The 70's

Sunday, Aug. 28, 2011-11:13 pm
THE 70's

Looking at old pictures of the 70's are a surreal glimpse into another time. I caught myself feeling nostalgia from my childhood and how lovely it had been at the Cape in the summers . I indulged in the thoughts of " things were so good back then in those carefree days ..."

I caught myself here. Wait. Be honest .

Do I remember how it really was to be a teenager in the 70's? Do I remember how frightening it was when my brother was hospitalized for months at a time, with a poor chance of surviving ? Do I remember how sad it was being caught up in the middle of my parents marital problems? In nonfiction writing you are never telling the stark unvarnished truth, but rather a constructed truth. The story is an inevitable interpretation of the actual untouched events.

I wonder what the rest of my family sees when they remember the 70's..

Optimist, pessimist, or realist: None of us were as happy or content as we remember , and that's okay. No matter what is going on now, just wait a couple of years and you'll find yourself looking back at them admiringly.

Whatever discontent there may have been, it made me desire more from life , it made me create the biggest dreams and appreciate what I had. It made me the kind of person who never let disappointments take those dreams away from me.

Aside from serious family problems, and life's challenges, there are other frivolous and comical reasons that defined the 70's . Of all the decades , regarding style and decorating, the 70s were the worst.
Ugliness was a virtue. Bad taste was good.
Strong colors in geometric patterns, and lots of them, was what people wanted! It was not just reserved for Vegas hotels and the insane.

I don't know if this appalling new 70's style was due to drug experimentation in the 60s ? Or was it that seemingly endless recession and the energy crisis , that motivated people in the 1970s to produce some of the tackiest, ugliest decorating in homes since the beginning of time.

I lived in two of those homes in the 1970s, my family home and our summer home.
I was a pre teenager when our family built the Cape house in the early 70's. I thought the house was beautiful, but you would have to be high on Peyote and Psilocybin mushrooms to think that by today's standards. I cant imagine that my parents were ever into drugs. If by any obscure chance they ever were, it was evident that they had thankfully switched exclusively to booze a long time ago. In any event, something possessed them to make some bad choices that would imply "acid trip", of the following trends of the decade:

Floors
Two words: Shag carpeting. When we were decorating the summer house, we were offered two types of carpeting; I remember this well. Shag or sculpted carpeting. While both styles are equally ugly, shag was not only ugly, but long, fuzzy ,thick and a catch-all for disease and bacteria. Add that fact to the dampness of a beach front house and you've got yourself a petri dish .

You were considered "well-to-do" if you got this new luxurious shag carpeting in your home. It came in a variety of colors. My parents allowed me to choose my color for my room. I chose pink. My brothers chose black for their rooms . They decided to have gold carpeting throughout the halls and the rest of the house, except in the downstairs office, which was red. The family room was royal blue. Yikes!

Appliances
The gold carpeting matched the appliances. In the 1970s, it was considered fashionable to have appliances that came in earth tone colors. If you had white appliances, that was old fashioned and common. Colors like Avocado Green and Harvest Gold and Aqua were "in" and were a bit more money. There was also a horrid brownish rust color . When we built our home, my family chose gold.

Bathrooms
The bathrooms all had aqua Formica and white tile and a matching turquoise toilet, sink and tub.

The Family Room
Nothing says "cheap" like fake leather . Two of the heaviest, ugliest, longest black vinyl sofa sleepers one could imagine graced our Cape family room. It was not unusual to have all black furniture in a room back then. Or plaid. No one seemed to mind vinyl back then. Manufacturers did not bother to try to make it "look" like leather. As a matter of fact, my parents apparently loved black vinyl so much they even had a reclining chair to match.

Entertaining

As is today, the television was the center of the family room. They were usually large, extremely heavy consoles that, if you were lucky, had sliding doors to hide the screen. We had a Zenith Stereo with a built in turntable and a radio that was about the size of a desk and weighed at least 200 lbs. There was an 8 track tape playerin the family room as well as in my father's (gold) Cadillac.

I am currently the steward of an 8-track player somewhere in the garage, in a box. If you've seen my garage, though, that really doesn't narrow down its location . It used to be in the family room , 40 years ago.

State of the art , at that time, archaic by todays standards. You couldn't rewind or skip to your favorite song. And when you least expected it, the tape heads switched tracks, often in the middle of a song. It continued to play the same tired, warped and fragmented songs . You listened to what was being played, even if it was not your true desired selection.
The tapes were the size of a brick.

It gets better--or shall I say , it gets worse.

The Kitchen
Wanting to bring disco into the home might serve as an excuse why anyone would put a strong colored foil on the walls. The wallpaper in the kitchen was yellow foil with huge flowers and mushrooms and butterflies. It was an unpleasant visual assault that would make most people's heads ache. . Enough said.

Accessories
It was not unusual in that house to see a ceramic sailboat lamp base, or a mirror frame made of gold shellacked shells. Or a plastic wall clock flanked by a sailfish or a unicorn.

The Walls

It wasn't unusual for people to use mirror tiles back then to cover walls. These were easy to apply and use. My parents used them in the office with the red carpet and I liked it so much I begged them for some on my wall. With pink shag carpeting and pink walls and mirrored tiles, my lava lamp, at 14 years old my room looked like a bordello.

The Living Room

On a school girl or a Scotsman, plaid might actually be an acceptable fashion choice. On a couch, however, plaid just looks wrong. The living room had a dizzying plaid couch, in shades of gold and rust to match the shag carpet.

I'm showing my age here...

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