Call Me Old All You Want, But I Got to Grow Up in the 1970s

Call me old all you want, but I got to grow up in the 1970s, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

We were the cool kids before anybody needed social media to prove they were cool.

Where I grew up, we liked peace, we liked to party, puff puff, and pass , we loved our friends, we loved our families, and most of the time we even liked the strangers who wandered into our circle. The attitude was simple: the more, the merrier.

Sure, every once in a while there was a fistfight. There was always somebody who eventually wanted to test somebody else. But in my world, that was the exception, not the point of the night. We weren’t going out looking to hurt people. We were going out looking for our friends, some great music and a good time.

And we knew how to have one.

We didn’t have cell phones. We didn’t have texting, group chats, FaceTime or location sharing.

If you wanted to know whether somebody was home, you called their house phone.

If nobody answered, you might just go over and knock on the door.

Somehow, without a single app telling us where everybody was, we always managed to find each other.

We drove around for absolutely no reason.

We hung out in basements, backyards, driveways and parking lots.

We went to the movies and the drive-in.

We went rollerskating.

We went to concerts.

Sometimes the entire plan for the night was getting into somebody’s car, turning up the radio and seeing where we ended up.

And those nights were some of the best nights of our lives.

In my circle and among the people I knew, we didn’t have to worry about fentanyl, crack, crank or heroin. That wasn’t part of the world we were living in.

We were more interested in sneaking a beer once in a while, having a friend’s older brother buy us a bottle of Boone’s Farm, or everybody chipping in together to buy a dime bag.

And plenty of times, we didn’t need any of it.

We could have fun just being together.

Imagine that.

We talked.

We laughed.

We flirted.

We danced.

We acted stupid.

We stayed out too late.

We made memories.

Were we perfect?

Not even close.

We broke rules. We tested boundaries. We did things our parents probably never found out about, and maybe that was for the best.

But we were much more interested in enjoying life than bringing harm to somebody else.

And then there was the music.

Good Lord, did we have music.

We had Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Queen, Kiss, Todd Rundgren, Journey, the Eagles, Boston, Michael Jackson , the Commodores, Average White Band and Evelyn Champagne King , Parliament.

And that barely scratches the surface.

We could go from rock ’n’ roll to hard rock, funk, soul, R&B and disco in the same night and never think twice about it.

We didn’t care what little category somebody wanted to put a song into.

If it sounded good, we turned it up.

Music was part of who we were.

It was playing when we fell in love.

It was playing when somebody broke our heart.

It was playing while we got ready to go out.

It was blasting from car speakers while we cruised around town.

It was playing at parties, skating rinks, concerts and in our bedrooms.

We bought albums and actually listened to the whole album.

We knew the covers.

We knew which song was on which side.

We waited for our favorite song to come on the radio, and when it finally did, everybody in the car knew the rule:

Shut up and turn it up.

And we had places to go.

We had the World Series of Rock.

We had the Tomorrow Club.

We had Idora Park.

Locally, we had the Spring Thing.

We had amazing movie theaters and awesome drive-in theaters.

And we had rollerskating rinks with great music where you could spend half the night going around in circles and somehow feel like you were exactly where you were supposed to be.

Those skating rinks were social media before social media.

Everybody knew who was there.

Everybody knew who came in with whom.

Everybody knew who was hoping to skate with whom.

And nobody needed an algorithm to figure it out.

Now, can we please talk about the clothes?

Because we absolutely knew how to dress.

Hip huggers.

Bell-bottoms.

Elephant pants.

Silver jackets.

Silver pants.

Platform shoes.

Stilettos.

Stiletto boots.

We wore clothes that had personality.

We weren’t afraid of shine.

We weren’t afraid of color.

We weren’t afraid of walking into a room and being noticed.

If the pants could get wider, we wore them wider.

If the shoes could get higher, apparently we were willing to risk an ankle.

And somehow we looked fabulous doing it.

We had mood rings that supposedly told everybody exactly how we were feeling and love block rings that were as much a part of the look as everything else.

And what cracks me up today is watching our fashion come back over and over again.

Bell-bottoms become “flares.”

Platforms are cool again.

Vintage band shirts are everywhere.

Retro sunglasses come back.

Designers keep rediscovering the 1970s as if they just invented it.

Sorry.

We already wore it. And we wore it damn well.

And our hair?

We could go from one extreme to the other and somehow pull that off too.

We went from curly-haired perms to poker-straight hair.

We wore it long, layered, feathered, curled and straight.

And we could rock a shag haircut like nobody’s business.

Actually, some of us can still rock a shag haircut today.

The 1970s shag never really died. It just waited for everybody else to catch up again.

We also learned how to work.

And I mean work.

I’m talking about laboring work.

Factories.

Construction.

Restaurants.

Stores.

Cleaning.

Lifting.

Standing on your feet all day.

Doing whatever needed to be done.

A lot of us started working young, and we learned early that if you wanted money in your pocket, you earned it.

You showed up.

You did the job.

You didn’t expect everything to be easy.

That work ethic stayed with a lot of us for life.

We were also proud of where we came from.

We were proud of our neighborhoods.

We were proud of our side of town.

We didn’t spend our entire childhood embarrassed by where we lived and counting the seconds until we could escape and pretend we came from someplace else.

Those neighborhoods were ours.

Those streets held our friends, our families, our first jobs, our first loves, our heartbreaks, our dumb decisions and some of the greatest memories we would ever make.

And some of those friendships lasted.

Some of the best friends I ever had came into my life during the 1970s, and here we are in 2026, and I am still friends with two of them today.

More than 50 years later.

Think about that.

No Facebook suggested we become friends.

No app matched us.

Nobody followed anybody.

Nobody counted likes.

We met each other.

We spent time together.

We showed up for one another.

And we stayed friends.

That was enough.

And one of the coolest things about getting older is watching younger generations discover everything we already knew was great.

They love our music.

They wear our band shirts.

They buy vinyl.

They want our bell-bottoms.

They wear platforms.

They get shag haircuts.

The music we were blasting more than half a century ago is still playing in movies, stadiums, bars, commercials, weddings and cars today.

So the next time “Hotel California” comes on and somebody’s grandmother starts singing right along with every word, remember something:

She didn’t discover that song on Spotify.

She was there.

That grandmother may have once been walking around in hip huggers and platform shoes with poker-straight hair down her back.

She may have been wearing a mood ring.

She may have been at a Pink Floyd concert.

She may have spent Saturday night at the drive-in or skating under flashing lights.

She may have cruised around town with six friends stuffed into a car and the music turned up way too loud.

She may have worn stilettos higher than anything you would attempt today.

And trust me, she probably has stories she still hasn’t told you.

We grew up without cell phones and somehow never lost everybody.

We survived without GPS.

We called each other on house phones.

We knocked on doors.

We listened to records.

We sang in our cars.

We danced in our kitchens.

We went to concerts.

We went to drive-ins.

We went rollerskating.

We wore bell-bottoms and elephant pants.

We survived platform shoes and stilettos.

We wore mood rings.

We rocked perms, poker-straight hair and shag cuts.

We worked.

We laughed.

We loved.

We made mistakes.

We grew up.

And as the years moved forward, we brought you MTV, too.

So go ahead.

Call me old.

I’ll gladly take it.

Because being this age today means I was lucky enough to be young in the 1970s.

And underneath the gray hair, the wrinkles, the reading glasses and the knees that might complain a little louder these days, that kid is still in there.

We grew up smart. We weren’t just school smart we were street smart.

We didn’t believe in fighting, but if we got in a scrape, we definitely knew what we were doing and could hold our own.

Still loving the music.

Still loving the clothes.

Still loving those memories.

Still proud of where we came from.

And still ready to turn the damn music up.

We are the ’70s generation.

We were cool then.

We’re still cool now. We’re cool moms. We’re cool. Grandma‘s some of us may even be cool. Great grandmas..

Many of us who made friends we had friends for life and we still enjoy meeting with them if we’re close by talking with them on the phone.

And we are darn proud of it.