music was more common in the mainstream or outside the black community

it was common to see young people doing their fancy break dancing moves on the street corners of US cities

 

[Doctor Strange]

As a child of the idealistic sixties who came of age in the hedonistic seventies, I found myself lost in the eighties as society swung back hard to the Right, and suddenly it was all about money and status. The entire Reagan era was perplexing and disturbing to me, and I - not for the last time, alas - felt that the society I knew and was part of had just evaporated.

OTOH, it was also the decade during which I found my career, met and married my (now ex-)wife, and by December 1989, we were pregnant and looking for a house. So I finally grew up during that decade.

As far as the music, movies, TV, technology, clothes, etc... There was both good and bad. I'm not big on making sweeping generalizations about that kind of thing. And I'm pretty immune to the faux-nostalgia for that decade that's so in vogue now (e.g., Stranger Things leaves me cold). The eighties were an interesting transitional period, but no less or more so than the decades before or after.

Trenchfriend, I'm sorry if that's not the kind of retrospective observation you wanted. But to paraphrase something once said by pretentious ad exec Miles Drentell on thirtysomething (one of the quintessential eighties TV series), "The decimalization of history and experience is overrated and misleading."

 

[LizzieMaine]

it was common to see young people doing their fancy break dancing moves on the street corners of US cities

A genuinely beautiful day in the neighborhood...

Mr. Rogers transcended all decades. Wish he was here for this one.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Mr. Rogers transcended all decades. Wish he was here for this one.

Fred Rogers was after my own ankle biter years. We had Miss Frances (Horwich) and "Ding Dong School."

And even though she was a professional educator with a doctorate in primary education, the same sort of crass product pitching that both Buffalo Bob and Captain Kangaroo engaged in evidently wasn't beneath her.

 

[scottyrocks]

but did so behind a fixed, plastic-coated, cap-toothed, blow-dried rictus smile.

Tell me anyone didn't immediately think of Erik Estrada. haha

If there's one bit of pop-culture effluvia that really captures what the eighties felt like in America, it would be the comic strip "Bloom County," by Brooke Breathed, who, using a variety of human and animal avatars, perfectly mirrored the empty sleaziness of the decade.

I was actually thumbing through the first bound volume of his strips, Loose Tails, a day or so ago. Yes, very '80s with many political references, by name, and what the overall feel was like in the country back then.

 

[3fingers]

View attachment 96419

Fred Rogers was after my own ankle biter years. We had Miss Frances (Horwich) and "Ding Dong School."


View attachment 96422


And even though she was a professional educator with a doctorate in primary education, the same sort of crass product pitching that both Buffalo Bob and Captain Kangaroo engaged in evidently wasn't beneath her.

I watched Romper Room. Unknown to me at the time of course, it was apparently the Stepford wives do preschool. All Romper Room teachers across the country were carbon copies of each other as much as possible. And Miss Jean had no compunction regarding shameless peddling of the RR swag. Do be a do bee.
Given the time frame we were in, maybe she actually said do a doobie. Hmm.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yep, Romper Room was a franchise deal owned by the Claster family, and all Romper Room "teachers" were sent to be personally tutored by Nancy Claster, the original "Miss Nancy." The Clasters made a fortune licensing the format, and an even bigger fortune from the Romper Room merch.

Our local Romper Room was telecast live from a studio in Bangor converted from an old industrial garage, and it was common on warm days for them to leave the big doors open to provide ventilation. As the story goes, a very large bumblebee flew into camera view as "Romper Room" was on the air, and Miss Whateverhernamewas covered with a quick ad-lib -- "Oh look! Mister Do Bee is here to visit us in person!" That satisfied the kiddies until, just out of camera range, a stagehand swatted Mister Do Bee into oblivion with a folded newspaper. The screams could be heard in Brewer.

"And don't forget, boys and girls, tell your mother to get milk from Pleasant Hill Dairy, the milk with the PhD!"

 

[Paisley]

As on the TV show Dallas, there apparently were oilmen taking helicopters to work in the early 80s oil boom:

Nowadays, Dubai is the poster child for petrodollar extravagance, with oil-rich sheiks spending billions on crazy projects like man-made islands and indoor ski resorts in the middle of the Arabian Desert. But trust me, Dubai has nothing on Houston in the early 1980s. On my first morning living there, I woke up to a loud, hive-like buzz above my apartment near Buffalo Bayou. Half asleep, I walked out onto my balcony and watched dozens of helicopters whirring above the choked freeways of the city....They were there in such numbers because the city's oilmen all wanted to live like James Dean in the movie Giant. They built custom mansions on ranches the size of small nations and rode thirty, forty, even a hundred miles into town every morning by air. Source: Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon, MacMillan, 2015.
​

It all came crashing down with a glut of Saudi oil in 1986:

The hubris earlier in the decade dissipated and worry set in as most Houston banks also failed. More than 225,000 jobs left Houston, which led to 200,000 vacant homes. According to one report, there were 30,000 foreclosures in 1987 in Harris County. Source: "How Houston Dealt with the Oil Bust in the 80s" by Craig Hlavaty, Houston Chronicle, 9/7/16.​

The newspaper article linked to above has dozens of photos of Houston and its inhabitants in 1986. Despite the crash, many seem in good spirits.

 

[Paisley]

We had fake news in the 80s. The TV special below aired on the local CBS affiliate in Denver. It blamed "cattle mutilations" on space aliens (not illegal aliens from Mexico eating other people's cattle) and government conspiracies. Similar stories appeared on the local news without a hint of irony or skepticism. The special won a regional Emmy award. There's even a version online dubbed in German.

Other mainstream TV programs (this was pretty much pre-cable) presented woo in the same way--In Search Of, Unsolved Mysteries (mostly about real, unsolved crimes, though), and probably several others.

Woo has always had its enthusiasts, but it really seemed to go mainstream in the 70s and 80s, and on into the 90s.

 

[sheeplady]

The AIDS epidemic.

People being allowed to die in the streets by paramedics if they were known/suspected of being gay. Nurses drawing straws to take care of patients dying of AIDS. News reports talking about the "Gay Disease."

Red ribbons, which my 20-something students don't even know what they stand for.

A decade of safe sex education and "yes, you can eat out of the same potato chip bag as HIV-positive Johnny." Don't share needles if you do drugs, don't share razors, don't have unsafe sex.

Discovering HIV comes before "full blown AIDS."

 

[Just Jim]

The '80s didn't seem any different than any other decade, at least not at the time. Looking back. . . well, at least we saw the end of disco: I guess that is a distinction worth noting.

I grew up in a small town in central Nebraska, about as far as you could imagine from Trenchfriend's Germany. Even then, music crept in from outside, we were usually months behind whatever was current on the coasts; what I've heard from friends is that music or a fashion could sweep across Germany in a day. Fashion? Pop culture? I wasn't too aware of it. I graduated in '84, probably wore 501s and flannel shirts/T-shirts to school 98% of the time. I wore my hair in a pony tail, and the only time in high school I can recall shaving my beard was to tap a friend for Honor Society. (Come to think of it, I wore a 3-piece suit for that too.)

Moved to the "big city" (200k people) for a while, which was an eye opener. There were so many people that I couldn't help but notice how strange some of the fashions and music seemed. I loved the libraries though!

I was never a big fan of most of the '80s movies, or much of the music. The '80s were also when I was first introduced to the comedy of people like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, and the Dr. Demento Show. To me, that made up for the music.

I can remember sneaking away to NYC to visit museums. The Cloisters became an early favorite, I was awestruck by the beauty of the things that survived the ages. Compared to that, the decade when I experienced so many firsts seemed meaningless even at the time.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

'We were pregnant' instead of 'my Wife was pregnant'. Does this really make sense for a man to say..?? I just don't get some of these new terms. Did they come out of the eighties..??

 

[HudsonHawk]

As on the TV show Dallas, there apparently were oilmen taking helicopters to work in the early 80s oil boom:

Nowadays, Dubai is the poster child for petrodollar extravagance, with oil-rich sheiks spending billions on crazy projects like man-made islands and indoor ski resorts in the middle of the Arabian Desert. But trust me, Dubai has nothing on Houston in the early 1980s. On my first morning living there, I woke up to a loud, hive-like buzz above my apartment near Buffalo Bayou. Half asleep, I walked out onto my balcony and watched dozens of helicopters whirring above the choked freeways of the city....They were there in such numbers because the city's oilmen all wanted to live like James Dean in the movie Giant. They built custom mansions on ranches the size of small nations and rode thirty, forty, even a hundred miles into town every morning by air. Source: Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon, MacMillan, 2015.
​

It all came crashing down with a glut of Saudi oil in 1986:

The hubris earlier in the decade dissipated and worry set in as most Houston banks also failed. More than 225,000 jobs left Houston, which led to 200,000 vacant homes. According to one report, there were 30,000 foreclosures in 1987 in Harris County. Source: "How Houston Dealt with the Oil Bust in the 80s" by Craig Hlavaty, Houston Chronicle, 9/7/16.​

The newspaper article linked to above has dozens of photos of Houston and its inhabitants in 1986. Despite the crash, many seem in good spirits.

We weren't all riding around in helicopters, but many were. That was mostly the late 70s and first few years of the 80s. Things started to go south in about 1983, and by '86, with Reagan killing the US's energy indepenence efforts and the Saudis getting cheesed at the rest of OPEC, we were at rock bottom. Many people simply had to call the bank and say "the key is under the mat". That's when I decided to get into the oil business.

It also forced Houston to diversify. It's still an oil town, but there is a lot more now than there ever was during the boom.

 

[DrMacabre]

If you like riding a bmx with stupid haircut then the 80's were a must. The birth of video games, lots of affordable personal computers, first Walkman, 24/7 movie channel.

I would go back without any hesitation but i guess it all depends on what age you had in the 80's

 

[LizzieMaine]

And don't forget the ultimate fake news event, at least until our own time, the opening of Al Capone's Vault by that paragon of tabloid TV, Geraldo Rivera. I watched this live, having nothing better to do that night, and don't think I've ever laughed harder than I did at poor Geraldo muttering something like "I wonder if I can get a deposit back on a sixty year old bottle."

I was trying to explain this show to one of the kids the other day, and being born in 1988, she had never heard of it. How very quickly the world forgets.

The 80s were a hive of such nonsense. There was the remarkable Morton Downey Junior, who was, following on from Joe Pyne in the 60s, the modern template for the aggressively, flamboyantly hateful talk-show host. He was doing a flat-footed Bizarro World parody of the touchy-feely Phil Donahue type of talk show, but too many people didn't get the gag and took him dead seriously -- leading to bellowing hack after bellowing hack, many of whom are still with us today on cable "news" channels and on radio.

Mainstream journalism moved into the bizarre and incompetent during the '80s as well. These were the days when you couldn't look at a media column without reading some new weird story about Dan Rather. "What is the frequency, Kenneth?" And these were the days when Americans got well acquainted with Rupert Murdoch, and his talent for turning everything he touches into effluent. High-level reporters, fearing for their jobs in this strange environment, were afraid to ask too many probing questions, and just took whatever processed "facts" the Michael Deavers of the day handed them.