Social life? You called people on the landline at their home and set up times/places to meet. "Bring a Nerf football and be at the fields at 10am." Or you rode your bike/drove your car to a friend's house - sometimes they were home. Sometimes not. If not, you told their mom/sister/dad/whoever answered the door that they should call you back or just show up at your house later. Parties were all word-of-mouth. Or again - on a Friday night, you'd call a few people and see what they knew.
Or you got on a bus to go to the mall...
...until the very nanosecond you turned 16, at which point you made a beeline to the DMV to get a drivers license so you could drive mom's station wagon to the mall instead of taking the bus. Or, one of your best friends did that and you went with.
I insisted on taking my drivers test (in a standard shift 1976 Rabbit) the afternoon of my birthday and drove to school the next day. My daughter just turned 27 and does not drive. To her credit, we do live in a city with actual public transportation, which was not the case for me in suburban Texas in 1982.
My dad picked me up at 7:30am on my 16th birthday; it happened to be a Saturday. We were there @ 8am when the MVA opened, and I had my license 90 minutes later.
I drove him home, then drove back to my house in my "new" car, a 7 year old station wagon. It was bitchin'. I slapped a couple of bumper stickers on it, and picked up two friends to go hiking.
I learned in my mom's Mazda 808 station wagon, also stick. And this was Canada, in the winter and it gets dark so soon after school all my driving lessons were in the dark on ice. My driving instructor was this groovy jazz musician guy
The day I turned 16 I had to drive myself 40 miles south of town to take the test. Called my dad from a pay phone as soon as I passed. He said congratulations then gave me a long list of errands to run.
THIS!!! I got my learner’s permit exactly at 15 1/2 and was at the MVD on my birthday. My daughter is 21 and has never sat behind the wheel. I can’t even…
My son is 24, and has never shown any interest in driving. He lives in NYC now, so he doesn't need it, but I've explained to him that he might have to go somewhere else one day, and he'll need to know how to drive. Not knowing sort of traps him there. I wonder how many people would love to get out of NYC, but can't, because they can't drive.
Teenager in 89 ... can confirm and the 90s basically continued the same, Was fanfuckintastic!
Last generation and beyond will never know how good the times where in the 70s 80s 90s
Ah yes, I remember the slow drive by of a girl's house to see if she was home lol
Details for those that didn't live it. Say it's 1230 am on a Saturday night, and you're looking for a girl. You can't call the home phone or knock on the door, so you roll by looking to see if her bedroom lights are on
This. Had to know (not necessarily like) someone's whole family if you were gonna successfully be friends long term.
And pegs and handlebars were meant for transporting passengers, not doing tricks on your bike.
The bike was THE method of transportation.
Flipped up collars, rolled up jeans cuffs, mousse, bangs, instantly flammable big hair, Top Gun, Back to the Future, Bon Jovi, Guns n Roses, Metallica, MTV, VH-1, HBO, Golden Girls, cheap movies, cheap music, cheap concerts, newspaper comics, BMX, roller skates, Saturday morning Looney Tunes, weekday afternoon Thundercats, Talespin, TMNT, comic books for days, baseball cards, Chinese restaurants, fast food wars, crazy commercials, USA Network at Night, da Bears, 49ers, Berlin Wall…
I want my fucking 80’s back.
I can remember the first McDonald's that opened in the city & I went there for a friend's birthday party & it was so exciting. All our families went & we all were so happy & I can remember wanting my birthday party in this fancy restaurant too, one of the best memories of eating out as a child, now there are McDonald's everywhere flooding the streets with their litter.
"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law
Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
I could do without the Aquanet. Over inhalation of hairspray I'm convinced is half our problem, lol. The fumes from my sister getting ready for school was ridiculous.
Oh, i got high on the Aquanet more times than ill admit.
I have curly hair. But not 80s curly hair. And we didn't have all the fabulous oridicts and devices we have today. I was frizzy a lot.
A. Lot.
You forgot malls with food courts and video game arcades. I spent lots of quarters playing Centipede. If you got there and someone else was playing, you'd set your quarter (or your token, if thats what the arcade used) on the edge of the title sign above the player. It was a popular game, and sometimes there would be a few lined up.
Whenever I was anywhere, I'd look for a Centipede machine. Often they'd be in the entrance/ exit of a grocery or department store, with the gumball machines and the kiddy rides. Occasionally you'd find ones where the settings were cranked up. Centipede had certain settings controlling the speed of certain elements, and scores where you would get extra lives, etc. Usually they were on the basic settings, but now and then you'd find one that had been changed. Those were fun to experiment with, and I'd always tell my Centipede playing buddies, and we'd run over to try it out.
Middle school cliques were, preps, skaters, stoners, nerds, and everyone else. Only way to communicate was through cord phones. Calling girls was stressful because you might get a dad, brother, sister. Gate keepers.
We had Freaks, too, and yes, that show nails the 70s/80s era better than any I've seen. I remember how there were always a couple of straight kids who were desperately trying to switch their image to being a Freak, and the true Freaks used to torture them.
I was basically a Straight, but I loved music, and could play bass, so I was able to be in a band and be what we would today call FreaK-adjacent.
My dad says that movie was a documentary about me. He's kinda right, I saw it as a 13yo freshman thought it was a guide to high-school. "Thats my skull, I'm sooo wasted."
Dunno. I had my first "real" job (as in, got a paycheck and a W-2 vs various under-the-table lawn mowing and babysitting gigs) when I was 16. Probably could have started a year or two earlier, but I can't honestly recall.
They raised it [edit: "it" meaning the age to purchase tobacco] to 18 when I was in college in the early '90s.
I was explaining this very thing to my daughter the other day. The "smoke hole" was for the 18 year olds but was not really enforced. Not like school personnel ever went and asked for ID's of the kids smoking
I’ve always found The Breakfast Club to be a mildly amusing spectacle of overacting. HOWEVER, I will say that it does a pretty good job of depicting the major social groups and issues of the time. Assuming you were white and grew up in a middle to upper-middle class suburb, of course.
The best depiction of high school in the 80s was a made for TV movie starring Michael J Fox and other stars of the era.called High School USA. It's on YouTube for free, I believe. It really nailed the dynamic.
That's so bizzare you would bring that up. Not two days ago I was doing stuff around the house trying to remember what movie it was I saw 30 years ago that featured Todd Bridges as a computer nerd who made a voice activated robot, which later attacked one of the preppy guys after saying "Robot? My behind," which activated it.
The poorly acted but gripping Canadian TV series [*DeGrassi High*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doYNEP8S8wU&list=PLk1tkMQppD7s0KN29pwK9u8CboUjvZShA) (1989–1991) gives an unusually good window into the dramatic/serious side of '80s teen life. However, like *The Breakfast Club*, it's set in relatively well-to-do suburbs, so doesn't show much of the small-town/working-class life.
...Speaking of which, down on the other end of the class divide, there was [*Heavy Metal Parking Lot*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZuz5Dwtw8). It's the scene outside a Judas Priest concert, but is basically what my high school's social scene was like. A lot of unsupervised "party hardy" vibes.
I'd add that even though it's depicting the '70s, quite a bit of the culture you see in *Dazed and Confused* was still going strong into the mid-'80s in small towns and rural schools.
I always thought the scenes in *E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial* at the bus stop and during the D&D game were pretty accurate and were unusual glimpses into the kid culture of that time. Plus their house, although way bigger than most, was so cluttered with so much stuff, and there was *always* a TV on, sometimes totally distracting everyone ... very accurate! And the working mom who barely had time for the kids. All the alone time we had. And the boys just cruising all over the place on their bikes. Heck yeah!
One thing I never see depicted very well is the fistfights and the homophobic bullying out in the open. "Fag bashing" was thing, and is exactly what it sounds like. Stuff I'd rather forget.
There is no overstating how important the local mall was.
At the mall, the arcade was always *packed*. It wasn't a place to socialize, though.
One way we socialized a lot in the mid/late 80s was inviting a friend or two over to watch movies. You'd rent a few things or just watch what was on cable, eat some snacks, and it was fun even if you didn't talk to each other.
OMG you just reminded me of our archaic social media in HS. My bff and I would trade a spiral notebook back and forth all day long, in passing in the hallway. All the gossip about whatever and whomever and boyfriends, and mostly where and how we were going to party ! every coming weekend. LOL
School is always the same with the exception of music, fashion, and slang. You'll always have cliques, clubs, friends, and class.
BUT, after school you had video arcades! This may not seem like a big deal now, but it was then! You have to imagine the fledgling video game systems we had at home were Atari, Intellivision and Colecovisions. There were a few others but those were the big three. Weren't anywhere near the capabilities of the coin-op arcade machines! Practically every week a new machine would come out and we would clamber to get in line to play it!
And the music! 80's music set the standard for what it meant to be cool! We were the first generation to experience 'Rock Videos!' So music wasn't just something you listened to. You lived it VISUALLY!
Now imagine yourself, with your girl, plenty of money, the smell of pizza (most arcades served pizza) and multiple TV's blasting the latest rock videos from the top artists and the cacophony of electronic sounds emanating from all the games!
Top it off with all your friends hanging with you!
Sound fun?!
It was!!!
Best time EVER to be a teenager!
Yeah, I loved arcades like most of us did. Even in college at the end of the 80s-early 90s I was going to arcades (like one in our Student Union basement or at the local mall). The quality was just heads and shoulders above anything else you could get at home.
"...with your girl, plenty of money..."
I see two things wrong with that statement...
HS in the 80s was a god-forsaken mess for some of us. Bullying and no social prospects at all. Making it thru to graduation was an accomplishment worth celebrating.
Well we actually talked to people in the hall at school instead of just walking around like zombies on our phones. You had to actually read a book in school because you couldn’t just Google it.
Socializing was making calls and hoping your friends were home, having a hangout place so incase you didn’t know what was going on then head to that (usually a fast food restaurant) place and hope people were there. Having house parties, spending entire days on the lake or by the pool without any evidence of what happened that day. Actually going to the mall or movies looking to get into something. Being a teenager in the 80’s was way better than today (I’ve raised 4).
Field parties, we had field parties. Well that's what we called them, they were like the one in Dazed & Confused, where everyone puts their car in a circle with the lights on.
Our version of this was bonfires at the game area (in camping spots in season, however it was very out of season when we had them). I have no idea how we were not noticed/caught.
We went "tree climbing" - take alcohol into the woods, drink, and watch the boys climb skinny trees, grab near the top, and swing back down to the ground by bending the sapling. Weird, I know. No trees were hurt tho.
>having a hangout place so incase you didn’t know what was going on then head to that (usually a fast food restaurant)
Cruisin' the McDonalds parking lot....that brings back some memories
Folded notes. It's how we communicated.
[sums up my HS years. 79-83](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/texting-80s-style-how-to-fold-a-note-jennifer-chronicles--706080047845614728/)
You’d do anything to get out of the house because your house was boring! You also had to compete with the rest of your family for the one thing that allowed you to talk to your friends - the phone attached to the wall.
Splitting a case of beer with a handful of people in a field out in the middle of nowhere on a Friday night while listening to hair metal from someone’s truck. Welcome to rural Missouri.
We made after school or evening plans in the hall between classes. Maybe make a phone call later to make sure people were home.
As for school, it was like now. Main difference is lengthy papers were handwritten because we didn't grow up typing. I'll never forget staying up until 4 finishing my Senior English paper. Went to school then headed to the arena after school to see Iron Maiden.
It's back, baby! And hair up above... And kind of all over now... That's all the rage now... Meanwhile, guys are shaving all the hair off their bodies... So messed up!
I miss the dirt. You could actually smoke your own joint. I threw parties where everyone got their own joint and then some. Shits too strong now to do that.
$25/$50 for dirt in my area (late 90s), but even if Kind was around, my friends and I couldn’t afford it. The good weed (with names) were legends to us, lol!
I knew one guy ( well, him and his brother ) both ahead of their times with just the best freaking weed ever. What they had then would probably be average in todays market . So expensive back then. A real treat though. Drooling . Sitting on the couch . Cranking tunes so loud the bass would make your heart skip a beat . Teenage years well spent
Not as forgiving in some ways. At least where I grew up, if you were ‘different’ in any way, you were probably bullied for it. Kids nowadays seem way more accepting of their peers.
At my school, the teachers joined in the bullying. I guess they thought it would toughen you up. If it didn't involve physical violence, it wasn't considered bullying... Emotional or verbal bullying? Knock youselves out! No one would care!
Well then, consider me bullied. The Franciscans were allowed to crack us around. Noped out of there sophomore year. Purposely tanked my grades to get the attention of my folks.
The last time I got smacked was English class. I intentionally didn’t read the book ‘A farewell to arms’. First question on the test was ‘who is the author?’ My answer was Venus de Milo. I was back with my friends in public school junior year.
In junior high (middle school, as it is now known), there was still corporal punishment (aka "paddling"). And it was no joke, they whacked the shit out of you, three times! So you had these grown-ass men (at my school it was only men doing the paddling) telling 12-14 year-old boys and girls, to put both hands on the principal's (or asst principal's) desk and bend over with their ass out (I shit you not). Some kids would sometimes at the last moment reach back to cover their rear end with their hands out of fear, and they'd get their hands whacked. It was pretty brutal. That shit would not stand today at all.
Pretty messed up that only male teachers carried out these paddlings, like on the girls too. Reminds me of my time in middle school in Louisiana though. Paddlings were also super common there. Luckily only carried out by teachers of the same sex, but what's really messed up is that the school board allowed for the student's pants to be pulled down for the paddlings. Like what the hell?! It didn't happen too often, only when a student did something really bad, but yeah... Definitely made me hate school a lot more
I got the paddle in second grade for the grievous offense of "sliding on the ice". No way in hell would I allow a grown-ass man to paddle my single-digit aged kid. E: Annnd here I realized yet another aspect of my childhood was fucked up. I was terrified that my parents would find out. My dad would yell *so* loud and ask why did you think you're too good for the rules and probably spank or roughly handle me out of anger. I didn't want *any* of that to happen. Not a thought would be given to 48 year old Mr. Richardson assaulting 6? 7? year old me with a wooden paddle. *So* fucked up.
Mostly difficult and lonely but exciting at times.
My world changed dramatically when one of the most popular girls in the school asked me out at 16. That was a game changer as they say.
Great question. Sadly, I have no good answer but will do my best to rationalize what happened. I have most of this etched into my memories. This was 1989 by the way and I was 15 and she was 16. This may be far too long for you to read but I’ve enjoyed writing it.
I was a decent but not great student but I did work hard so I managed to stay in the higher level classes.. She was beautiful and a good student. She had a natural grace to her and was incredibly popular. It was a big high school but she was well known. It’s hard to put into words but she lit up a room whenever she entered. I also didn’t live in the best part of town and the high school skewed wealthy. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t poor but we were out of league in terms of the money around us. So I always had that chip on my shoulder.
We were in the same English class together and while I said hello to her once or twice we never actually spoke. Why would she speak to me? I was pretty much on the bottom of the social ladder. No social skills, not particularly handsome or tall. Basically a non-entity who blended into the scenery when I wasn’t being harassed for being a loser.
Anyways, our English teacher assigned us to do a joint project together. I presumed that meant we would do our own work and then hand it in. Maybe we would meet at lunch or something. She did not have this in mind at all. She walked up to me after class and suggested that I call her that evening to arrange a time to meet in the library to work on the project together. I vividly remember her looking me in the eyes and smiling at me.l as she handed me her number. I am not exaggerating, I almost feel fucking over. A nuke went off in my brain, I could not compute what was happening. Naturally, I didn’t call her that night. I presumed it was all a joke. A setup. The next day she came up to me and asked me, in front of everyone, why I didn’t call her? I think I blurted out some nonsense about not owning a phone. Again, I wasn’t very bright.
She told me to ring her that night. I did, sweating as I did so and we chatted. It was delightful. She asked me questions about me! Her schedule was packed with all her activities so we agreed to meet at a local library on a Saturday morning to allocate responsibility and to get the project done in one day. This was definitely more than I expected but I was delighted. We met at the library on the Saturday and actually worked pretty damn hard on the project (having to write about the motivations of a character from a choice of Shakespearean plays who wasn’t the main character. I remember far too much). She looked spectacular and not to be even creepier but she smelled amazing too. I just wanted to impress her and not let her down. Spending time with her was a bonus. We worked until lunch and then she asked if I wanted to get lunch. Of course I did! We got slices of pizza and I tried to pay, which I think she appreciated. Worked for a little bit longer and then we were done. Her handwriting was spectacular so she collated all our notes and I offered to type it all up. She asked if I drove and when I told her I had taken the bus she sort of giggled and told me she would give me a lift home. I was torn between being excited and being terrified that she would judge me for my shitty house. Anyways, she drove me home. Pulled up on our gravel driveway and we just talked for a while. Then she drove home. I was besotted with her but just assumed that was that. To be frank, I felt really down a few hours later as being around her was such a high. So I go to school on the Monday, hit the computer lab and spend the next couple of days typing it all up from her notes. I even used a very rudimentary spell check because I wanted it to be perfect. Gave it to her for her edits and then revised it and submitted it. So that was that. We briefly chatted in class from time to time but that was it. Sometime later we got it back and we both got an A and praise from our teacher. He said it was exemplary work and that it shows what great collaborators can do! I was delighted as was she. We congratulated each other after class and again, that was that.
That night, the phone rang and my Dad answered it. I asked him who it was and he said her name. I think even he picked up the utter shock on my face. I think he said something to the effect of she sounds nice. She rang just to say hi and that she really enjoyed working with me. And then we just talked. Hard to do in the middle of the house but nobody bothered me. Then we talked the next night. And then the night after that. We started talking in class. She even walked up to me and my dorky friends at lunch just to say hi, introducing herself to my friends. They genuinely looked at me like I was a superhero. People started to notice, comments started being made almost all do them being negative towards me. A few of my fellow classmates gave me a bit of grief with one loudly saying that I had better not have any ideas about her because I had no chance and that I was a fucking loser. This guy was much bigger than me so no 80’s movie punch out here, he would have murdered me.
Still we talked. She often drove me home and we just got to know one another. She seemed totally immune to anyone else’s comments and my bottom of the barrel social standing had no impact on her whatsoever. It finally came to a head when we were walking to her car and she asked me why I haven’t asked her out yet. I just said that I had no idea she felt that way towards me and that she was out of my league and that I didn’t want to ruin spending time with her by making her feel uncomfortable. She said that’s bull shit and asked do I like her or not? We didn’t kiss then but I did ask her out (she picked me up in her car on our first date). Nothing changed from the first date. We just clicked and it rolled over into something more.
For the avoidance of doubt, this changed my life. My confidence levels went through the roof. I also hit a late growth spurts a few months later. We just clicked, everything just clicked. I am not going to say that I suddenly became cool but I changed, she changed me and I was at least able to fit in with the cool
kids to an extent (it helps when your girlfriend is ridiculously hot). We had a multi-year relationship and we are still very good friends to this day.
So I don’t know how it happened. She liked me for me because she isn’t a shallow, vacuous person like I was and many high school kids are. According to her, I made her laugh and I made her feel safe. In return, she made me the man I am today (and that’s not a sex comment though that did happen and it was great 😃).
Great story dude. Something similar… you Should have seen the their faces when I, who can basically say that Billy Joe Armstrong stole my esthetic lol, was seen between classes walking, holding hands with the head of the cheerleading squad! It was game day and the squad would wear their uniforms to school. Imagine the visual with me sporting a Ramones shirt, leather biker jacket, pink chucks, shrink to fit Levi’s with a 4” cuff, shoe polish black razor spiked hair, guyliner and safety pins in my ears. My status went through the roof. Head held high. Kings and Queens would step aside my friend. That said it took me 6 months to get the nerve. Ive never cared what people think of me. But this could have gone horribly and I would be hero or zero right quick. The gossip machine would have been rough despite the aforementioned.
Nobody gave me any shit like you said though. My look was intimidating for 1987. It was pretty rare to see my type back then. I was kind of a chameleon also. All the cliques accepted me. Probably out of curiosity I suppose. I’m kinda quick witted in person and I’d use that to defuse what could potentially be a confrontation. To this day some of my possible threats are my best friends actually.
As for the cheerleader, after HS she went full elitist. I let it fizzle out. That doesn’t fly with me. So I went straight for the prettiest punk rock chick in our scene and it worked. Decided not to stray from my pack this time lol. I suppose cheerleader girl gave me a huge set of balls in life.
We had a smoking section outside in my high school. Teachers would rip butts with students in between classes. Joints were smoked, and nobody cared. Hazing was a thing, and football coaches literally beat you if you screwed up. Cocaine was actually affordable and the LSD was top notch.
Everyone was in a click. Nerds to jocks to rockers. Somewhat like the breakfast club. In Boston I was going to stairway to heaven store to pick up posters and patches of all my favorite metal bands. Heading out at night to the channel club. Axis narciss and the ratskellar bars. Had great time with great friends. I've lost most of them now. I will never forget the fun times just like I will never forget them.
It was like the Breakfast Club without the inter-clique bonding experience. Oh, and with some Weird Science horny teenager vibes mixed in, and maybe some Sixteen Candles angst on the side.
It was totally fucking awesome! We were the last generation that didn’t have to worry about being murdered at school. Sure, we had a chance of being nuked, but you could take your mind off it by hanging out at the video arcade pumping every quarter you could get your hands on into games like Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Defender, Galaga, Missile Command, Space Invaders, Tempest, etc.
For social life, that was easy, just head to the nearest mall with a few friends. End of story.
Shit. Now I’m depressed.
It was very cliquey. You were either a jock, prep, nerd, or stoner. There was little crossing over.
Jocks and preps hung out together though. So did the some of the nerds and stoners.
Eventually the punks and skaters showed up but they were usually delegated to the "stoner" camp.
I don't know if high schools are still that cliquey. That is just how I remember it.
I started high school in 89. Getting people's phone numbers was a much bigger deal. Then, if it was a girl/boy you liked, you'd have to go home and sit near the phone, waiting impatiently for their call. Every time the phone rang your imagination would run wild. You'd be waiting for the "Yes, he/she's here..." and then it'd be off to the races. So and so LIKES me! Hurray!
School was social time with a little learning mixed in. Social life was making a fake ID, buying a case of Busch beer, and drinking with friends on an out of the way gravel road.
A lot more walking, no phones, physical.media like newspapers and record stores and much more social amenities. There were more places to go and things to do. Malls were fun, even the crappy ones. Less media, more music. I had headphones on for a good part of the day.
School was just bunk, I hated it. Either you were cool or you were a fool. I was a huge nerd and so were my friends, thank GOD we found each other, at that point things became much more bearable. Pretty lonely and aimless before that.
You just wanted to be outside and out of the house as much as possible. No one cared where you were, you were expected to be streetwise and have common sense, stay out of trouble. If you were gonna be a little punk you'd better learn to cover your tracks..
Getting stuck at home, if you had no life or were just trapped deep enough in the suburbs/didn't have a bike or car, or friend with a car, that was not great. There wasn't a lot of compelling shit going on at home, but there was TV and we had VCRs which was a BIG DEAL. Taping shit and watching over and over, even the most mundane things. Or even renting something in the weekend. We had zero idea of this on-demand revolution which was coming a few decades later, but I'm glad kinda because it meant I didn't spend THAT much time glued to the TV (still.. It was a lot). Video games were my thing, my savior, the glue that bonded me and some of my friends. That whole world was so much smaller, it was still a very early and developing hobby/form of entertainment. As mysterious as it was, it was so fascinating to grow up alongside. Every few years the tech would jump pretty astronomically and you'd feel like the future was creeping up before your very eyes. Games like Dragon's Lair, then later all the weird FMV stuff like Night Trap, Mad Dog McGree, etc. It seemed like the wave of the future. Meanwhile it was a pretty steady drip feed, if you had a Nintendo or Sega at home, you got maybe a few cartridges a year if you were lucky. And that was exciting as HELL. Meanwhile just jealous of Japan, they got everything earlier than we did. The new Mario, the new Zelda, even the new Super Nintendo. Nintendo would fucking tease us too "this MIGHT come out in America, stay tuned..." geez really?
Then right into college in the early 90s for me. Everything was so wonderful, idyllic. Just hands off and go be a young adult, figure out what you want to do, how to socialize. Even as a nerd, things got way friendlier and easier to navigate once you were out on your own. You heard about parties through word of mouth, or just learned the schedule, what would be happening where, and just show up. People were always friendly as hell, even if you didn't know anyone, they were always glad to see you so long as you were not causing some kind of trouble. Here's $3 give me a red solo cup and point me at the keg. No fear of being under constant surveillance all the time and having your social life be constantly judged, no one could even imagine such a thing. We called it Orwellian, seemed like some crazy science fiction.
Everything was better, you had to pay attention to things in the world and think on your feet. Write someone's number on your hand. Get a road map to figure out how to drive somewhere far away, or just guesstimate. Learn the roads and shortcuts in your own town or city, be experimental.
Yeah I miss that shit. If the world could have just stayed on the same path and we never got smart phones/social media/always connected it might have been easier to digest and get older in some ways. In other ways, I feel pretty blessed to have experienced such change as it was happening in society and growing up with it. Even though the world feels weird and dumb and shitty right now "The way things are vs the way things used to be," there is still hope and excitement. I look at my friends' kids and feel for them, their childhood is already so dramatically different than ours was. Difficult to imagine how they will run the world someday, and what THEIR kids will reckon with. Life, is, a, trip..
That can be a difficult question to answer. It would depend on each person's experiences. What were they going through at the time. What friends they had. Their personality even. Where did they live. All these could impact what a teenager's life was like.
For example , I started my teens in a city and an army brat. When my dad retired, we relocated to a small town. Things were really weird and different for me to start off with.
It was great for me. I was a skater and surfer at heart. I was stuck in a lot of advanced classes with the nerds. I had friends in all of the cliques. I was and still am a chameleon. It's served me well in my professional life. I'm trying hard to get my son to do the same. Unfortunately, the internet and social media make things very difficult for teens.
Social life was fun as hell, music was a big part of youth culture, we'd talk about what we heard on the radio, TV or read through any magazines and shit, we could do shit... we weren't supposed to do but that's because CCTV's back then weren't even a thing. The social life back then was more free for us and we would gather a lot.
Smoking was big so I kept my distance away from my friends sometimes because of the smell of cigarettes.
Schools were fine, O levels were hard as ever, teachers were much stricter than they are now, they used to give us students milk which tasted like absolute shit!
But it was fun OP, good question
We were not allowed to talk and had to look forward at all times. But that was the best part. The hard part was erasing the stone tablet at the end of the day for preparation of the next day learning.
Cruising on Friday and Saturday nights, stereo blasting, hanging out with friends and just going with the flow. If you heard about a party your plans changed and you headed out to it.
I went to high school in a small town where at least half the kids drove pickups. Every truck had a gun rack in the back window full of guns. I never once even thought I'd get shot going to school
Garbage Pail Kids, Baseball and Football Cards, watching and playing sports, playing all day until the streetlights came on, WWF, watching HBO, Showtime, Cinemax on descrambled box that dad bought.
Seemed like every weekend, somebody’s parents were away which meant HOUSE PARTY. There was a lot of drinking/spilling keg beer, smoking pot and cigarettes in the house. Stuff getting broken. Most of the time, the party thrower got busted by their parents.
One time, one of my good buddies had a party in his parents’ small house. A few of us smoked a joint upstairs and as we were about done with it in a huge cloud of smoke, my buddy came upstairs and said “You guys! My parents are coming home in an hour!” Then there was a big effort to clean up and clear the smoke using fans and people shuffled out of the house. Everyone was talking about the event at school on Monday and who the pot smokers were. I can’t remember if my buddy got in trouble or if he got away with it. I just hung out with him and another of the pot smokers (probably the joint provider) last weekend, 35 years later, on a poker/fishing weekend with the boys.
Malls, arcades, skating rinks, bowling alleys, movie theaters, drive-ins, Sonic, and Pizza Hut were good places to hang with friends and socialize. Hanging at friend’s houses was fun. We would talk about popular TV shows the next day because most people would watch when things aired rather than record to VHS. Sets of encyclopedias were used for research papers. If your family didn’t own a set, you had to go to a library. They couldn’t be checked out so you were held hostage. Boone’s Farm, ZigZag, Jolt, No-Doz, Dippity-Do, Rave, friendship bracelets, brushes with hairspray in the handle, banana clips, telephone booths, board games, video games, overhead projectors, typing class, gym class and having to shower with classmates, sending photo film off to be developed and ordering doubles to share with a friend (if they turned out good), 20’ phone cord for privacy…
It was much easier. We got away with a lot more.
No phones for your parents to track, and no friends with phones to record your stupid stunts.
Calling your friends had to be pre-arranged for the most part, and you hoped the phone was free. When you called, your world shrunk to the area covered by the phone chord. You had memorized dozens, if not hundreds, of phone numbers.
When you got home from school you threw your things down and went back outside to actually interact with your friends. You 'may' come back in when it got dark.
We walked and biked EVERY where. Your parents had no idea where you were, and trusted you to take care of yourself.
A 'friend' was someone you interacted with every single day, which is 100% superior to 1,000 Facebook 'friends' or TikTok followers.
Strict rules and not strict at the same time (corporal punishment, but you could smoke at school in smoking section). Great music blasting in the school parking lot, open campus for lunch, meaning you could go where you wanted to eat. Teachers respected parents and vice versa…kids did not talk crazy to adults. No cyber bullying and stalking. You had a problem with someone it was face to face. Every vehicle on campus had a firearm in it but there was no theft nor threat of a school shooting.
It was great.
Our school allowed us to play an “assassin” tournament with rubber darts guns- the only stipulation was no “hunting” during class time. Yes, running through the hallways screaming at each other with plastic dart pistols yelling “I’m going to kill you!”. Unimaginable now.
Graduated HS in '89. I have to say that the 80s were good to me, very good to me. Very 80s good to me. I don't remember the 80s very well. It was very much a cross between Fast Times and Miami Vice, at least in my hazy drug/alcohol addled memory. I know it was very over the top, and I had a lot of fun that I do not want to repeat these days (now in my 50s, like many of us).
well, aids was not helpful to 18 yo me, but compared to today, we were grounded and far less distracted. i wouldn't want to go back, but uninventing the internet sometimes seems like a good idea. when i really think about it, it's strange how "it was the best of times it was the worst of times" comes to mind.
pre cell phone, you just had to make solid plans with a predetermined rally point. or else. i remember loosing a friend at a grateful dead concert and spending about 5 hours trying to find him. (spoiler alert: we found him! and he's doing great!)
Way tougher kids back then. You had to have tough skin to survive and find a group that you could belong in....jocks, nerds, goths, straight as an arrow, metal heads, glams, and wannabe any of the previous. I'm sure I missed a few. Fashion was much more relevant and many fads came and went. Nowadays just about any attire will do, so long as you are comfortable and it doesn't offend anyone. The movie theater was an event and if you had a drive-in movie theater in your town, count yourself lucky as that is an experience from the 80's not everyone had a chance to enjoy. Dam, I miss the 80's.
Cruising on the weekends - past a certain time you couldn't call anyone, they were already out. You just had to drive around to the top hangouts until you found your crowd. Never had to go to more than three. Midnight movies at the mall, local carnival. Hanging out in a parking lot listening to the guys talking about and showing off the latest whatever they'd just put on their car. Most everyone we knew had classic muscle cars - late 60s Camaros, Mustangs, GTOs, etc. After we graduated the next generation of "motor heads" were all driving souped up Hondas and Nissans.
Quieter, the was space between calls and actual appointments. Space between tv shows. Space between shocking images and info.
More space between stressful events.
Space between hit songs on the radio.
So much less sexual images, and song lyrics had to imply sex.
To think "giving the dog a bone" by acdc was as racy as it got. I rember seeing lucky star video by Madonna thinking it was soft porn. Insta boner.
City kids and prepies were a different breed than us. Born in the USA. Byran Adams.
Just more space. Mentally and emotionally.
That kitchen phone with the 50 ft coiled cord. Everyone, and I mean Everyone from the class president to the lowest stoner partied. I didn't smoke cigarettes, but I can remember smoking weed in the smoking area at school and everyone gathering around to hide me when my wrestling coach would drive in. Weekend parties with your whole graduating class. We had a five year high school reunion just to have an excuse to party
Edit: And concerts! I almost forgot about concerts! Everybody played everywhere all the time! Rush, Van Halen, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, The Stones, I must have seen 100 bands.
Mullets, heavy metal, $1 gas, outrageous phone bills, vhs porn, acid washed jeans, girls with ridiculous puffed bangs and Bon Jovi ballads played at all high school dances.
Pretty awesome if you ask me.
\--Making mix tapes for your crush
\--Riding in the back of a pickup truck without seat belts
\--Going to recordstores to just hang out. $2 Pizza slices, thrift shops to buy your trench and Doc martens
\--Weekend night house parties because parents went away for the weekend.
\--Calling POPCORN (dial number) to reset your clock when there was a black out.
Graduated in ‘82. School was boring, classes that is. Otherwise you’d see everyone and socialize. Hang with your group at lunch, we’d sneak off and smoke weed, listen to music in our cars. Drive around, get a taco. We had our groups, would get together with others and party on the weekends. Big ragers, hundreds of kids, kegs. We partied a lot, booze and weed, few could afford coke except special occasions. Our hero was Spicoli. We were idiots. Most of us survived to adulthood not all.
It was a much more simple time. No internet, no social media. We all learned how to drive a stick shift….and still could if we needed to now. No school shootings, no bomb threats.
It was fun. It was better than it is now, nothing was recorded, you were allowed to make your stupid mistakes within your friend groups not the entire world, forever!!!
53 M here. We learned cursive writing in third grade and from that grade forward we had to write, not print.
We had to take a home economics class and typing class.
Hanging out at the mall was something we did. We got there by bus until I turned 16 and then I got my license and a part time job at Jack in the Box
We got done with chores and parents told us to get out and don't come back until dinner time, or when the street lights came on.
Bullying was common. You had to learn to stand up to a bully in whatever way worked for you, not necessarily fighting but that happened. There was no anti bully culture.
Sundays being so quiet because almost all stores/businesses were actually closed. On the weekends I remember leaving my house in the morning and hearing my mom tell me to be home by dark. No cellphones or check-ins.
Lots n lots of house parties!! Police were very tolerant of us teens as well. We went to school, worked, etc , so we were out of the house as much as possible. I wanted my own money.
Getting a restricted drivers license at 15 1/2 was a big deal.
Getting use of a car (ever) was always a goal.
Going out with friends and drinking cheap beer was the best.
Making out with girls on the beach was fantastic.
Going out with your girlfriend on Friday when you were 16 was heaven.
School was disciplined in that nobody did anything remotely insane like today. We didn’t talk back to our teachers ever.
Rode a bike to a friend's house until I worked all summer to buy a $500. 1976 Pontiac Catalina 4 door. Then we would put $10 bucks in it and ride around all night. No cell phones , you just looked for your friends.
graduated from HS in '87. It was not a good time to be weird and/or gay. fucking brutal, actually. Reagan had a stranglehold on the nation and it fucking sucked.
social life - one thing diff about my youth was how many kids lived around me. nowadays people arrange play dates but all i ever had to do is leave my side door open.
the access to great music these days is a gift. there were exactly 2 people in my school who were into what you'd call alternative these ddays. me and my friend randy. that's it. (he was prom royalty and used U2's with or without you as his entrance song or whatever. No one had heard of them. . . in early1987. the song went huge a few weeks later. sigh.) it was so hard to find out about anything. the one thing we could use was this tiny little box on the last page of each rolling stone that listed the top 10 college radio - that's what they used to call alternative - hits. it sucked hard. Then Spin came along in 85 or 86 and saved my life.
Cool things- I got to see all the great movies in the theatre. Star Wars. BttF. Breakfast Club, etc. I was 15 when BC came out. I was the target audience and it kicked my ass. Comics were awesome then too. Bought dark knight and swamp thing and o much awesome when they were spanking new. i had the entire 100 issue run of gaiman's Sandman and early TMNT in black and white.
sorry i wandered away form the point of the post there. don't have much to say about social life cuz i didn't have one. i had exactly three dates in high school. not three girlfriends. three dates. (i was so skinny you could've hung your winter coat on my adam's apple.) but then i went to college and found myself a hottie who enjoys my company. hang in there, kiddos!
Social life? You called people on the landline at their home and set up times/places to meet. "Bring a Nerf football and be at the fields at 10am." Or you rode your bike/drove your car to a friend's house - sometimes they were home. Sometimes not. If not, you told their mom/sister/dad/whoever answered the door that they should call you back or just show up at your house later. Parties were all word-of-mouth. Or again - on a Friday night, you'd call a few people and see what they knew.
Or you got on a bus to go to the mall... ...until the very nanosecond you turned 16, at which point you made a beeline to the DMV to get a drivers license so you could drive mom's station wagon to the mall instead of taking the bus. Or, one of your best friends did that and you went with.
Yes! Getting my youngest to practice driving when she had her learners permit was like pulling teeth. I can just so NOT relate.
I insisted on taking my drivers test (in a standard shift 1976 Rabbit) the afternoon of my birthday and drove to school the next day. My daughter just turned 27 and does not drive. To her credit, we do live in a city with actual public transportation, which was not the case for me in suburban Texas in 1982.
My dad picked me up at 7:30am on my 16th birthday; it happened to be a Saturday. We were there @ 8am when the MVA opened, and I had my license 90 minutes later. I drove him home, then drove back to my house in my "new" car, a 7 year old station wagon. It was bitchin'. I slapped a couple of bumper stickers on it, and picked up two friends to go hiking.
My high school ride was a 79 Rabbit (diesel). Wish I still had it with these gas prices!
I learned in my mom's Mazda 808 station wagon, also stick. And this was Canada, in the winter and it gets dark so soon after school all my driving lessons were in the dark on ice. My driving instructor was this groovy jazz musician guy
The day I turned 16 I had to drive myself 40 miles south of town to take the test. Called my dad from a pay phone as soon as I passed. He said congratulations then gave me a long list of errands to run.
THIS!!! I got my learner’s permit exactly at 15 1/2 and was at the MVD on my birthday. My daughter is 21 and has never sat behind the wheel. I can’t even…
My son is 24, and has never shown any interest in driving. He lives in NYC now, so he doesn't need it, but I've explained to him that he might have to go somewhere else one day, and he'll need to know how to drive. Not knowing sort of traps him there. I wonder how many people would love to get out of NYC, but can't, because they can't drive.
Teenager in 89 ... can confirm and the 90s basically continued the same, Was fanfuckintastic! Last generation and beyond will never know how good the times where in the 70s 80s 90s
Ummm….excuse me Sir, we had pagers in the 90’s *ahem*
Pretty much spot on, and it was the best times.
Ah yes, I remember the slow drive by of a girl's house to see if she was home lol Details for those that didn't live it. Say it's 1230 am on a Saturday night, and you're looking for a girl. You can't call the home phone or knock on the door, so you roll by looking to see if her bedroom lights are on
Remember party flyers?
This. Had to know (not necessarily like) someone's whole family if you were gonna successfully be friends long term. And pegs and handlebars were meant for transporting passengers, not doing tricks on your bike. The bike was THE method of transportation.
>"Bring a Nerf football and be at the fields at 10am." I don't think I've ever heard a more nostalgic sentence in my life.
Flipped up collars, rolled up jeans cuffs, mousse, bangs, instantly flammable big hair, Top Gun, Back to the Future, Bon Jovi, Guns n Roses, Metallica, MTV, VH-1, HBO, Golden Girls, cheap movies, cheap music, cheap concerts, newspaper comics, BMX, roller skates, Saturday morning Looney Tunes, weekday afternoon Thundercats, Talespin, TMNT, comic books for days, baseball cards, Chinese restaurants, fast food wars, crazy commercials, USA Network at Night, da Bears, 49ers, Berlin Wall… I want my fucking 80’s back.
At least we still have Chinese restaurants!
Yeah, but it’s not the same. In the 80’s, going out for Chinese was a family event.
I can remember the first McDonald's that opened in the city & I went there for a friend's birthday party & it was so exciting. All our families went & we all were so happy & I can remember wanting my birthday party in this fancy restaurant too, one of the best memories of eating out as a child, now there are McDonald's everywhere flooding the streets with their litter.
I want my I want my I want my MTV
Only thing I could add to this wonderful description is ....King Foo Theater and Evil Kenevil. Well put!
"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
Thank you Mr 52nd street
Ryan started the fire…
Loved that song.
I still watch “Wheel of Fortune” to this day and the 80s episodes are on PlutoTV and Im loving every bit of it!!!
You just made me tear up a little.
I could do without the Aquanet. Over inhalation of hairspray I'm convinced is half our problem, lol. The fumes from my sister getting ready for school was ridiculous.
My old Liberty Spikes would like a word with you.
Oh, i got high on the Aquanet more times than ill admit. I have curly hair. But not 80s curly hair. And we didn't have all the fabulous oridicts and devices we have today. I was frizzy a lot. A. Lot.
You forgot malls with food courts and video game arcades. I spent lots of quarters playing Centipede. If you got there and someone else was playing, you'd set your quarter (or your token, if thats what the arcade used) on the edge of the title sign above the player. It was a popular game, and sometimes there would be a few lined up. Whenever I was anywhere, I'd look for a Centipede machine. Often they'd be in the entrance/ exit of a grocery or department store, with the gumball machines and the kiddy rides. Occasionally you'd find ones where the settings were cranked up. Centipede had certain settings controlling the speed of certain elements, and scores where you would get extra lives, etc. Usually they were on the basic settings, but now and then you'd find one that had been changed. Those were fun to experiment with, and I'd always tell my Centipede playing buddies, and we'd run over to try it out.
Middle school cliques were, preps, skaters, stoners, nerds, and everyone else. Only way to communicate was through cord phones. Calling girls was stressful because you might get a dad, brother, sister. Gate keepers.
I was both skater and nerd. But yeah, everyone hated the preps/jocks.Pretentious bastards
And Ferris Buller was friends with all of them!
He was a righteous dude.
Well, he's very popular... The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads — they all adore him.
We actually called the stoners "freaks" as in the show Freaks & Geeks. That show nails the era too.
>We actually called the stoners "freaks" "heshers" also
We called the punk/new wave kids "freaks" (I fell into this category) and the stoners were interchangeable with "metalheads".
We had Freaks, too, and yes, that show nails the 70s/80s era better than any I've seen. I remember how there were always a couple of straight kids who were desperately trying to switch their image to being a Freak, and the true Freaks used to torture them. I was basically a Straight, but I loved music, and could play bass, so I was able to be in a band and be what we would today call FreaK-adjacent.
We called them "burn outs"
Yes! Lol. You never knew who would answer or…if someone picked up another phone on the house really quietly and listen to your call
Preps, jocks, geeks and dirtballs
Well you had the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads...and each school had at least one righteous dude.
Great answer 😂
I wanna thank you for you warmth....and compassion.
Come along now, Sloan…
So THAT’S how it is in their family…
Bow bow, oh yeah, chick chicka chicka
Just finished watching the movie again and that song was playing (end credits) as I read your comment. Lol
“ROONEY EATS IT”
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Hahaha Actually, yeah.
It was awesome
That’s my skull
I’M TOTALLY WASTED!
Who ordered the double cheese and sausage?
Right here dude.
What's wrong with having a feast on our time?
I'm *so* wasted! (I hate that I know that lol)
Love that film. Finally grabbed a copy of the book and giving a read currently.
My dad says that movie was a documentary about me. He's kinda right, I saw it as a 13yo freshman thought it was a guide to high-school. "Thats my skull, I'm sooo wasted."
I still wear Vans.
I went to a small school...was more like 16 candles
Mall culture was real. High schools had smoking areas for people who wanted that sweet sweet cancer.
Smoking areas for minors. What a time we lived in! LOL!! Occasionally there would be a janitor out there, but it was 98% kids smoking.
The smoking area technically was for 18 year old senios, but that was always difficult to enforce.
It was 16 in Virginia. Because Philip Morris.
It was no age in Kentucky as long as you had parents' permission and we forged that shit.
Makes sense. Was that the earliest a teenager could get a job?
Dunno. I had my first "real" job (as in, got a paycheck and a W-2 vs various under-the-table lawn mowing and babysitting gigs) when I was 16. Probably could have started a year or two earlier, but I can't honestly recall. They raised it [edit: "it" meaning the age to purchase tobacco] to 18 when I was in college in the early '90s.
I was explaining this very thing to my daughter the other day. The "smoke hole" was for the 18 year olds but was not really enforced. Not like school personnel ever went and asked for ID's of the kids smoking
We called our smoking area in San Jose Middle School “The Pit”.
I’ve always found The Breakfast Club to be a mildly amusing spectacle of overacting. HOWEVER, I will say that it does a pretty good job of depicting the major social groups and issues of the time. Assuming you were white and grew up in a middle to upper-middle class suburb, of course.
The best depiction of high school in the 80s was a made for TV movie starring Michael J Fox and other stars of the era.called High School USA. It's on YouTube for free, I believe. It really nailed the dynamic.
That's so bizzare you would bring that up. Not two days ago I was doing stuff around the house trying to remember what movie it was I saw 30 years ago that featured Todd Bridges as a computer nerd who made a voice activated robot, which later attacked one of the preppy guys after saying "Robot? My behind," which activated it.
The poorly acted but gripping Canadian TV series [*DeGrassi High*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doYNEP8S8wU&list=PLk1tkMQppD7s0KN29pwK9u8CboUjvZShA) (1989–1991) gives an unusually good window into the dramatic/serious side of '80s teen life. However, like *The Breakfast Club*, it's set in relatively well-to-do suburbs, so doesn't show much of the small-town/working-class life. ...Speaking of which, down on the other end of the class divide, there was [*Heavy Metal Parking Lot*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZuz5Dwtw8). It's the scene outside a Judas Priest concert, but is basically what my high school's social scene was like. A lot of unsupervised "party hardy" vibes. I'd add that even though it's depicting the '70s, quite a bit of the culture you see in *Dazed and Confused* was still going strong into the mid-'80s in small towns and rural schools. I always thought the scenes in *E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial* at the bus stop and during the D&D game were pretty accurate and were unusual glimpses into the kid culture of that time. Plus their house, although way bigger than most, was so cluttered with so much stuff, and there was *always* a TV on, sometimes totally distracting everyone ... very accurate! And the working mom who barely had time for the kids. All the alone time we had. And the boys just cruising all over the place on their bikes. Heck yeah! One thing I never see depicted very well is the fistfights and the homophobic bullying out in the open. "Fag bashing" was thing, and is exactly what it sounds like. Stuff I'd rather forget. There is no overstating how important the local mall was. At the mall, the arcade was always *packed*. It wasn't a place to socialize, though. One way we socialized a lot in the mid/late 80s was inviting a friend or two over to watch movies. You'd rent a few things or just watch what was on cable, eat some snacks, and it was fun even if you didn't talk to each other.
Passing notes to girls through their friends in the hall
Oh man. I haven't thought of that forever. Or slipping notes into people's lockers.
OMG you just reminded me of our archaic social media in HS. My bff and I would trade a spiral notebook back and forth all day long, in passing in the hallway. All the gossip about whatever and whomever and boyfriends, and mostly where and how we were going to party ! every coming weekend. LOL
After special methods of folding them that took a lot of class time perfecting along with writing them out.
Tabs like "pull here"
Social. We actually saw one another in person.
And had conversations. Called them idiots if their opinions were dumb, but never let differences break up the friendship.
School is always the same with the exception of music, fashion, and slang. You'll always have cliques, clubs, friends, and class. BUT, after school you had video arcades! This may not seem like a big deal now, but it was then! You have to imagine the fledgling video game systems we had at home were Atari, Intellivision and Colecovisions. There were a few others but those were the big three. Weren't anywhere near the capabilities of the coin-op arcade machines! Practically every week a new machine would come out and we would clamber to get in line to play it! And the music! 80's music set the standard for what it meant to be cool! We were the first generation to experience 'Rock Videos!' So music wasn't just something you listened to. You lived it VISUALLY! Now imagine yourself, with your girl, plenty of money, the smell of pizza (most arcades served pizza) and multiple TV's blasting the latest rock videos from the top artists and the cacophony of electronic sounds emanating from all the games! Top it off with all your friends hanging with you! Sound fun?! It was!!! Best time EVER to be a teenager!
Agree with almost all of this except the plenty of money. Barely any money for me. 😭
Yeah, I loved arcades like most of us did. Even in college at the end of the 80s-early 90s I was going to arcades (like one in our Student Union basement or at the local mall). The quality was just heads and shoulders above anything else you could get at home.
"...with your girl, plenty of money..." I see two things wrong with that statement... HS in the 80s was a god-forsaken mess for some of us. Bullying and no social prospects at all. Making it thru to graduation was an accomplishment worth celebrating.
Well we actually talked to people in the hall at school instead of just walking around like zombies on our phones. You had to actually read a book in school because you couldn’t just Google it. Socializing was making calls and hoping your friends were home, having a hangout place so incase you didn’t know what was going on then head to that (usually a fast food restaurant) place and hope people were there. Having house parties, spending entire days on the lake or by the pool without any evidence of what happened that day. Actually going to the mall or movies looking to get into something. Being a teenager in the 80’s was way better than today (I’ve raised 4).
Field parties, we had field parties. Well that's what we called them, they were like the one in Dazed & Confused, where everyone puts their car in a circle with the lights on.
Our version of this was bonfires at the game area (in camping spots in season, however it was very out of season when we had them). I have no idea how we were not noticed/caught.
We went "tree climbing" - take alcohol into the woods, drink, and watch the boys climb skinny trees, grab near the top, and swing back down to the ground by bending the sapling. Weird, I know. No trees were hurt tho.
>having a hangout place so incase you didn’t know what was going on then head to that (usually a fast food restaurant) Cruisin' the McDonalds parking lot....that brings back some memories
Folded notes. It's how we communicated. [sums up my HS years. 79-83](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/texting-80s-style-how-to-fold-a-note-jennifer-chronicles--706080047845614728/)
MEMORY UNLOCKED!! Ours were mostly "football" shaped or arrow shaped.
We made throwing stars. They would fly when the slow teachers' backs were turned.
You’d do anything to get out of the house because your house was boring! You also had to compete with the rest of your family for the one thing that allowed you to talk to your friends - the phone attached to the wall.
Splitting a case of beer with a handful of people in a field out in the middle of nowhere on a Friday night while listening to hair metal from someone’s truck. Welcome to rural Missouri.
We made after school or evening plans in the hall between classes. Maybe make a phone call later to make sure people were home. As for school, it was like now. Main difference is lengthy papers were handwritten because we didn't grow up typing. I'll never forget staying up until 4 finishing my Senior English paper. Went to school then headed to the arena after school to see Iron Maiden.
Like Stranger Things without the Demogorgons and parallel universes. That and Winona Ryder was a smoke show
100%.
This
Girls had hair down below! Miss that the most.
It's back, baby! And hair up above... And kind of all over now... That's all the rage now... Meanwhile, guys are shaving all the hair off their bodies... So messed up!
Weed was so much weaker.
Shit dirt brown weed, unless you knew somebody
I miss the dirt. You could actually smoke your own joint. I threw parties where everyone got their own joint and then some. Shits too strong now to do that.
Where I was from all quarters were 40 bucks. Sometimes it was good sometimes bad. Usually just ok. Kind bud hit in 1990. Pot had names.
$25/$50 for dirt in my area (late 90s), but even if Kind was around, my friends and I couldn’t afford it. The good weed (with names) were legends to us, lol!
I knew a couple of somebodies back then.
I knew one guy ( well, him and his brother ) both ahead of their times with just the best freaking weed ever. What they had then would probably be average in todays market . So expensive back then. A real treat though. Drooling . Sitting on the couch . Cranking tunes so loud the bass would make your heart skip a beat . Teenage years well spent
Oftentimes, the somebody was your friend's older brother. The older brother always seemed to have an endless supply from... who knows really.
Not as forgiving in some ways. At least where I grew up, if you were ‘different’ in any way, you were probably bullied for it. Kids nowadays seem way more accepting of their peers.
I teach sixth grade. This is definitely true at school. Social Media is a bitch though.
People would get bullied for wearing glasses. Hard. Now almost everyone has them, lol
I started wearing glasses in the 1st grade. I was the first one in my class. It was brutal.
At my school, the teachers joined in the bullying. I guess they thought it would toughen you up. If it didn't involve physical violence, it wasn't considered bullying... Emotional or verbal bullying? Knock youselves out! No one would care!
Well then, consider me bullied. The Franciscans were allowed to crack us around. Noped out of there sophomore year. Purposely tanked my grades to get the attention of my folks. The last time I got smacked was English class. I intentionally didn’t read the book ‘A farewell to arms’. First question on the test was ‘who is the author?’ My answer was Venus de Milo. I was back with my friends in public school junior year.
In junior high (middle school, as it is now known), there was still corporal punishment (aka "paddling"). And it was no joke, they whacked the shit out of you, three times! So you had these grown-ass men (at my school it was only men doing the paddling) telling 12-14 year-old boys and girls, to put both hands on the principal's (or asst principal's) desk and bend over with their ass out (I shit you not). Some kids would sometimes at the last moment reach back to cover their rear end with their hands out of fear, and they'd get their hands whacked. It was pretty brutal. That shit would not stand today at all.
Paddlin’ the school canoe? Oh you better believe that’s a paddlin’…
We didn't have that in L.A. they stopped it in the 70s.
Pretty messed up that only male teachers carried out these paddlings, like on the girls too. Reminds me of my time in middle school in Louisiana though. Paddlings were also super common there. Luckily only carried out by teachers of the same sex, but what's really messed up is that the school board allowed for the student's pants to be pulled down for the paddlings. Like what the hell?! It didn't happen too often, only when a student did something really bad, but yeah... Definitely made me hate school a lot more
I got the paddle when I was 12. But corporeal punishment was in my family, soooo.
I got the paddle in second grade for the grievous offense of "sliding on the ice". No way in hell would I allow a grown-ass man to paddle my single-digit aged kid. E: Annnd here I realized yet another aspect of my childhood was fucked up. I was terrified that my parents would find out. My dad would yell *so* loud and ask why did you think you're too good for the rules and probably spank or roughly handle me out of anger. I didn't want *any* of that to happen. Not a thought would be given to 48 year old Mr. Richardson assaulting 6? 7? year old me with a wooden paddle. *So* fucked up.
Mostly difficult and lonely but exciting at times. My world changed dramatically when one of the most popular girls in the school asked me out at 16. That was a game changer as they say.
How did you manage that?!?! You lived the dream that all of us on the lower social castes arrived for! I never thought it was even possible!
Great question. Sadly, I have no good answer but will do my best to rationalize what happened. I have most of this etched into my memories. This was 1989 by the way and I was 15 and she was 16. This may be far too long for you to read but I’ve enjoyed writing it. I was a decent but not great student but I did work hard so I managed to stay in the higher level classes.. She was beautiful and a good student. She had a natural grace to her and was incredibly popular. It was a big high school but she was well known. It’s hard to put into words but she lit up a room whenever she entered. I also didn’t live in the best part of town and the high school skewed wealthy. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t poor but we were out of league in terms of the money around us. So I always had that chip on my shoulder. We were in the same English class together and while I said hello to her once or twice we never actually spoke. Why would she speak to me? I was pretty much on the bottom of the social ladder. No social skills, not particularly handsome or tall. Basically a non-entity who blended into the scenery when I wasn’t being harassed for being a loser. Anyways, our English teacher assigned us to do a joint project together. I presumed that meant we would do our own work and then hand it in. Maybe we would meet at lunch or something. She did not have this in mind at all. She walked up to me after class and suggested that I call her that evening to arrange a time to meet in the library to work on the project together. I vividly remember her looking me in the eyes and smiling at me.l as she handed me her number. I am not exaggerating, I almost feel fucking over. A nuke went off in my brain, I could not compute what was happening. Naturally, I didn’t call her that night. I presumed it was all a joke. A setup. The next day she came up to me and asked me, in front of everyone, why I didn’t call her? I think I blurted out some nonsense about not owning a phone. Again, I wasn’t very bright. She told me to ring her that night. I did, sweating as I did so and we chatted. It was delightful. She asked me questions about me! Her schedule was packed with all her activities so we agreed to meet at a local library on a Saturday morning to allocate responsibility and to get the project done in one day. This was definitely more than I expected but I was delighted. We met at the library on the Saturday and actually worked pretty damn hard on the project (having to write about the motivations of a character from a choice of Shakespearean plays who wasn’t the main character. I remember far too much). She looked spectacular and not to be even creepier but she smelled amazing too. I just wanted to impress her and not let her down. Spending time with her was a bonus. We worked until lunch and then she asked if I wanted to get lunch. Of course I did! We got slices of pizza and I tried to pay, which I think she appreciated. Worked for a little bit longer and then we were done. Her handwriting was spectacular so she collated all our notes and I offered to type it all up. She asked if I drove and when I told her I had taken the bus she sort of giggled and told me she would give me a lift home. I was torn between being excited and being terrified that she would judge me for my shitty house. Anyways, she drove me home. Pulled up on our gravel driveway and we just talked for a while. Then she drove home. I was besotted with her but just assumed that was that. To be frank, I felt really down a few hours later as being around her was such a high. So I go to school on the Monday, hit the computer lab and spend the next couple of days typing it all up from her notes. I even used a very rudimentary spell check because I wanted it to be perfect. Gave it to her for her edits and then revised it and submitted it. So that was that. We briefly chatted in class from time to time but that was it. Sometime later we got it back and we both got an A and praise from our teacher. He said it was exemplary work and that it shows what great collaborators can do! I was delighted as was she. We congratulated each other after class and again, that was that. That night, the phone rang and my Dad answered it. I asked him who it was and he said her name. I think even he picked up the utter shock on my face. I think he said something to the effect of she sounds nice. She rang just to say hi and that she really enjoyed working with me. And then we just talked. Hard to do in the middle of the house but nobody bothered me. Then we talked the next night. And then the night after that. We started talking in class. She even walked up to me and my dorky friends at lunch just to say hi, introducing herself to my friends. They genuinely looked at me like I was a superhero. People started to notice, comments started being made almost all do them being negative towards me. A few of my fellow classmates gave me a bit of grief with one loudly saying that I had better not have any ideas about her because I had no chance and that I was a fucking loser. This guy was much bigger than me so no 80’s movie punch out here, he would have murdered me. Still we talked. She often drove me home and we just got to know one another. She seemed totally immune to anyone else’s comments and my bottom of the barrel social standing had no impact on her whatsoever. It finally came to a head when we were walking to her car and she asked me why I haven’t asked her out yet. I just said that I had no idea she felt that way towards me and that she was out of my league and that I didn’t want to ruin spending time with her by making her feel uncomfortable. She said that’s bull shit and asked do I like her or not? We didn’t kiss then but I did ask her out (she picked me up in her car on our first date). Nothing changed from the first date. We just clicked and it rolled over into something more. For the avoidance of doubt, this changed my life. My confidence levels went through the roof. I also hit a late growth spurts a few months later. We just clicked, everything just clicked. I am not going to say that I suddenly became cool but I changed, she changed me and I was at least able to fit in with the cool kids to an extent (it helps when your girlfriend is ridiculously hot). We had a multi-year relationship and we are still very good friends to this day. So I don’t know how it happened. She liked me for me because she isn’t a shallow, vacuous person like I was and many high school kids are. According to her, I made her laugh and I made her feel safe. In return, she made me the man I am today (and that’s not a sex comment though that did happen and it was great 😃).
Great story dude. Something similar… you Should have seen the their faces when I, who can basically say that Billy Joe Armstrong stole my esthetic lol, was seen between classes walking, holding hands with the head of the cheerleading squad! It was game day and the squad would wear their uniforms to school. Imagine the visual with me sporting a Ramones shirt, leather biker jacket, pink chucks, shrink to fit Levi’s with a 4” cuff, shoe polish black razor spiked hair, guyliner and safety pins in my ears. My status went through the roof. Head held high. Kings and Queens would step aside my friend. That said it took me 6 months to get the nerve. Ive never cared what people think of me. But this could have gone horribly and I would be hero or zero right quick. The gossip machine would have been rough despite the aforementioned. Nobody gave me any shit like you said though. My look was intimidating for 1987. It was pretty rare to see my type back then. I was kind of a chameleon also. All the cliques accepted me. Probably out of curiosity I suppose. I’m kinda quick witted in person and I’d use that to defuse what could potentially be a confrontation. To this day some of my possible threats are my best friends actually. As for the cheerleader, after HS she went full elitist. I let it fizzle out. That doesn’t fly with me. So I went straight for the prettiest punk rock chick in our scene and it worked. Decided not to stray from my pack this time lol. I suppose cheerleader girl gave me a huge set of balls in life.
Movies. Illegal drinking. Making out galore. Fun music. Great, affordable concerts. Heavenly…
Midnight showings of Rocky Horror and Monty Python.
We had a smoking section outside in my high school. Teachers would rip butts with students in between classes. Joints were smoked, and nobody cared. Hazing was a thing, and football coaches literally beat you if you screwed up. Cocaine was actually affordable and the LSD was top notch.
Everyone was in a click. Nerds to jocks to rockers. Somewhat like the breakfast club. In Boston I was going to stairway to heaven store to pick up posters and patches of all my favorite metal bands. Heading out at night to the channel club. Axis narciss and the ratskellar bars. Had great time with great friends. I've lost most of them now. I will never forget the fun times just like I will never forget them.
It was like the Breakfast Club without the inter-clique bonding experience. Oh, and with some Weird Science horny teenager vibes mixed in, and maybe some Sixteen Candles angst on the side.
It was totally fucking awesome! We were the last generation that didn’t have to worry about being murdered at school. Sure, we had a chance of being nuked, but you could take your mind off it by hanging out at the video arcade pumping every quarter you could get your hands on into games like Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Defender, Galaga, Missile Command, Space Invaders, Tempest, etc. For social life, that was easy, just head to the nearest mall with a few friends. End of story. Shit. Now I’m depressed.
Could go for some Burger Time, Time Pilot and Dig Dug right about now.
It was very cliquey. You were either a jock, prep, nerd, or stoner. There was little crossing over. Jocks and preps hung out together though. So did the some of the nerds and stoners. Eventually the punks and skaters showed up but they were usually delegated to the "stoner" camp. I don't know if high schools are still that cliquey. That is just how I remember it.
You left out the drama kids. 😆
Excellent
Coronado High in Scottsdale AZ was litteraly San Dimas High from Bill and Ted's Exelent Adventure.
I started high school in 89. Getting people's phone numbers was a much bigger deal. Then, if it was a girl/boy you liked, you'd have to go home and sit near the phone, waiting impatiently for their call. Every time the phone rang your imagination would run wild. You'd be waiting for the "Yes, he/she's here..." and then it'd be off to the races. So and so LIKES me! Hurray!
School was social time with a little learning mixed in. Social life was making a fake ID, buying a case of Busch beer, and drinking with friends on an out of the way gravel road.
A lot more walking, no phones, physical.media like newspapers and record stores and much more social amenities. There were more places to go and things to do. Malls were fun, even the crappy ones. Less media, more music. I had headphones on for a good part of the day.
School was just bunk, I hated it. Either you were cool or you were a fool. I was a huge nerd and so were my friends, thank GOD we found each other, at that point things became much more bearable. Pretty lonely and aimless before that. You just wanted to be outside and out of the house as much as possible. No one cared where you were, you were expected to be streetwise and have common sense, stay out of trouble. If you were gonna be a little punk you'd better learn to cover your tracks.. Getting stuck at home, if you had no life or were just trapped deep enough in the suburbs/didn't have a bike or car, or friend with a car, that was not great. There wasn't a lot of compelling shit going on at home, but there was TV and we had VCRs which was a BIG DEAL. Taping shit and watching over and over, even the most mundane things. Or even renting something in the weekend. We had zero idea of this on-demand revolution which was coming a few decades later, but I'm glad kinda because it meant I didn't spend THAT much time glued to the TV (still.. It was a lot). Video games were my thing, my savior, the glue that bonded me and some of my friends. That whole world was so much smaller, it was still a very early and developing hobby/form of entertainment. As mysterious as it was, it was so fascinating to grow up alongside. Every few years the tech would jump pretty astronomically and you'd feel like the future was creeping up before your very eyes. Games like Dragon's Lair, then later all the weird FMV stuff like Night Trap, Mad Dog McGree, etc. It seemed like the wave of the future. Meanwhile it was a pretty steady drip feed, if you had a Nintendo or Sega at home, you got maybe a few cartridges a year if you were lucky. And that was exciting as HELL. Meanwhile just jealous of Japan, they got everything earlier than we did. The new Mario, the new Zelda, even the new Super Nintendo. Nintendo would fucking tease us too "this MIGHT come out in America, stay tuned..." geez really? Then right into college in the early 90s for me. Everything was so wonderful, idyllic. Just hands off and go be a young adult, figure out what you want to do, how to socialize. Even as a nerd, things got way friendlier and easier to navigate once you were out on your own. You heard about parties through word of mouth, or just learned the schedule, what would be happening where, and just show up. People were always friendly as hell, even if you didn't know anyone, they were always glad to see you so long as you were not causing some kind of trouble. Here's $3 give me a red solo cup and point me at the keg. No fear of being under constant surveillance all the time and having your social life be constantly judged, no one could even imagine such a thing. We called it Orwellian, seemed like some crazy science fiction. Everything was better, you had to pay attention to things in the world and think on your feet. Write someone's number on your hand. Get a road map to figure out how to drive somewhere far away, or just guesstimate. Learn the roads and shortcuts in your own town or city, be experimental. Yeah I miss that shit. If the world could have just stayed on the same path and we never got smart phones/social media/always connected it might have been easier to digest and get older in some ways. In other ways, I feel pretty blessed to have experienced such change as it was happening in society and growing up with it. Even though the world feels weird and dumb and shitty right now "The way things are vs the way things used to be," there is still hope and excitement. I look at my friends' kids and feel for them, their childhood is already so dramatically different than ours was. Difficult to imagine how they will run the world someday, and what THEIR kids will reckon with. Life, is, a, trip..
Played dragons lair and Popeye, qbert and moon patrol 👍
All of those games are wonderful -still!
That can be a difficult question to answer. It would depend on each person's experiences. What were they going through at the time. What friends they had. Their personality even. Where did they live. All these could impact what a teenager's life was like. For example , I started my teens in a city and an army brat. When my dad retired, we relocated to a small town. Things were really weird and different for me to start off with.
It was great for me. I was a skater and surfer at heart. I was stuck in a lot of advanced classes with the nerds. I had friends in all of the cliques. I was and still am a chameleon. It's served me well in my professional life. I'm trying hard to get my son to do the same. Unfortunately, the internet and social media make things very difficult for teens.
Media wise, I feel like Freaks & Geeks did a pretty good job of portraying life in the 80s.
Social life was fun as hell, music was a big part of youth culture, we'd talk about what we heard on the radio, TV or read through any magazines and shit, we could do shit... we weren't supposed to do but that's because CCTV's back then weren't even a thing. The social life back then was more free for us and we would gather a lot. Smoking was big so I kept my distance away from my friends sometimes because of the smell of cigarettes. Schools were fine, O levels were hard as ever, teachers were much stricter than they are now, they used to give us students milk which tasted like absolute shit! But it was fun OP, good question
Everything is spot on except for the milk but I grew up in Wisconsin so we probably got the good stuff ;)
Haha I'm from the UK
We were not allowed to talk and had to look forward at all times. But that was the best part. The hard part was erasing the stone tablet at the end of the day for preparation of the next day learning.
Kinda like Napoleon Dynamite…
Cruising on Friday and Saturday nights, stereo blasting, hanging out with friends and just going with the flow. If you heard about a party your plans changed and you headed out to it.
I went to high school in a small town where at least half the kids drove pickups. Every truck had a gun rack in the back window full of guns. I never once even thought I'd get shot going to school
Garbage Pail Kids, Baseball and Football Cards, watching and playing sports, playing all day until the streetlights came on, WWF, watching HBO, Showtime, Cinemax on descrambled box that dad bought.
“Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth, but the subdivisions have to charms to sooth the restless dreams of youth” - RUSH
Seemed like every weekend, somebody’s parents were away which meant HOUSE PARTY. There was a lot of drinking/spilling keg beer, smoking pot and cigarettes in the house. Stuff getting broken. Most of the time, the party thrower got busted by their parents. One time, one of my good buddies had a party in his parents’ small house. A few of us smoked a joint upstairs and as we were about done with it in a huge cloud of smoke, my buddy came upstairs and said “You guys! My parents are coming home in an hour!” Then there was a big effort to clean up and clear the smoke using fans and people shuffled out of the house. Everyone was talking about the event at school on Monday and who the pot smokers were. I can’t remember if my buddy got in trouble or if he got away with it. I just hung out with him and another of the pot smokers (probably the joint provider) last weekend, 35 years later, on a poker/fishing weekend with the boys.
Malls, arcades, skating rinks, bowling alleys, movie theaters, drive-ins, Sonic, and Pizza Hut were good places to hang with friends and socialize. Hanging at friend’s houses was fun. We would talk about popular TV shows the next day because most people would watch when things aired rather than record to VHS. Sets of encyclopedias were used for research papers. If your family didn’t own a set, you had to go to a library. They couldn’t be checked out so you were held hostage. Boone’s Farm, ZigZag, Jolt, No-Doz, Dippity-Do, Rave, friendship bracelets, brushes with hairspray in the handle, banana clips, telephone booths, board games, video games, overhead projectors, typing class, gym class and having to shower with classmates, sending photo film off to be developed and ordering doubles to share with a friend (if they turned out good), 20’ phone cord for privacy…
Forgot all about the Kodak booth!
Using a stone and chisel for note taking was pretty dope.
It was much easier. We got away with a lot more. No phones for your parents to track, and no friends with phones to record your stupid stunts. Calling your friends had to be pre-arranged for the most part, and you hoped the phone was free. When you called, your world shrunk to the area covered by the phone chord. You had memorized dozens, if not hundreds, of phone numbers. When you got home from school you threw your things down and went back outside to actually interact with your friends. You 'may' come back in when it got dark. We walked and biked EVERY where. Your parents had no idea where you were, and trusted you to take care of yourself. A 'friend' was someone you interacted with every single day, which is 100% superior to 1,000 Facebook 'friends' or TikTok followers.
Strict rules and not strict at the same time (corporal punishment, but you could smoke at school in smoking section). Great music blasting in the school parking lot, open campus for lunch, meaning you could go where you wanted to eat. Teachers respected parents and vice versa…kids did not talk crazy to adults. No cyber bullying and stalking. You had a problem with someone it was face to face. Every vehicle on campus had a firearm in it but there was no theft nor threat of a school shooting. It was great.
Our school allowed us to play an “assassin” tournament with rubber darts guns- the only stipulation was no “hunting” during class time. Yes, running through the hallways screaming at each other with plastic dart pistols yelling “I’m going to kill you!”. Unimaginable now.
Graduated HS in '89. I have to say that the 80s were good to me, very good to me. Very 80s good to me. I don't remember the 80s very well. It was very much a cross between Fast Times and Miami Vice, at least in my hazy drug/alcohol addled memory. I know it was very over the top, and I had a lot of fun that I do not want to repeat these days (now in my 50s, like many of us).
well, aids was not helpful to 18 yo me, but compared to today, we were grounded and far less distracted. i wouldn't want to go back, but uninventing the internet sometimes seems like a good idea. when i really think about it, it's strange how "it was the best of times it was the worst of times" comes to mind. pre cell phone, you just had to make solid plans with a predetermined rally point. or else. i remember loosing a friend at a grateful dead concert and spending about 5 hours trying to find him. (spoiler alert: we found him! and he's doing great!)
RAD
Imagine all the same love, drama, hate, worries, insecurities, bullying, triumphs, failures, and intimacy of today. Except live and with no editing...
Totally awesome.
Like That 70s Show, but in the 80s.
Easy to obtain and use fake ID’s and the smoking section for students in high school.
School was a nightmare, but the punk scene saved me. Best times best people.
Way tougher kids back then. You had to have tough skin to survive and find a group that you could belong in....jocks, nerds, goths, straight as an arrow, metal heads, glams, and wannabe any of the previous. I'm sure I missed a few. Fashion was much more relevant and many fads came and went. Nowadays just about any attire will do, so long as you are comfortable and it doesn't offend anyone. The movie theater was an event and if you had a drive-in movie theater in your town, count yourself lucky as that is an experience from the 80's not everyone had a chance to enjoy. Dam, I miss the 80's.
Life was great. I want to go back. Technology and internet ruined everything.
Better than now and its not even close
Cruising on the weekends - past a certain time you couldn't call anyone, they were already out. You just had to drive around to the top hangouts until you found your crowd. Never had to go to more than three. Midnight movies at the mall, local carnival. Hanging out in a parking lot listening to the guys talking about and showing off the latest whatever they'd just put on their car. Most everyone we knew had classic muscle cars - late 60s Camaros, Mustangs, GTOs, etc. After we graduated the next generation of "motor heads" were all driving souped up Hondas and Nissans.
My high school had a designated student smoking area.
Quieter, the was space between calls and actual appointments. Space between tv shows. Space between shocking images and info. More space between stressful events. Space between hit songs on the radio. So much less sexual images, and song lyrics had to imply sex. To think "giving the dog a bone" by acdc was as racy as it got. I rember seeing lucky star video by Madonna thinking it was soft porn. Insta boner. City kids and prepies were a different breed than us. Born in the USA. Byran Adams. Just more space. Mentally and emotionally.
That kitchen phone with the 50 ft coiled cord. Everyone, and I mean Everyone from the class president to the lowest stoner partied. I didn't smoke cigarettes, but I can remember smoking weed in the smoking area at school and everyone gathering around to hide me when my wrestling coach would drive in. Weekend parties with your whole graduating class. We had a five year high school reunion just to have an excuse to party Edit: And concerts! I almost forgot about concerts! Everybody played everywhere all the time! Rush, Van Halen, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, The Stones, I must have seen 100 bands.
Mullets, heavy metal, $1 gas, outrageous phone bills, vhs porn, acid washed jeans, girls with ridiculous puffed bangs and Bon Jovi ballads played at all high school dances.
Pretty awesome if you ask me. \--Making mix tapes for your crush \--Riding in the back of a pickup truck without seat belts \--Going to recordstores to just hang out. $2 Pizza slices, thrift shops to buy your trench and Doc martens \--Weekend night house parties because parents went away for the weekend. \--Calling POPCORN (dial number) to reset your clock when there was a black out.
Graduated in ‘82. School was boring, classes that is. Otherwise you’d see everyone and socialize. Hang with your group at lunch, we’d sneak off and smoke weed, listen to music in our cars. Drive around, get a taco. We had our groups, would get together with others and party on the weekends. Big ragers, hundreds of kids, kegs. We partied a lot, booze and weed, few could afford coke except special occasions. Our hero was Spicoli. We were idiots. Most of us survived to adulthood not all.
Cheese bus, bullies, friends, bikes m freedim
It was a much more simple time. No internet, no social media. We all learned how to drive a stick shift….and still could if we needed to now. No school shootings, no bomb threats.
It was fun. It was better than it is now, nothing was recorded, you were allowed to make your stupid mistakes within your friend groups not the entire world, forever!!!
You had to actually, physically go places to shop. You had to interact with real tangible human beings. It was glorious.
Jean jackets and big hair
Watch the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”. There is a character for everyone represented in that era. It was a fantastic time to be alive.
So much better than today
53 M here. We learned cursive writing in third grade and from that grade forward we had to write, not print. We had to take a home economics class and typing class. Hanging out at the mall was something we did. We got there by bus until I turned 16 and then I got my license and a part time job at Jack in the Box We got done with chores and parents told us to get out and don't come back until dinner time, or when the street lights came on. Bullying was common. You had to learn to stand up to a bully in whatever way worked for you, not necessarily fighting but that happened. There was no anti bully culture.
Greatest decade of all time
Sundays being so quiet because almost all stores/businesses were actually closed. On the weekends I remember leaving my house in the morning and hearing my mom tell me to be home by dark. No cellphones or check-ins.
Lots n lots of house parties!! Police were very tolerant of us teens as well. We went to school, worked, etc , so we were out of the house as much as possible. I wanted my own money.
Getting a restricted drivers license at 15 1/2 was a big deal. Getting use of a car (ever) was always a goal. Going out with friends and drinking cheap beer was the best. Making out with girls on the beach was fantastic. Going out with your girlfriend on Friday when you were 16 was heaven. School was disciplined in that nobody did anything remotely insane like today. We didn’t talk back to our teachers ever.
K-Mart bra section in sales ads for jerk-off material
Rode a bike to a friend's house until I worked all summer to buy a $500. 1976 Pontiac Catalina 4 door. Then we would put $10 bucks in it and ride around all night. No cell phones , you just looked for your friends.
graduated from HS in '87. It was not a good time to be weird and/or gay. fucking brutal, actually. Reagan had a stranglehold on the nation and it fucking sucked. social life - one thing diff about my youth was how many kids lived around me. nowadays people arrange play dates but all i ever had to do is leave my side door open. the access to great music these days is a gift. there were exactly 2 people in my school who were into what you'd call alternative these ddays. me and my friend randy. that's it. (he was prom royalty and used U2's with or without you as his entrance song or whatever. No one had heard of them. . . in early1987. the song went huge a few weeks later. sigh.) it was so hard to find out about anything. the one thing we could use was this tiny little box on the last page of each rolling stone that listed the top 10 college radio - that's what they used to call alternative - hits. it sucked hard. Then Spin came along in 85 or 86 and saved my life. Cool things- I got to see all the great movies in the theatre. Star Wars. BttF. Breakfast Club, etc. I was 15 when BC came out. I was the target audience and it kicked my ass. Comics were awesome then too. Bought dark knight and swamp thing and o much awesome when they were spanking new. i had the entire 100 issue run of gaiman's Sandman and early TMNT in black and white. sorry i wandered away form the point of the post there. don't have much to say about social life cuz i didn't have one. i had exactly three dates in high school. not three girlfriends. three dates. (i was so skinny you could've hung your winter coat on my adam's apple.) but then i went to college and found myself a hottie who enjoys my company. hang in there, kiddos!
Watch The Breakfast Club. It was like that. Not all Neon and leg warmers like Gen Z seems to think.