Here are some 70s stories I originally emailed to a friend. If I didn't get all the facts straight, please let me know. ----- When I first started talking on the CB radio in Austin in 1976, it didn't take me long to discover channel 10. Channel 10 had lots of very cool (and very young!) people who lived close to me. Living close by was important because I had one of those 23 channel walkie talkies and it didn't "get out" so good. 10-1 signal fersure. Anyway one voice captured my imagination and my heart more than any other, and that was the Cadillac Cowgirl. She had this sweet, melodious Texas twang that would charm any man's heart. Something else that you have to understand was that in the CB world, having a good CB had a lot to do with how much people would pay attention to you. And Cadillac Cowgirl was sure set up great. I don't mean nitpicky details like what model, or how many knobs it has. I'm talking about the important things. Cadillac Cowgirl had a power mike, so she could speak in her soft sultry voice and still get 100% modulation. She had a beam antenna, so she could swing around and capture weak signals, enabling her to 10-5 (relay messages) for weaker stations, overpower troublemakers, and otherwise maintain a strong and glamorous presence on the channel. She was also on the air a lot which didn't hurt any. At times, it would be safe to say she ran the channel. I was only 10 years old and hadn't really "discovered girls" yet, but I had to meet the Cadillac Cowgirl!! The signal was strong... she must be close by. I asked her a few times where she lived and if I could ride over on my bike and visit. She was always off doing this or that, so she never cared to make it so. How many 19-year-old girls are excited to meet a 10-year-old kid from down the street anyway? So it wasn't going to be easy. But I would meet her. Oh, yes. I would meet her. For several days I would go out and ride my bike, walkie-talkie in hand, whenever Cadillac Cowgirl was on. On about the fifth day, I came across a house with the biggest beam antenna I had ever seen, and Cadillac Cowgirl's signal was peggin' my meter fersure. I mean she was puttin' thirty pounds on me! I hadn't been there long when a pretty young girl came out. "Are you Cadillac Cowgirl?" I blurted. "No, I'm her sister, the Corvette Cowgirl." I had heard her on the air a few times but she wasn't nearly the radio personality her sister was. "Is she here? Can you tell her Little Boy Breaker is here to see her?" I remember Cadillac Cowgirl was a little reluctant, but she did come out and greet me cordially. It was the first time (but not the last) I would learn that often the best voices come from the largest people. She was actually very pretty, but I just remember being surprised at what a large girl she was. She had such a petite-sounding voice! In the months ahead, I was to attend many CB parties, known as "Breaks", and I eventually became accepted as the "channel mascot". Cadillac Cowgirl went to most of these, and I soon was able to associate the voice I heard on the air with the person I had come to know. But it is simply amazing what a good voice (and a good microphone!) can do. It is also amazing how a localized broadcast medium, like CB and now the world wide web, can create a community out of thin air. We live in wondrous times. ----- Hmm let's see. I'll try facts. Let's see how many I can come up with, and how many you already know. In 1976, special bicentennial quarters, half-dollars and silver dollars were minted. They're a little rare but can be found today. I have several. In 1979, the Government attempted to make a dollar coin, and thus the Susan B. Anthony dollar was born. It was almost exactly the same size and shape as a quarter though. (Duuuuuuh!) It never caught on, but I have one, and it's still legal tender. In 1975 or so, two-dollar bills were issued, but that didn't last either. Like a dumdum I spent all of mine. I used to have some nice uncirculated ones. owell I was st0opid. Hey cool my wife says she has four of them!! In 1977 or so, the price of a first class letter went up from the long-standing 10 cents to 13 cents, and people were up in arms about it. President Carter proposed a special "citizen's rate". Under this proposal, a letter could be mailed for less money if it had hand-written addresses. The idea was to charge "the people" less and corporations more. Nice enough idea, but it actually cost the Post Office more money to process hand-written letters! Sheer Energy pantyhose were introduced in 1973, and they were packaged in plastic eggs, which you probably got to see before they were changed to the more "environmentally friendly" packaging maybe 4-5 years ago. They were the first nylons to contain lycra, and they were phenomenally successful. FM radio finally really took off in the 70s. Until then, FM was reserved for oddball and classical type stuff. All the pop was on AM, and car radios only had AM. Starting around 1971, pop stations sprang up on FM one by one, and by 1979 FM was the only way to listen to pop music on the radio. The 1972 hit "Brandy (You're A Fine Girl)" for example was recorded in mono. Even by 1973 it would be very hard to find any mono hit records. In the 70s, when you went to school you got a form to take home for your parents to sign. Basically the parents gave the school principal permission to spank yer bottom if you were bad, and they did do it. Nowadays people go crazy if you start talking about spanking kids in schools, but back then it was quite routine. The vice principal of my junior high school had a big wooden paddle that you got to sign after he wacked yer ass. Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80 microcomputer in 1977. It had 4K of RAM (that's less than a tenth of a percent of the amount of memory your computer is likely to have), an 8-bit processor that ran at 1 MegaHertz (yours is almost certainly 32-bit, running in the tens of MHz), and a graphics resolution of 128x48 pixels in black and white (your machine offers a minimum of 640x480 and it's not uncommon today to see 1024x768, in color!). It saved and loaded its programs with cassette tapes, and a typical program load took 10 minutes, and you had to save it several times because the tapes were so error prone. Even in 1980, 16K of memory was a respectable amount, costing a few hundred dollars. For the same money today you can get 16 MEGS of memory, 1024 times as much!! *AND* it's smaller and uses less power. By the way, top modem speed was 300 baud in 1980, as opposed to 28,800 today! [-DeeT's note: the preceding was written in 1995. Computers have advanced incredibly even since then.] In 1970, my mom bought a Ford Maverick automobile for $2000. It was the cheapest new car you could get, akin to today's Yugo or Hyundai. By today's standards, it would be midsized, but back then it was teeny. It got 18 MPG or so, qualifying it as an economy car at the time. In 1971, my mom let my white baby sitter's black boyfriend take me for a ride in the back of his purple car, with no seat belts, while they smoked and listened to Abbey Road on the 8-track. That was life as usual. ----- Hmmm let's see... yeah I remember one. In 1975, my third grade class got together and made a time capsule. The idea was that we would put a bunch of fun stuff in a box and bury it, then dig it up in the year 2000. I remember thinking to myself that I would be 34 in the year 2000, and that seemed so hopelessly far away. Now I'm thinkin' I better call the school and make sure they remember that it's there, get plane tickets, etc. The year 2000 is fast upon us. There's a lot I don't remember, which will make it all the more fun, but I do remember a few things. One kid put in a list of popular TV shows of the day. I remember Good Times was on there, and the Jeffersons. My idea was to put in a ruler that had both inches *and* centimeters on it. We were told that the metric system was taking over everything, and that certainly by the end of the decade, let alone the end of the century (!), English measures like pounds and inches will scarcely be remembered. I doubt if they're telling you that in schools today. Looks like the English system is here to stay. But in the mid seventies, we really planned to make the switch. Some gas pumps measured liters and everything. People hated it, and eventually everyone gave up. So, ironically, my choice for a time capsule item was an appropriate one, precisely because it *didn't* become rare 25 years later. It merely should have become rare. Pretty wild, eh? ----- Okay let's see... I'm saving the roller skating stories for the tapes, so let's see... what would be a good story from the best decade there ever was? Okay I got one! The year was 1978. I had just started eighth grade, and I had been playing the violin for about a year. Now something you must understand is that being in *band* is cool. You get to play great songs like "Soul Man" and stuff like that. Being in *orchestra* means you're a fag, and you do Bach and shit like that. So of course most of the time, if you were in orchestra, you kept a low profile. Except.... except.... this was 1978. Disco was in full swing, and what does a lot of disco music feature? Violins! This could be quite a breakthrough for us "fags" if we work it right. But how? We begged and begged and convinced our orchestra director to let us do just one disco song. It was the perfect choice: A Fifth Of Beethoven! We worked it up and finally had our brief moment of glory on the stage in the Junior High cafeteria. I was about the only one who was playing worth a crap, and the director was doing a pretty bad job backing us up on the piano, but nothing could take away from the joy of that moment. I was shining on that stage, playing disco music to a room full of kids who were eating it up. Well, maybe they were just eating their lunch. But they *did* love disco! Anyway that was the one day in eighth grade that I didn't feel like an "orchestra fag". I'll always remember it fondly and I'm so grateful to Walter Murphy for the arrangement and to the orchestra director Mrs. Larson for letting us do a disco song. ----- Our National Bureau of Standards maintains shortwave radio stations that broadcast the exact time of day, and for some reason I was fascinated with this as a kid. It turns out there is also something called a "leap second". Every few years, our clocks get a little out of synch with the stars, and we have to have a 61-second minute to balance it out. The first "leap second" that I had ever heard of was to happen on December 31, 1979 at 11:59 pm. Well that was just too exciting for me. While other people were getting drunk and kissing, I had my shortwave receiver pressed to my ear, and I counted the seconds until 1980. Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty, BEEEEEP! Wow! A 61-second minute! What a prefect way to end a decade of excesses!