It was a far different world back then, in so many ways. I was pretty young, not yet even a teen, so all the political stuff that was swirling in the air was lost on me.
My hometown was a place that in a lot of ways resembled Mayberry R.F.D.. Though the town was bigger in population than Mayberry, the mindset was the same. The local neighborhood cop was named Buster and his workload was as light as sheriff Andy Taylor's was.
In the summer, people played league baseball and softball in the park across the street from where we lived. Many evenings during the week large numbers of cars would be parked there and people would sit in bleachers to watch the games.
Every car on the block had a V8 engine, and every teen kid had a hot rod of some sort or another.
News came through the newspaper, which arrived in the afternoon, thrown onto your doorstep by the newspaper boy. Later, on one of the three TV channels in town, would come the news broadcasts, one at 6 p.m. and the other at 10 p.m. At midnight the TV station would sign off for the night and in the morning (around 6:00 was it?) it would replace the test pattern it was showing during the night and the day's programming would begin.
This picture is kind of ugly but you get the picture
Photo- Pavan Trikutam- Unsplash.com
Vietnam was raging and there were protests happening at the big college down south that I didn't even know about but found out about later.
The telephone was something that hung on the wall or sat on the table at the house. It was either rotary dial or newfangled push button. Outside of the house you had to find and use pay phones and if you called long distance you had to dial the Operator first, who would tell you how much the call would cost and you'd better have plenty of coins in your pocket to pay for it.
Coffee was made in a contraption called a 'percolator'. Bowls of sugar for sweetening your food sat on the dinner table, next to the salt and pepper. There were no expiration dates on any of the foods you bought at the grocery store. TV dinners were popular.
Bonanza was on prime time TV, as was the Lawrence Welk Show.
Nobody in town had a tattoo unless they had been in the navy or the slammer.
For guys, bell bottom pants were absolutely essential schoolwear. Long hair as well. Without that, you were viewed as clueless, or a jock.
Half the population smoked cigarettes, at least. You could smoke in a restaurant, in a bar, on a bus, on a train, on an airplane, in a football stadium, at a baseball game. I still remember going to an NFL game that started in the early evening and watching the flickering of cigarette lighters constantly going off around the stadium for the duration of the entire game.
I rode my three speed bicycle everywhere and especially liked my other bike, which had a banana seat, a sissy bar, and a fat back tire. I practiced doing wheelies on it and got good enough to ride a wheelie about 200 feet or so.
Rock and roll was exploding on the national landscape but not so much in my hometown, which was kind of backwater, due to geographic location, but still, every guy wanted to be in a band.
It was that geographic isolation (and very cold winters) that kept my town predominantly white and middle class. I had little concept of race or racism and just assumed that where I lived was like everywhere else.
Music came on records, which you played on your Hi Fi Stereo system, which was the size of a dresser. You played 45's or 33.3 albums. Grandpa had some 78's that you could play too. The radio stations in town broadcast on the AM band, and between songs the station's DJ's bantered and ads for local businesses played.
Compare all this stuff to what the world is like right now and it's hard to find any similarities at all. But I'm here to say that this kind of reality was as real as the one we're now experiencing. Whippersnappers don't think that a world such as this was probably even possible to live in, or in any way desirable, but it was, and it was a pretty cool time to be alive, even without all the technology we have at our fingertips today, all of the conveniences.
But, times change and the year 1970 B.C. was a blip in the continuum, as our present time will eventually be. There was a LOT more to it than what I have been able to put into these few words, it was a total immersion experience, like now is. What is perplexingly hard to capture and describe is the MINDSET that prevaled and how different things are now in that regard. There was a certain degree of ignorance and simplicity in the populace. People weren't so harsh, know-it-all, and blase as they can be these days, but in other ways the people from back then were certainly roughly hewn characters, and that's just the way it was.
I have the knowledge of what it was like to live back then and what it's like to live now, that is the benefit of experience. As an elder, I am able to make comparison analysis. Being around for awhile has some perks! So I'm not just spouting off about this and that, all this is coming from seeing how things were, and how they worked, and what worked, compared to what is being called 'normal' now.
It's a far cry from what 'normal' used to be, I will say that. So don't let anybody tell you what the new normal is going to be because things will change. I've seen a LOT happen since 1970 B.C. and nobody back then saw any of what is here now coming. So- keep that in mind.
Someday it's gonna be 2038 A.C. (After Computers). Where will we be then?