Did anybody grow up in the 70s?

I was born in 1966 and when I think of the 70s, I think of:

The Osmonds
The Stylistics
Bry-nylon sheets
The long hot summer of 1976
Chopper bikes
Dog poo everywhere
Chelsea Girl
The Tomorrow People
The Sunday People
Top of the Pops
Starsky and Hutch
Lava lamps
Brown house decor
Skipping with my sisters
Two ball on the wall
The pop van
Soggy white paper straws
Blue eye shadow

I know, I miss the freedoms we had the lack of traffic congestion and pollution and the feeling of there being so much more space (South East).

thesacredcow I too had a purple and orange bedroom. Even my dressing table was painted in purple orange and pink racing stripes ! What times.

Buying an icecream from the Mr Softee icecream van when he came round in the summer holidays and collecting the little round cards with photos of popstars. I had Moody Blues, Lulu, Marc Bolan I recall.
Hessian wedge sandals in the summer and platforms in the winter
Tiered skirts made by mum.
Hair tied up with bobbles
Mum had a Hillman Imp car with the engine in the back and dad had a Vauxhall Cavalier
Every room in the house seemed to be painted green and there were loads of pot plants.
My bedroom had orange gloss paint on the skirting and doors, with mauve walls. I had posters up of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy and later, Elvis and the BeeGees.
Trying to tape TOTP off the telly with the microphone of my casette recorder
Wearing long dresses to parties, made by mum
The summer of '76, all the pre-teens and teens in my street walking around in swimsuits every day of the summer holidays
The dentist van turning up at school and the "nit van" would strike horror into us. Dentistry in general was like being butchered.
Mum washing clothes in the twin tub and poking it all down with a giant wooden spoon
My grandad smoked Players No 6 and collected the cards which he saved up to buy goods from a catalogue, a bit like Green Shield stamps
My hobby was stamp collecting and I used to send off for stamps through the post, paying with a postal order.

3 day week
Power strikes and candlelight
No central heating - paraffin heaters
The world about us. The sullivans, cannon, starsky & hutch, Etc
Jubilee street party
Landlines with chair and note pad by them.
Gingers knock
Outside play all day remote from home on bikes sometimes including river swimming.
Rag and bone man with pony and cart ‘any old iron’ and everyone rushing to offload things.
Rust bucket cars.
European vote !!
Decimalisation.
Card train tickets. Old bus ticket machines operated by conductors.
Smoking on buses and trains and tubes and everywhere really.
Casual violence tolerated and used by teachers.
Casual racism tolerated at school.
Knowing middle aged people who had fought in ww2 - so close back then.

walking half a mile to school age 5 with my sister age 7
Hot summer with a week away in Great Yarmouth 1976
Saving water in 1976
Strikes and queing for petrol and some rationing in shops
Silver Jubillee and a party in the village hall for all kids
Day trips on a coach to Clacton with Tea in Cordeys
Days and days spent outside playing
Stubble burning

Black & white TV
No daytime or late evening TV
Three channels, BBC1, BBC2, ITV
No car seat belts
Sitting in the boot of estate cars
Playing on building sites
Angel Delight was a treat
Never eating out in a restaurant or café
Home made clothes
Party line on the telephone
No duvets, just a sheet, blankets and a bedspread
Wrestling on ITV on Saturday afternoons

Crackerjack
Shep on Blue Peter
People actually watched Eurovision
No remote control or wireless anything
Coming home from school and there was nothing being broadcast yet
Playing out for hours
Cycling all over south Devon
Picnics by the beach or on the moors
A pair of flares my mum wore that had a little bell on one ankle
Fur coats were desirable
Long skirts/dresses for parties
Hardly anyone wore jeans
Gloves on elastic
Sunday roasts
Eating apple before bed instead of brushing teeth because that's what Mum thought was good for us (hence my crowns and fillings now)

The Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977.
Pippa dolls in a purple case (the shoes always got lost)
"Sweet cigarettes" sweets
Woolworths pick 'n' mix
Thames TV skyline ident
Halfpenny coins
Cassettes
No mobile phones or internet
Rockeries
Pampas grass
Bambi
K9 and Romana
'The Generation Game' with Larry 'shut that door' Grayson. The conveyor belt memory game where there was always a cuddly toy.
Vienetta

Beginning of 70s we still lived in a farm and my parents only had tv during the winter. It was in the days when everyone rented TVs and white goods. Nobody we knew bought such things.

I remember a trip to London from Devon with my brother. I must have been 10 to his 16 and he wanted to see things I didn't so he put on a hop on hop off bus on my own and collected me when it finished. No one thought anything if this.

I would be put on a train on my own at similar age to visit my married sister who would pick me up at other end. Again, this was seen as nothing unusual.

I remember for the silver jubilee celebrations we had a street party and I made coconut ice in the form of a Union Jack flag. So much colouring to make the red and blue my fingers were stained for weeks.

The whole school football team plus subs (so 13 boys) fitted in the heads estate car for away matches.

Also, being bored sometimes. If it was raining and we had to stay indoors, it was either reading or making up your own games with whatever toys you had (mostly soft toys and action men etc.). If we complained to mum about being bored, she’d just say “use your imagination”! There were no dvds/internet to distract us with so we had to make our own entertainment. But learning to cope with being bored is a skill we need to learn after all.

Being able to cross the road safely because there were literally only 2 cars every 5 mins.
Angel Delight (had that today).
Going to the local woods in the school hols at 9am and not returning till 5pm. Parents didn't turn a hair as we all thought it completely normal.
TV was brilliant because we didn't have so many channels (puts my teeth on edge watching DCs mindlessly scrolling through 500 odd channels to find something to watch.
Stealing my parents library tickets then dragging a bagful of library books home because we actually read books then.
Fighting with my brothers every week when the Look-in comic arrived through the letterbox to see who got to read it first.
Best of all. no internet.

Queuing up to use the phone box.
Roller skating everywhere with those skates which you would strap on over your shoes.
Roaming the neighbourhood for hours on end in the summer.
Bombing down the hill behind my house on my bike (no one wore helmets)
Playing on building sites and waste ground.
No convenience foods, everything was cooked from scratch
A whole range of shops in the neighbourhood, which was only a mile from the town centre, but most people did their shopping locally, on foot. We had 2 bakers, 2 butchers, a greengrocers, a post office, a hardware shop, a knitting shop and a pet shop, and many more which I have forgotten . Most of them have gone now.
Half day closing on a Tuesday when most of the local shops were shut. Also, I grew up in a Northern mill town, and we still had 'Wakes week'. A lot of the independent shops would close for a week in August and a travelling fair would come to town. It dates back to when all the cotton mills would close for a week and all the workers would go on holiday, usually to Blackpool. Each town in the area would have its own week, so not all the factories were shut at once.

School closed for weeks on end due to an oil shortage.

ladybird summer

I remember having the day off school for Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips and then on the Queen’s 25th wedding anniversary (which was also my birthday!).
Power cuts and spending whole evenings in the dark.
Mars bars and packets of crisps cost 2.5p (must have been early 70’s).
The hot summer of 1976 and the plague of ladybirds which accompanied it.
The huge guillotine (for cutting paper) in our classroom when we were 7-8. Health & safety was not that hot. Likewise the big rusty climbing frame on tarmac in the playground.
In the school summer holidays we’d spend all day playing out in some fields and woods a couple of blocks from our houses. Adults would only get worried if we didn’t turn up for tea.
There was also a building site we played on for a while when they were building a small block of flats - it was left completely open and unsecured when the workmen went home, damp cement and all.
There was no telly on during the day except school programmes. And no breakfast telly!
If we went to a hotel or posh-ish restaurant, you’d get orange juice as a starter. And a sweet trolley at the end. (No one does sweet trolleys anymore do they?)

I remember my mom watching The Onedin Line, The Brothers, and When The Boat Comes In.
Everyone watched the same thing. Saturday night was Jim’ll Fix It (ugh), Doctor Who, then maybe some sort of variety show.
By the late 70s I think I was old enough to watch Dallas and was devastated that the Who Shot JR episode clashed with a family occasion which merited a rare meal out, as we had no video recorder or catchup.
On Christmas Day there was always the big film, something like Bond.

@ALongHardWinter my 14 year old friends also got into see Saturday Night Fever but they wouldn't let me in. I was devastated and cried all the way home and then had to confess to my parents who I'd told I was going to see Star Wars!

Poldark with Robin Ellis, the lovely Angharad Rees and her smiling eyes, and Ralph Bates as George Warleggan.

We had individual armchairs in the lounge, mismatched in style and probably colour, rather than a three piece suite.
There was a trend for coloured bathrooms - yellow, pink, olive green, turquoise etc. We had a boring white one. By the time we had changed it to a creamy beige, white suites were about to come back into fashion!
I had twice weekly baths, I think. Not sure if parents bathed daily. We certainly didn’t get a shower till the mid 80s.
Can’t remember wearing any deodorant until the mid 80s either.
Did we all stink back then?

So many of these!
Smash with everything instead of potatoes. It was never mixed properly and I hated it.
Bay City Rollers
Maxi dresses
Blue eyeliner and mascara
Awful swirly carpets and flock wallpaper
Transistor radios
The top 40
Platform shoes
Vesta curries
Great TV programmes that were actually worth watching
Three TV channels on a rented TV set
No central heating
Baths once a week
Arctic roll
School discos
Milk in a bottle with cream on top
Telephone boxes
Chatting to your friends on the landline
Cheesecloth tops
So much better then.

I was born in 1963,so the 70s was when I was growing up. I can remember:-
Chopper bikes (always wanted one but my parents wouldn't let me)
The Bay City Rollers (having a crush on Woody )
Going sledging on nearby Haste Hill in the winter (we seemed to get snow every year back then!).
3 TV channels (BBC1 and 2,and ITV) and no remote control.
The long,hot summer of 1976.
Bell-bottom trousers
Dial-a-disc.
Saturday Night Fever (my best mate and I managed to get in to see it at the cinema at the age of 14,despite it being an 'X' certificate {18 is today's equivalent}. Heaven knows how we managed that!)
Red phone boxes that had phone directories in!

Home made clothes, including my brown school uniform. Choosing a pattern, and Mum picking the material from the market.

Ice inside the windows.
Waiting for the back and white telly to warm up.
Watching a black screen until the countdown clock came on for Playschool
Power cuts
The washing machine being dragged out into the middle of the kitchen on a Monday, and playing in the bubbles
Strap on rollerskates
Ice cream from the Walls van coming in blocks, and cutting it out onto square"cones"
No freezer, so eating the ice cream block quickly!
Ice lollies costing 5p
Taking 5p to the corner shop, coming back with a bag of sweets
No supermarket, so individual shops each day.
Supermarket opening, great excitement!
Bring allowed to stick the Green Shield stamps in the book
Going home at lunch from school, Dad coming home as well, eating mince and carrots with mash, then going back to school.

Haven't RTFT (I usually would - apologies!) so I'm sure others have said my things already, but in no particular order from someone born in the middle-late 60s and in primary school/early secondary school during the 70s:

Lots of clothes in brown, yellow and green
Clothes made by my mum (also in yellow and green!)
Sheets you could make spark in the dark
Realising colour TV was a thing
Interesting (yes, that's a euphemism for hard-on-the-eyes!) wallpaper and carpet patterns (tbf, may have been leftovers from the 60s, but I remember them in the first house I lived in)
Phone numbers that only had 4 digits
No sun cream - Factor 2 was 'out there'
Findus crispy pancakes
Flares

There's probably more, but that's my off-the-top-of-my-head-list!

Being furious that decimalisation meant my 6d pocket money became 2.5p - one old penny was equated with 0.5 new penny. So my 6 penny chews on pocket money day became 5 overnight. What a swizz.