It's the 1970s

Not many knew what a computer was. The only phones were in buildings or booths by the side of the road. They were all tied to the system by a wire, so you could only take the phone so far away from its normal resting place. We swapped the short handset cord for long ones so that we could roam up to 50 feet from the phone’s base. Milk might have been delivered right to your house. Sometimes bread, pop and chips too. If you wanted a coffee outside of work and a restaurant, you had to make it at home and your only two options were a percolator, which took a long while to brew, or instant coffee, which still required boiling water. There were no stores that just sold coffee and tea. Convenience stores didn’t sell hot food. Porn magazines were on a rack in the middle of the store and for the longest time, they weren’t sealed. The produce section of the grocery store had whatever was in season and there was nowhere near the range of items we have today. If you wanted vegetables as a side, you probably got it out of a can. There was no such thing as packages of pre-sliced or shredded vegetables, lettuce or other salad makings. There was absolutely no gluten-free anything. The word vegan had no meaning. A diet simply meant you were consuming less food. Atkins, Keto, Paleo, etc. diets didn’t exist. 

Women had only secured the right to open a bank account without their husband’s signature in the past decade. This became the first time a woman could get a credit card in their own name, instead of their husband or father. The Criminal Code had just been amended to legalize the distribution of information on methods of contraception and their prescription, as well as sexual acts between two consenting members of the same sex. Women earned 57 cents to every dollar earned by a man. Paternal Authority was abolished, eliminating a husband having more legal rights with regard to judicial matters concerning their children. Women could not serve in combat roles nor be pilots in the military. Just under half of children had moms who stayed home all day as housewives. The Canadian Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Maternity benefits were finally standardized and made part of EI. 

Gas had lead in it. Paint too. You could buy a single family home for under $20,000, sometimes way under. Very few people locked their doors. For the most part, parents had no idea where their kids were, and they rarely had any concern about their safety. If you wanted to listen to music, you played a record at home and maybe put an 8-track cassette in your car stereo. Otherwise, mobile audio was restricted to radio only. FM radio had only been around a decade. Very few kids actually liked their parents’ music. Even if you lived in a big city, you had at most six TV channels to choose from. If you didn’t live close to the American border, you had much less than that, because there were only two Canadian networks at the time. The TV got its signal from an antenna and mast on the roof, and sometimes you needed a motor control to point the thing more toward the direction of the transmitting station you were trying to receive. If you wanted to get information about something you had to rely on a set of encyclopedias. Not everybody had them, because they were expensive, and the information contained within them was only as current as when they were printed. The next best option was your local library. Everyone wore a watch. 

There were maybe three or four flavors of potato chips. There was no such thing as ready made popcorn in a bag, with the exception of pink candy popcorn. People made popcorn using a Jiffy Pop pie plate thingy with a handle that you heated on the stove and the aluminum foil expanded as it popped. The closest thing there was to single serve, frozen dishes was the TV dinner on a compartmentalized aluminum tray, sealed with aluminum foil that you baked in the oven. There were no microwave ovens, those people that had them called them radar ranges, and they were exorbitantly expensive. McDonald’s had no chicken items on the menu. The Big Mac was under 75 cents. There were a lot of different kinds of bubblegum, and they weren’t sold as small pieces, they were made into fat sticks of flavored gum that you broke off into pieces. There were no diet soft drinks. Soft drinks were sold in glass bottles. 

Playgrounds were filled with things that could seriously harm you. Swings with wooden slat seats you could stand on, merry-go-rounds that spun fast enough to launch you many feet, slides that were long and high, monkey bars that were way too high off the ground. Suntan lotion (it wasn’t called sunscreen back then) had an SPF2 rating. Boxer shorts weren’t common. Most suitcases didn’t have wheels. Most people had at least a flower garden. The majority of cars on the road were made in North America. Cars were huge - a car with a width of 77 inches and a length of 210 inches (5.3 metres) wasn’t uncommon (A Honda Fit was 161 inches long). Pickup trucks were not a common family vehicle. There was no such thing as an SUV. Vans were big in the 70s and single guys liked to customize the paint job but especially the interior, turning them into psychedelic party / sex pads. The walls and floor would often be covered in thick shag carpeting. Car mechanicals were simple enough that most people could do their own minor repairs. Every car had a cigarette lighter and many ashtrays. There was no such thing as a sunroof in a car. Very few people wore seatbelts and most cars only had a lap belt in the front seat. Only sporty cars had individual seats in the front, most of the time it was one big long, bench seat. If kids were in the car, they basically sat wherever they felt like, unbelted, and it wasn’t uncommon to find them sprawled in the back of the station wagon. People rode in the back of a pick up truck like it was nothing. 

A lot of people smoked. There were still cigarettes with no filters on the end. Cigarette packages had cool designs and no glaring warnings at all. You could smoke everywhere, on a plane, on the train, in the workplace, at your desk, walking the hallways, anywhere. Cocktail lounges and bars would be thick with smoke. Cooks often had a smoke dangling out of their mouth while they prepared food. Every desk and most tables had an ashtray. The ashtray could even be on its own pedestal stand next to your chair in your living room. The shorts that men wore were very short, tight, revealed a lot of thigh and would’ve looked very strange today. Jean jackets were a common item of clothing. Bell bottom jeans too. Some young women liked to show their feminist side by not wearing a bra. Condoms existed, but not many people used them. There was no such thing as metal or plastic recycling, same with paper and cardboard. You didn’t have to visit the dump as often as we do today. If you had something to throw and it was smaller than a loveseat, you pretty much just put it out with the rest of the garbage, and it got compacted with all the rest of the garbage bags by the truck. Mercurochrome, the brand name of merbromin, was an antiseptic used to treat minor wounds and cuts that contained mercury. 

There were no ice makers in fridges, you had to fill metal ice cube trays with water and freeze them. Outdoor ice rinks outnumbered indoor rinks. Most airports didn’t have security screening. Handicapped people were still being sterilized. The Human Rights Act became a thing. The Canada Labour Code was amended to eliminate pregnancy as a basis for lay-off or dismissal. A dollar bought a movie ticket and snacks with money left over. Sometimes we went to see a movie in our car, at a drive-in theatre. You hung a speaker on your window and everybody parked facing the screen. Most of the grocery store brands don’t exist anymore. Steinberg’s, Dominion and A&P anyone? Most of the department stores don’t exist anymore. Zellers, K-Mart, Simpson’s, Eaton’s, Woolworth, Towers, Ogilvy’s. Newspapers were subscribed to by a lot of people and kids made a decent wage from delivering them every day. The newspaper was thick on Saturdays, with a built-in comics section, and loads of flyers with coupons. If you wanted something professionally printed on paper, you typed the document by hand using a typewriter. There were no ‘fonts’, just whatever type set was installed on the typewriter. If you needed copies of a document or copies of signatures or a filled out form, you put carbon paper between multiple sheets of paper and the copies were created by the pressure of typing or writing on the top sheet. The only way to take pictures was with a standalone film camera with interchangeable lenses. They made compact film cameras, but they took lousy quality pictures. Your webcam could take a better picture. You paid for everything with cash or wrote a cheque. Stores might not accept a cheque if they didn’t know you. Only wealthy folks or businessmen used credit cards. Paying with a credit card was not an electronic transaction, they used a special imprinter machine nicknamed a knuckle-buster to imprint the raised number from the card onto a carbon paper form, which was signed by the customer. That’s why you had to sign the back of the card, so the merchant could compare signatures. I don’t recall experiencing violent weather growing up. But after I left home, they experienced microbursts, tornados, ice storms, etc.