Hang around long enough and you suddenly could be celebrating your 50th wedding anniversary. A great thing for lots of reasons. And maybe it’s inevitable that on that occasion your spouse gifts you a little paperback that chronicles the culture and events in the year of your nuptials. I got one.
It provides a sort of reverse Rip Van Winkle effect, a somewhat disorienting awakening to the past—even though I’ve been there. A half-century is a substantial amount of time.
A dozen eggs cost 78 cents? A gallon of gas 39 cents? A car, on average, $3,400? Such factoids can mess with your bearings—some of the tidbits staggering to contemplate, yet others remarkably familiar. The President of the United States was facing impeachment. The Supreme Court was sorting out Roe v. Wade. I just read that the so-called stand-alone mustache (no beard or other facial hair; the kind I had in 1973) now is enjoying one of its periodic renaissances.
What goes around comes around?
In that Long Ago, lots of people were smoking marijuana, leading—as humorist Garrison Keillor recently put it—“to pretentious inwardness and contemplation of oneself as a rainbow or a rubber duck or rhubarb.” Keillor contended that “illegality was a big part of the appeal” of weed back then. Well, that’s different.
People were wearing strange clothing in ’73. (Bellbottoms! Tie-dye T-shirts!) Guys were walking around in public with shoulder-length hair and mutton-chop sideburns. Most domestic cars were merrily guzzling gas and resembled flat, wide-bodied boats—and generally were equipped with only AM radios. At home, we still were listening to music by employing black vinyl discs the size of dinner plates, placed on a gizmo called a turntable. Played at 33 rpm. (Ask your grandmother.)
Humans, though mostly speaking to others face-to-face, did have telephones—though those were stationary, stuck to walls or sitting on desks—that didn’t do anything besides function as telephones. People composed letters (which they then put into envelopes and dropped into mailboxes, destined to reach the addressee in just a matter of days), by operating heavy machines known as typewriters, which had keys attached to small metal arms that struck an inked ribbon, thereby imprinting letters on a piece of paper.
Nobody went around saying everything was “awesome” in 1973. Or, worse: “actually awesome.” (The hardly superior cliché then was “far out!”) Mass-marketed computers still were 10 years in the future. There were no laptops, digital cameras, DVDs, hybrid cars, Google, GPS. No fuss over global warming.
Babies were being named Christopher and Jennifer, Jason and Melissa then. No Liams or Noahs, Willows or Madisons. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Some things, I’m going to argue, were better then. Music: The Beatles (even after they split up), Chicago, Bette Midler, Paul Simon, early Springsteen, The Grateful Dead, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. Tina Turner.
Horses were better: Secretariat.
There were, in 1973, hints of a futuristic world, such as the debut flight across The Pond by the supersonic passenger plane, the Concorde: D.C. to Paris in 3 ½ hours. The Concorde’s marketing pitch was “Arrive before you leave.” (Thirty years after it arrived, the Concorde did an Amelia Earhart. Disappeared.)
There was hope of consequences for political malfeasance: The Watergate hearings. There was a sense with the American troop withdrawal from Vietnam after 18 years that we just might give peace a chance. That summer, the United States and Soviet Union signed an agreement to reduce the threat of nuclear war.
Not that I want to return to 1973. That’s a foreign country which no longer exists, an archeological dig. But it was a special year, a good beginning—certainly in terms of one particular marriage—and therefore is a nice place to visit in the mind. Briefly. But, as the old baseball pitcher Satchel Paige warned, “Don’t look back; something might be gaining on you.”
These are good old days.