What do you remember most about the 70's?

[cascadiance]

208. Mine started out with some personal experience with terrorism then...

... when I was living overseas in Turkey at the time in 1971...

There was a big explosion of anti-American violence that also took the life of an Israeli diplomat visiting there at the time, that triggered a government shut down and martial law when I was there.

A terrorist group, not Islamic, but more aligned with the Red Brigades of those days, kidnapped four American airmen that were stationed at a nearby air base next to the school I attended. And my teacher's boyfriend was one of those airmen at the time, and she was miserable for a few days until they escaped fortunately.

But living overseas was still a memorable and good experience, and I keep in touch with many of the kids I knew from back then. As young kids we all would buy military fatigue jackets that we would fill with many peace sign patches, etc. that were the signs of anti-war protests at the time, that seemed at odds with the military bases that we were at in those days. They might have looked something like this then...



When I moved back to the states, it was a time of revelation for me right when Watergate hearings were coming to a head then. It was my first experience in many years with American television then, since the television I had watched overseas had some dubbed or with subtitles a few shows like Star Trek and Daktari, but not much else then.

When I moved back I lived next door to the future congressman of Indiana, and later president of Club for Growth who hadn't started high school yet then.

I lived for the first time since I had been going to school in a white majority neighborhood that basically had me in a "majority" rather than a minority there. The racism I observed then seemed odd to me as I was used to living in more diverse communities before where people weren't treated that way. It had me more sympathetic for African Americans, when I saw the one black lady in our school having to just hang out with the heavy drug using crowd because no one else would accept her there. I wasn't well accepted myself there then either and moved on from that experience when moving away to college.

I remember listening to a lot of good music then, and mixed in to it were records from Kiss, and Ted Nugent, who later I'd despise as having right wing nut cases in their bands.

Watching Star Wars had me loving movies, and then had me aspire to being in the film industry, and I got a degree in film and broadcasting before moving on in to computer science that I moved to in the 80's...