Boys of the 1970s : A Golden Age

1970's boy: image by A Cool Boi's Blog
There were no real computer games except PONG....it was played on a TV set....each player had a paddle which controlled a Vertical Line on the Tv....they then batted and electronic dot back and forth, like tennis. It was the greatest thing ever for boys those days. Air hockey was big. Parking. Yes those were what your dad probably enjoyed in the 1970s. Girls wore mini skirts until around 1973 when they were finally allowed to wear pants to school (even in the mid-west). You didn't say bad words to your parents. You didn't even complain about what they suggest. A kid who did was known to be a bad kid. The majority of kids did not toss bad words out of their mouths. They weren't allowed to at home and they couldn't at school. It wasn't allowed in the movies, either. If they did, it was among friends doing the same thing.
Bellbottom trousers, mini skirts, wide leather belts with grommets in them, chain belts, long straight hair on the girls, long hair on the guys, sideburns... People walked around saying Groovy and Peace and FAR OUT! all the time. Noone would have EVER thought of being disrespectful to teachers or parents.Shirts had really crazy designs on them and BIG collars and boys wore very tight jeans and leather shorts : they were called Lederhosen boys shorts. I don't remember kids in the Midwestern US using a lot of "70s" slang. We always though it was weird when we'd watch TV and characters on shows would say stuff like "far out" and "groovy." Only people who were pretending to be HIP would actually use this kind of language where I lived.
Clothes were pretty tacky back then. "Garanimals," a color-coordinated clothing line for kids was popular. People think the 1960s had the colorful clothes and weird designs, but most of America didn't embrace that sort of thing until the 70s. Boys started wearing wide ties, jackets with big lapels, bell-bottom pants, and "superfly" suits. Boys played mostly board games, cards, or did sports. Video games were still in their infancy, and kind of expensive. Plus, they used up the TV, and many people still had only ONE of those. You couldn't play Pong in one room, while people watched football in the other. People might think that the wlothes which young boys used to wear in the 1970s was kind of "not appropriate" as they wore very short tight shorts and they used to wear very long hair most of the time and I can honestly say that was very common back then and everyone enjoyed it. They were allowed to go with that kind of fashion everywhere even at school. I would say flares and bright gaudy patterned shirt were also the thing. I bet you're trying to picture your dad wearing those tight high shorts and wearing long socks to work - with shorts haha..

By Wombah1970 (Own work) (CC-BY-3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Boys did not sit on the couch and play video baseball and video football........Boys went outside and played sandlot baseball and sandlot football. Teens did not commucate woth each other by ' texting ' each other......Teens actually communicated by talking to each other face to face. There were pay phones on almost every corner where you could make a call for 10 cents and when we saw people walking down the street in the 80's with big early cell phones we chuckled as they walked by as we thought ' I'n sure they are not so important that they need to make a phone call as they are walking down the street '..
Television was invented in the 20's but only became commercially available during the 50's so people in the 70's had television heck they even had color television. Before the invention of television and the internet the dominant forms of entertainment in the early 20th century(early 1900's) were cinema and radio. In those times radio dominated and was the centrepiece of the house. There was TV in the 70s, 60s and 50s. However, for a good long time there were only about six channels. In the evenings we read books, played games, had actual conversations. During the day (when there was no school) we went to the beach, on hikes, rode bikes, visited friends. The main addiction for kids were radio and records, first 45s and then LPs. The invention of the transistor radio enabled kids to take rock & roll wherever they went.
There wasn't an immigrant refugee problem then and there was less police. People used to go to beach parties and pile up all the wood on the beach and start a bonfire where you could roast potatoes in tin foil and roast marshmallows and cook popcorn, house parties, public park parties, and people used to cruise around in cars and congregate on corners. Less police on the streets and people were more or less better behaved and didn't damage private or public property. More good clean fun. Discos, live bands everywhere. In nightclubs, pubs, open air concerts, festivals . Most people had a job and a good wage and they used to work hard and play hard during the weekend. People wrote letters and used landlines or public payphones that you had to put money into. There was television though not every house had one. Mostly black & white TV. People who didn't have television used to listen to the radio. There was the children's hour. And late in the evening they'd have serials, much like TV serials. Movie theatres were places to go to socialise. And milk bars that sold milk shakes. I don't have a cellphone as I can live without one. Most people had landlines and people used to communicate locally. Before television we used to have swap clubs in our local neighbourhoods and we used to swap comics with kids in the neighbourhood because we all couldn't afford to buy all the comics, plants, or we'd have fairs and sell stuff. Community galas in your local areas. Once upon a time people could set up a lemonade stall outside their homes and sell stuff; now you'd get closed down for not having a permit. People joined local clubs and hobby groups. People got by writing letters and posting them.
A boy, in the late 1960s and during the 1970s, aged between 13 / 14 years old and over is treated completely as an adult. No kiddie treatment or soft talking. A boy in those yeras was ' I'm sorry to say this, more responsible. He was just a 20 years old guy in a very smaller shape. But anyway you are still smart haha .. Some of you may wonder what the heck did boys do in the 1960s; 1970s and even 1980s when they get bored with no available good advanced technology as you can see today.. Well, We did have some technology- transistor radios. We played video games at parlours and read comics. There were virtually no fast food joints where I lived, only had a couple of KFC's and one MacDonalds in the city. I remember when MacDonalds first opened in our city (~1978) and my parents actually dressed up in their suits/ best clothes to try out this new "restaurant". They had no idea it was fast-food place. Also hung out with friends and relatives a lot. Didn't watch much TV in the 70's, went occasionally to movies. Many of boys had part time jobs. Played some sort of sport e.g. table tennis or did jogging. After all, where do you think the technology of today came from? It didn't just appear magically overnight. Today's tech was yesterday's idea. Anyway I'm sure it wasn't relied on nearly as much, they did more for themselves. As for boredom, I'm sure they socialised, played games outside. Not everything needs to be done on a computer. Instead, having fun playing this game which you will watch on the following video was and I guess still more fun. The following video is taken from a kids TV series back in 1977 which I really did like when I was a kid.
In the good old 70s we used to have things called youth clubs, (before thatchers regime destroyed them) we also used to have playing fields where you could go and have a kick about with your mates, there was also after school activities you could be involve in, I played for the school rugby team (city and county team as well) so there were after school training sessions, in the holidays we would go fishing, and camping, I also had a dog and we roamed miles together, maybe you could join the scout movement?

My childhood days were the best of my life, one experience we had was, a friend and myself found a field of horses, and started riding them bareback, then the farmer caught us, we expected a beating, but the farmer offered us a deal, if we groomed his horses then we could ride them, (we spent most of the time picking ourselves up out of the dirt but it was great fun that lasted one whole summer.