Growing Up In The 70's Header Image

Is she or isn’t she?

Is she or isn’t she? Written by Nix Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. The eternal chant. If it rained, if it was humid, if that Winter kid shoved me into the jets of a sprinkler… Me and my hair. Curling up. Refusing to lie down and take it like all the other smooth, straight tresses of the 70’s. How could anything that resided so close to my brain consistently fail to know what I wanted? Kids today, they just don’t know. All the products and styling tools out there. And to meet me now, you’d never know. “Your hair isn’t really …
More….

Going to the Movies

Going to the Movies Written by Gail Walter I remember going into town to watch Love Story when it first came out. My best friend and I were fourteen-years-old. It was my first introduction to that powerful combination of love and mortality. It was the saddest movie I had ever seen. My mom and dad collected us after the movie in their cream colored Citroen with the fancy suspension. As soon as the car drew to a halt in front of us we clambered in. My mom and dad turned to ask us how the movie was. We couldn’t say …
More….

Get Down and Boogie

Get Down and Boogie Written by Gail Walter Close your eyes for a minute. Imagine this: a shimmering dance floor, a lithe figure clad in a skintight white suit, left hip thrust out, right hand pointing skywards. The music throbs with an irresistible beat and your shiny, pointy-toed shoes just can’t stop themselves from tapping. This was disco, an unprecedented phenomenon that emerged in the seventies with figures like John Travolta teaching us how to own a dance floor. They called it performance dancing because that’s exactly what it was. No more modest clinches on a modest dance floor that …
More….

The First Night

Written by Gail Walter Now, I don’t really know if I should be talking about this…the thing is, it was pivotal. Funny also. It was the first time I ever spent a night with a man, a boy as it happened… We were both seventeen, both the eldest child in our respective families and both careering towards one another with a kind of cosmic momentum that we were at first quite unaware of. When my friend Susan told me she had another crush, this time, on a new boy at her school, I knew the drill. I mean we’d done …
More….

Fashion Sense

Written by Gail Walter In the summer of 1973 I had a dress that I absolutely loved. It was patterned with pink and grey swirls and had two bites taken out of it, or so it seemed. The resulting holes revealed the teasing curves of a waist that 15-year-old girls take for granted. When I wore this dress I felt like a million dollars. The pale pink in the fabric brought out the healthy tan of my skin. The short skirt revealed audacious lengths of tanned leg and the back zip pulled the fabric snug across my teenage hips. This …
More….

Best Friends

Written by Gail Walter I had never been one to socialize en masse, one or two good friends was all I needed. In fact, one is what I had…right through the seventies. When I think about Susan, hmmm… yes, what do I think? Well, firstly, and inadvertently I think of her, or thought of her, as criminally slim. She wore the streamlined fashion of the day like a store mannequin. It hung where it was supposed to hang and where it clung it was aesthetically pleasing. This is always a challenge for a friendship, especially between teenage girls. Couple this …
More….

Shopping in the 70s

We all use to buy our stuff from the corner shops, but before long those gleaming supermarkets would be forming all over town, and they were cheaper, if you excluded the cost of buying the car to get there and back, or the bus and taxis. But we really changed our ways of shopping in the 1970’s, not just in supermarkets but other high street shops. How many of these do you remember, as these have all gone to shop heaven now. FINE FARE these were everywhere in the 1970’s, I should know as I worked in many of them. …
More….

70’s Fashion

In the summer of 1973 I had a dress that I absolutely loved. It was patterned with pink and grey swirls and had two bites taken out of it, or so it seemed.  The resulting holes revealed the teasing curves of a waist that 15-year-old girls take for granted. When I wore this dress I felt like a million dollars. The pale pink in the fabric brought out the healthy tan of my skin. The short skirt revealed audacious lengths of tanned leg and the back zip pulled the fabric snug across my teenage hips. This was the seventies. Clothes, …
More….

Old Grannies and Oxford Bags

A lot of things had not yet been discovered in the seventies. There was no Internet, no cell phones and no Ipods. There were also no small sizes. Here was a world — hip and cool in every way — that failed to recognize the needs of the smaller person. I was a hip and cool person in the seventies. I was also small, smaller than the smallest jean size. This meant that, though I WAS cool, I did not look it. When Oxford bags came into fashion my pants were almost as wide around the waist as they were …
More….

The 70s actual reality vs. virtual reality.

Now, consider the seventies. Yes, there were televisions, telephones, record players and airplanes, but technology wasn’t nearly as dominant as it is today. There were spaces and places that were completely without gadgetry.  You could go on long drives in the country and absolutely no-one could contact you and remind you of your responsibilities. This is what many of us remember about growing up in the Seventies. It was vivid and dynamic but we weren’t being eaten alive by a pace that left no space for wonder. In the seventies there were still places that you walked to and walked …
More….

Growing Up In The 70s

I'm very lucky to have so many friends that love the 70s and some that have shared their memories with us. It's interesting to see there was little difference between the USA and UK but from reading these stories one thing does come through, technology. It seems to all the people lived through the 70s the technology of today seems to have taken the personal, community spirit out of life. It's taken us years to get this site together so we would love to hear your feedback in the Facebook comment box.

Join the Discussion

Register now & join in the discussions, this will allow you to add your own comments, memories, photographs and stories to our ever growing website dedicated to the Seventies. Simply sign up using your Facebook, Twitter, Linked In or Google+ Account

Your API connection setting not working. try to change setting from module option or check your php.ini setting for (cURL support = enabled OR allow_url_fopen = On)

Like this Story ? Share it now