Why do I hate the 1970s so much?

[52Styleline]

Here are some 70's TV Shows that I would watch again even today

Bob Newhart Show
Odd Couple
M*A*S*H
Flip Wilson Show
All in the Family
Barney Miller
Mary Tyler Moore Show
Rockford Files
WKRP in Cincinnati
Taxi

And then there were some that were hard to watch even back then

Room 222
Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour
Brady Bunch
Partridge Family
Mod Squad
Sandy Duncan Show
Sanford and Son
Tony Orlando and Dawn
Captain and Tenille
Happy Days
Bionic Woman
Welcome Back, Kotter
Donny and Marie
Richard Pryor Show
New Adventures of Wonder Woman
Battlestar Galactica
Three's Company
Mork and Mindy

 

[Lincsong]

All this talk about hippies and drugs - but wasn't the 1970s also home to something of a conservative backlash against what had been developing in the late 1960s? What about the hard hat riot?

Are you referring to the counter-counter war protests? Where the anti-Vietnam War protesters were met by hard hatted construction workers flying American flags????[huh]

 

[Lincsong]

My dad agrees with you. He was a teenager and young adult in the '50s, and hated it as much as I hated the '70s. My dad describes it as the most repressive, grey, and artificial decade of his life -- and he's a fairly conservative guy!


It was in the '50s, for example, that cities really began to decay, thanks in some part to white flight to the suburbs. The '50s also saw the dawn of really horrible urban architecture. Yet the decade's media glossed over all that. Even Esquire magazine was terrible in those years.

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I'll have to respectfully disagree with you two here. My parents were newlyweds in the 1950's, Mom was 18 and Dad was 27 and it was a "fabulous" decade for them; Dad bought his first house in 1952 for $9,000 and $75 a month and his second house in 1956 for $11,500. They had four kids in 8 years and didn't think twice about it. Mom used to sit my sisters in front of American Bandstand while she went about cleaning the house.

People could walk down Broadway in Oakland or Market Street in San Francisco at any hour of the day without worry. Women actually wore white gloves to go shopping. My Mom's younger brother was a playboy/lounge singer/nightclub bouncer in the International Settlement (Pal Joey movie) and in Oakland's downtown area.

By the time I came around in 1969 the Bay Area had already taken it's turn for the worse, (think Zodiac) By 1975 (when I was 6) everyone in my extended family and neighbors complained about how terrible Oakland and San Francisco had become and they only went there for Chinese Food.

Grandparents hated long hair on boys, pants and mini-skirts on girls. I remember when my sister was accepted at Cal Berkeley in 1974 and we were walking around campus with her and all the nuts parading about the place. lol It hasn't changed in 33 years!

 

[Lincsong]

wasn't done around here. All I remember is the local idiot council went around trying to get everyone to plant trees in the planter strips in front of their houses. Now thrity years later the sidewalks are all screwed up. :eusa_doh: Yeah I love that time. :rage:

Regards,

j

What are you blind???? There were plenty of those fire hydrants painted like that around here. (red/white/blue, construction worker) etc.:fing28: YOU WERE SHELTERED.

 

[Lincsong]

Maybe it was just a Southern California thing. (I lived in Alameda and Newark from '70 to '73, then moved to L.A.)

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It was up here in the Bay Area, Marc. People even painted the address numbers on the curb red/white and blue. Only the real cheap wouldn't part with the $2.:rage:

 

[Marc Chevalier]

I'll have to respectfully disagree with you two here.

You and I may both be right. Perhaps the way that one perceived the '50s depended on where one lived. San Francisco sounds like it was a pretty good place to be in the '50s; Staten Island and Morningside Heights/Columbia U., where my dad lived, were not.

.

 

[reetpleat]

Flip Wilson Show

[/QUOTE]

The devil made me do it!

 

[reetpleat]

You and I may both be right. Perhaps the way that one perceived the '50s depended on where one lived. San Francisco sounds like it was a pretty good place to be in the '50s; Staten Island and Morningside Heights/Columbia U., where my dad lived, were not.

.

I think you are right. The fifties were certainly the start of what went on for many years, but while I don't know about sf, in LA they were the height of the golden era. Mainly because LA was a city of suburbs, while al the east coast and midwest cities were being abandoned ath taht time for hte suburbs. So the fifties were a golden era for the burbs too, but not the traditional manufacturing cities.

 

[BegintheBeguine]

Wow, so much to hate about the sickening seventies.
I was just thinking,...is there anything y'all actually really liked about the seventies???
I can think of some music, for instance, Emerson,Lake,and Palmer, Roxy Music, Yes, UK, King Crimson, Audience,...to name a few.

I've never smoked pot and I liked the seventies. Maybe even loved the seventies. See posts 7, 111, and 114.

 

[dhermann1]

I'll have to respectfully disagree with you two here. My parents were newlyweds in the 1950's, Mom was 18 and Dad was 27 and it was a "fabulous" decade for them; Dad bought his first house in 1952 for $9,000 and $75 a month and his second house in 1956 for $11,500. They had four kids in 8 years and didn't think twice about it. Mom used to sit my sisters in front of American Bandstand while she went about cleaning the house.

People could walk down Broadway in Oakland or Market Street in San Francisco at any hour of the day without worry. Women actually wore white gloves to go shopping. My Mom's younger brother was a playboy/lounge singer/nightclub bouncer in the International Settlement (Pal Joey movie) and in Oakland's downtown area.

By the time I came around in 1969 the Bay Area had already taken it's turn for the worse, (think Zodiac) By 1975 (when I was 6) everyone in my extended family and neighbors complained about how terrible Oakland and San Francisco had become and they only went there for Chinese Food.

Grandparents hated long hair on boys, pants and mini-skirts on girls. I remember when my sister was accepted at Cal Berkeley in 1974 and we were walking around campus with her and all the nuts parading about the place. lol It hasn't changed in 33 years!

This pretty much defines the paradox of the 50's. As I said, in 1959 it was common knowledge that Ike was an idiot. Now, what would we give to have him back!
I think we have to remind ourselves that talking and thinking in such broad generalities is pretty much meaningless. I look back my childhood in the 50's, and aside from domestic issues, which were very rough, I had an idyllic time. I rode my bike, swam in the lake, rode my sled down the big hills, had a dog, had food on the table and was in love with Annette Funicello.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think that's the drawback with judging past eras based on our own childhood experiences -- it gives us an awfully limited perspective and makes it very easy to idealize the times as A Great Time To Grow Up, regardless of what they might have been like in a broader scope. Someone once said "The Golden Age of anything is twelve," and I think there's much wisdom in that.

 

[Flivver]

Dhermann1 and Lizzie are right. My fond view of the 1950s comes from my happy childhood experience then. As a kid, I was completely shielded from all the ugly parts of the decade so I have a rather rose colored view of it.

All I remember about Eisenhower is that just about every kid in the Boston area (me included) toasted him with a glass of milk, to the tune of "Hail To The Chief", every day at noon on the Big Brother Bob Emery TV show.

 

[scotrace]

Why I am deaf today

Here's to feeling old:

I was a teen in the 70's. I remember the local (small town) park in the early part of the decade with the real-live hippies lying around on the ground stoned out of their minds and lying in their own vomit. Then came all the bicentennial trinkets with a Godspell feel. And I hated John Travolta for Saturday Night fever, which forced all of us with hair that would not feather to do it anyway. My dad and I had matching powder blue leisure suits with print shirts with the huge collar worn outside. Platform shoes. By 1977 my poker-straight hair was shoulder length, parted in the middle (looked like an afghan hound) and I had tinted eyeglasses.

To me, the films that best capture what the 70's felt like are Saturday Night fever and the more recent Boogie Nights.

 

[warbird]

In Chile, the '70s literally stopped on September 11, 1973. A military coup d'etat almost instantly turned back the clock to around 1950. Soldiers were ordered into the schools to forcibly cut the long hair off of boys. Jeans all but disappeared: quite a few were burned (along with books). Brylcreemed slickness was -- and still is -- the preferred look among conservatives there.


I'm not at all convinced that "figuring stuff out later" is a feasible (and good) idea. Reviving the '50s for another 16 years had a stultifying effect on Chile's intellectual, cultural and entrepeneurial life. Stagnation in excelsis.

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Cultural and intellectual progress is certainly in the eye of the beholder. I have talked with many many Chileans who would disagree with you there. Economically they moved forward to the 90's and would today without question be the most prosperous and consistent economy in all of South America if they had kept on that path. In fact they could have been a model for th US in some ways.

But I digress, this will go no further as it will be seen as political, and heaven forbid people discuss politics. Civilized people cannot discuss politics. Thank God the Romans and Greeks thought otherwise, but again I digress.

 

[warbird]

As far as tv in the 70's most of it was wretched. One show I watched only some of I simply hate now, MASH. Everytime I see Alan Alda and his hippy hair in a military uniform of our brave boys I want to wretch. There was nothing authentic about that show in the least. Only reason I watch it at all on occasion now is that an acquaintance, Wayne Rogers, is on some of the only good shows.

When they added BJ and his weepiness it was simply to much to bear.

 

[RedPop4]

Someone a few pages back mentioned white-flight and the development of the suburbs. Part of the problem with that was the sheer number of men returning from the war in their mid 20s in 1945-48. They all wanted their own homes, they had GI Bill money to do it, as well.

Here in New Orleans, many wanted to move back to their old neighborhoods and renovate the homes they could buy. G.I. Bill stipulated that they must buy new. Thus the only places where building new was an option was in the less congested areas, out in the suburbs where there was land, there were new homes being built and some subdivisions. It wasn't really racial at all. I live in post War tract housing. My one street is early 50's frame homes in three different or four different designs. BUT, they all have hardwood floors, beveled interior doors, and archways.

The 70s? I'm conflicted. I'm 40 now, and there were things I still like, music, especially, that most people hate passionately.

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

My dad and I had matching powder blue leisure suits with print shirts with the huge collar worn outside. Platform shoes. By 1977 my poker-straight hair was shoulder length, parted in the middle (looked like an afghan hound) and I had tinted eyeglasses.

Of course you know we all want to see the pictures now! lol

 

[Marc Chevalier]

I look back my childhood in the 50's, and aside from domestic issues, which were very rough, I had an idyllic time. I rode my bike, swam in the lake, rode my sled down the big hills, had a dog, had food on the table and was in love with Annette Funicello.

And in high school in the mid '50s, my dad was doing everything to avoid getting beaten up by black leather jacket-wearing "greaser" gangs. Cross country track and the Boy Scouts were his salvation. Then, in college, he was doing everything to avoid becoming a grey flannel-suited, sexless business drone. The NROTC and the Navy were his salvation.


It's not when you lived, it's where and how you lived.


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[Marc Chevalier]

G.I. Bill stipulated that they must buy new. Thus the only places where building new was an option was in the less congested areas, out in the suburbs where there was land, there were new homes being built and some subdivisions. It wasn't really racial at all.

I half agree with you, Red. As you pointed out (and I'm glad you did), ex G.I.s and their families were not moving to the suburbs to "fly" away from minorites, but rather to "fly" toward new homes, which is fine -- I would have done it myself.


However, minority G.I.s and their families were not particularly welcomed to "fly" along with them. The result was that these new suburbs became divided along racial lines. In Southern California, at least, the homeowners' associations in some suburbs deliberately excluded minorities from living there.

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[jamespowers]

What are you blind???? There were plenty of those fire hydrants painted like that around here. (red/white/blue, construction worker) etc.:fing28: YOU WERE SHELTERED.

We never had them on my side of town. [huh] Must have been a below the tracks thing. You sure it wasn't grafitti?