There’s been some very, VERY good news from the financial sector. Additionally, the Dow broke three records last week. Along that front, my mother calls me a drug dealer because I’m now into recreational and medicinal weed growth and production. I didn’t have the heart to tell this is hardly my first involvement with the plant. She just never looked in my boss Sound Design eight track player in my room during my High School years.
Truth be told, I wasn’t a big fan of the stuff. It made me uncomfortably paranoid. It made me feel like a failure, a fraud. I would constantly wash my hands and I could feel fat globules forming in my…….well, everywhere. The only way I could attain a buzz as good as my friends, was to be a bit drunk first. Then and only then I could find the gut busting humor in reciting the words, “urban renewal versus rurality”.
Living in a small community in South Central Texas, just a a bit more than a hundred miles from the Texas/Mexican border, accessibility was a breeze, plus this was the mid-70’s. There wasn’t much else to do. Vietnam ended in ‘75. Nixon resigned. Vice President Ford took over the reigns and pardoned Nixon for crimes Nixon claimed he never committed..
By the beginning of my Junior year in High School (fall of 1976) there wasn’t much happening. The rampant, calamitous civil unrest of the 60’s and very early 70’s, took a lot out of activists. They had all riot burn out. By 1979, half of all protestors cut their hair, wore ties, got jobs and married, had kids, changed their names from Moonbeam back to Brenda. They probably started a subscription to The wall Street Journal and voted for Reagan. And they started trusting people over 30 because they themselves were now well over 30. Many traded in their rolling papers for coke spoons..
I hail from the Senior class of 1977. A very uneventful time. Carter was President, Mondale was his Veep. The big News stories of the year were just as boring as that administration.
- In 1977, the first woman was ordained as an Episcopal priest
- Scientists identify previously unknown bacterium as cause of mysterious “legionnaire’s disease”
- Carter pardoned all Vietnam war drafts dodgers
Our clothing and Style? I don’t really remember there being any. Go watch the movie, “Dazed and Confused”. Those people were my contemporaries. They were Juniors spending their last days as Juniors. By late August, just a little over three months later, they’d be Seniors, Kings of High School. No one I knew felt that way or harassed underclassmen, Freshman specifically.
By and large, guys style involved bell bottom jeans. Corduroy pants were big then. Their hair was longish— Basically Just grown out last haircuts. By 1977, women were experimenting with bangs. Bangs curved under like a continuous tubing thanks to a curling iron. Others were trying this new style called “wings”, a precursor to a fuel-injected Farrah Fawcett shag.
The following photo is a typical small high school class photo from 1977. It comes the Clark School, but I know nothing beyond that, but so help me God, it exemplifies EVERYTHING I’ve described about my fellow 1977ers..
Tsk…tsk….tsk. My class photo looks no different. And that makes me wonder if or how anyone from my class ever married and procreated? Imagine adding to this loo, acne, braces, out of control glands and a few leisure suits and I urge you to fight your gag reflex. Polyester leisure suits and often in pastel colors, even in the dead of winter. Some guys tried to legitimize the look by adding a tie. Then it became an “ill at ease” suit. If any of my boyfriends had worn this combo, it would have become a lawsuit.
Like all classes, mine had a social strata. Freaks, Geeks, Band Nerds, only the Cool Kids thought they were The Cool Kids. There were the Plain Brains, Christian Clubbers, Sluts, the Blackfriars (kids who who were in plays), the jocks really weren’t revered because we never had decent teams in any sport, at least back in my day we didn’t, but considering this is Texas that is a bit unusual now that I think of it. I probably was a little bit of everything, but mostly I was glad to eventually get out of that stifling hamlet I once called home and move anywhere else.
Now, it’s your turn. Who and what were you in your HS? Also, tell me the year you graduated. School name and location are unimportant. .
AND if you smoked dope back then, where did you hide your stash? Seriously, where?????
PS: My mother called it “jazz lettuce” because in her sheltered, insulated existence , she’d heard that only jazz musicians of her time smoked it. Daddy referred it to as “marijuana grass”. Always in that combination.
Think that was funny? You should have heard him ask you face to face if you were all “sauced up” on marijuana grass after getting caught trying to sneak in two hours alter curfew…..while completely gacked out on the stuff.
Let me hear from you.
