Things I Remember: In the 1970s

Jaws was a very big deal back when I was 12! (C) 1975 Universal Pictures

It's been a very long time since I've read Stephen King's The Stand (in either the original or the Uncut, Unabridged editions), but among the many details and characters in that huge doorstop of a novel, King had one of his main dramatis personae (Frannie Goldsmith) keep a journal in which she sometimes wrote about the pre-Apocalyptic world so that her unborn child would have some idea of what life in the pre-plague years had been like.

Because I have not cracked The Stand open since at least the year 2000, I am not sure if Fran merely jotted down lists of people, places, events, foods and other slice-of-life items which were part of her life or if she wrote more detailed descriptions, but I figured I would try to do something similar here, not only to give readers a glimpse into pre-21st Century America but also to help me jog my own memory about my younger days.

From the 1970s, starting around 1972, I remember:

1. The last major air attacks on North Vietnam in the spring and early winter of 1972.

2. Apollo 13 (because of world-wide coverage)in April 1970 and Apollo 17 in December of 1972, which is the only launch I watched on color TV after we moved back to the States.

3. The 1972 Presidential election and the Watergate scandal which led to President Nixon's resignation in August of 1974. Naturally, when I was 11 I didn't understand the whole sorry event and was often bored when the Watergate Hearings were on TV.

4. The phenomenal success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws in the summer of 1975; I did not get to go see it in theaters because Mom thought I was too young to see it (at 12) and she didn't want to see it at all. Nevertheless, most of my friends saw it, and so did many others, making Jaws the first "blockbuster" of the modern movie-going era.

5. Even though cable TV was slowly (but surely) being introduced as an alternative to over-the-air broadcast television, most Americans relied mainly on three major national networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), a regional public TV channel affiliated with PBS and a handful of local VHF and UHF television stations for their TV news, sitcoms, dramas, children's programming, game shows and educational shows.

6. Swanson's TV dinners: my mom taught me how to heat these up in the oven (a big conventional one, not a toaster oven!) so I would learn how to do things on my own. My favorite was the Polynesian Dinner.

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