You find that there are no:
vcrs nor videos
cable TV including, of course, no MTV nor music videos
nor CNN nor Home Shopping Network (or shows of that type)
Saturday Night Live (TV program)
Donahue or Oprah Winfrey or Geraldo (nor any other tabloid TV)
Bart Simpson
Sesame Street
PBS (there was an educational channel but mostly for schools)
compact discs or compact disc players
shopping malls to hang out at
Wal-Mart or Sams (or any other warehouse store)
microwave ovens
Cuisinarts (or any other food processors)
cordless microphones or cordless telephones
cellular mobile phones in cars or briefcases or anywhere else
personal computers (i.e. mainframes yes/PCs no)
therefore networks via modem, email, voicemail,
junk telephone calls made by computers using automatic dialers
World Wide Web (the Internet has been around since the 1950s. The Web
has been around since 1993 or so)
fax machines
ATMs nor branch banking (you have to physically go to YOUR bank and
during limited banking hours- 10 AM to 2 PM)
scanners at the grocery store checkout counters
checking accounts at savings & loans
weather satellite photos during TV weather reports nightly
(much less national weather reports - youUd get your state)
USA Today (national newspaper)
Vietnamese (or other Asian) people owning and running convenience stores & service stations
working mothers in the business world (only one of my girlfriends while I was growing up has a working professional woman mother)
You further discover:
McDonalds doesnUt serve salads nor breakfast. (Neither do their competitors)
A foreign car meant a Volkswagon Beetle. (My college-student brother-in-law had one in 1968.)
Ma Bell has a monopoly. (There are no other viable telephone companies
such as MCI or Sprint)
Abortion is illegal
No one has ever even heard of the Equal Rights Amendment
Females had to always be addressed as Miss or Mrs. (No middle ground Ms.)
Female students have to sign in by 7:30 PM at their college dorms-
even seniors - and must explain in writing with a phone number for the
house mother to call where they will be if they plan to go out during
the evening. Their curfew is 11 PM.
This is known as *in loco parentis* and the college administrations take it very seriously.
Lyndon Johnson is president.
The Great Society is struggling to come into being
at the same time the Vietnam War is being waged.
Males between 18 and 25 are subject to the draft
and plenty are being sent to die in the war in Vietnam.
Unmarried men not in college are 1A.
Being in college got you that
coveted student deferment.
(My fiance Clif was drafted right after he finished college in 1972.
Another friend of mine was drafted while he was in graduate school.
Being married and also having children secured even better deferments.)
Legal drinking age nationwide is 21.
Legal voting age nationwide is 21.
Boys not old enough to go into a bar and order a drink nor to vote are old enough to be sent to fight in wars and die.
Baby Boomers were in college and in the Peace Corps and in the Weather Underground (a middle class white terrorist group trying to overthrow the fed. govt.).
Hippies are all over college campuses. Police are the *pigs*.
There is no AIDS so free love is popular among young people.
Young people do not trust anyone over the age of 30.
Make love not war is a popular slogan.
Hemlines on womenUs skirts are six inches above the knee.
Pantsuits for women have just been invented.
Twiggy is a popular model.
The fashions are mod and come from London.
Hard contact lenses have just been invented.
Near-sighted people could wear them
or wear regular glasses.
(No soft contact lenses or extended wear lenses in 1968.)
Granny glasses like John LennonUs were popular.
Man has not yet landed on the Moon so no **if we could land a man on the Moon, why cannot we [blank]** jokes.
The first lunar (even merely lunar orbit) mission is not until December 1968.
Apollo 8 orbits the Moon and one of the astronauts thinks to take a photo of
the entire planet Earth while on the way to the Moon. It was the first photo
taken that showed the whole globe in one frame. It started the environmental movement.
Space ships land in the ocean.
(Saturn 5 was a three-stage rocket. The last stage- the capsule-came down by parachute and landed in the Pacific ocean. Shuttles do not start landing on runways until 1981.)
More favorite phrases in 1968 are *Groovy* and *Sock it to me!*.
Rowan & Martins Laugh-In is a top favorite TV program.
The Smothers Brothers have constant battles with the censors at CBS.
(HBO is raunchier and more outrageous every day than the Smothers Brothers dreamed of being.)
Star Trek became the first TV show to portray people of multiple races/cultures living and working together as equals.
Blacks were as likely to be cast for a given role as whites or Asians.
It is daring to have Checkov on the show because the Russians are still our enemies.
My freshman year college roommateUs big sister (this was in 1969)
(in her sorority) has never attended classes with Afro-American
students in her life.
Almost no one her age has
Black people are setting fire to their ghettos.
(Not unlike the Rodney King Los Angeles riot later.)
Martin Luther King was assassinated April 1968, Robert Kennedy in June 1968.
In fact, both Russia and China are enemies to the U.S.
The cold war is at its height.
Breshnev is the head of the Soviet Union.
Mao is in power in Communist China.
Nixon has not yet gone to China so no American knew just what is going on there since 1949 when Mao came to power.
Clif Davis graduates from high school in May 1968.
His class chooses *To Sir With Love* as their official class song.
Simon & Garfunkel are a popular musical duo.
Their hit single *Mrs. Robinson* from the Dustin Hoffman film
*The Graduate* wins a Grammy.
The Grammy for best album goes to Glen Campbell for
*By the Time I Get to Phoenix*.
Kathleen (who graduated from high school in 1966) has these favorite
musical groups.
These are folk-pop groups:
The Brothers Four (who have been around since 1959 but are still going strong)
Peter, Paul, & Mary (who have also been around since 1961 and are still going strong)
New Christy Minstrels (who performed old time folk songs but with up-to-date
arrangements and have been around since 1962 and are still going strong)
Simon & Garfunkel (who put out *Scarborough Fair-Canticle* in 1968)
Herb Alpert (& his trumpet) (who put out *This Guys In Love With You* in 1968)
Top Musical Hits (according to Great Song Thesaurus) include:
Both Sides Now
Classical Gas
Do You Know The Way to San Jose?
Notable films in 1968 are
To Sir With Love (starring Sidney Poitier)
2001:A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
Lion in Winter (starring Peter OUToole and Katharine Hepburn)
Romeo & Juliet (starring Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey)
(Musical theme from movie was a hit: *A Time for Us*)
Taming of the Shrew (starring Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor)
Cool Hand Luke (starring Paul Newman)
Oscars for 1968:
Best Actor: Cliff Robertson (for *Charly*)
Best Actress (tie): Katharine Hepburn (for *Lion in Winter*)
Barbara Streisand (for *Funny Girl*)
Best Supporting Actor: Jack Albertson (for *The Subject was Roses*)
Best Supporting Actress: Ruth Gordon (for *Rosemarys Baby*)
Best Director: Sir Carol Reed (for *Oliver!*)
Best Picture: *Oliver!* (a musical adaptation of DickenUs Oliver Twist novel)
There are still card catalog pull-drawer cabinets at the public library.
There are mechanical cash registers in the stores (not computers printing out receipts showing exactly what you bought & updating the inventory).
The pumps at the gas stations (which are still all full-serve) are not computerized.
You return to the time machine, reset it for 1996, and go to your public library to
READ MORE ABOUT IT!
RECOMMENDED SOURCES:
THIS FABULOUS CENTURY, published by Time-Life. (My call no. is 973.9 Thi)
This set is by decade. See 1960-1970.
THE SIXTIES, published by Time-Life. (Skinny light blue book with an astronaut on the cover.)
(My call no. 973.9 Six)
There are two or three books on the Sixties in my childrens section in J 909 and J 973.
All of these books have plenty of pictures.
TIME magazine. See first issue of 1969 for *the year in pictures feature*.
LIFE magazine. See first issue of 1969 for *the year in pictures feature*.
SEE ALSO:
GREAT SONG THESAURUS (c. 1989)
PEOPLES CHRONOLOGY (c. 1992)
RAY MILLERS HOUSTON (c. 1982)
VARIETY MUSIC CAVALCADE (c. 1971)
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FOLK, COUNTRY & WESTERN MUSIC (c. 1983)
WORLD ALMANAC, 1993
BOOK OF TEXAS DAYS, by Ron Stone (c. 1984)
CHASEUS ANNUAL EVENTS 1993
TOTAL TELEVISION (c. 1991)
LES BROWNUS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TELEVISION, 3rd ed. (c. 1992)
BICENTENNIAL ALMANAC (c. 1975)
WHAT WE WORE, by Ellen Melinkoff (c. 1984)
Ask your mother if she still owns any of her favorite Sixties music.
I will bet she still does.
Is there a turntable in your house (for playing records?) still?
Go to Sound Warehouse (or equivalent) and see if they have any *greatest hits from the Sixties*-type cds or audiocassettes that have folk music on it by the groups IUve mentioned.
Go to costume rental shops.
Ask to rent Hippie outfits- complete with love beads, bell-bottoms, mini-skirts, etc.
Either take slides of one of you wearing such clothes or rent them for the party.
Draw anti-war posters depicting the PEACE and MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR themes.
Look for or draw your own movie posters from the film titles I have given you.
(Go to Blockbuster Video and look at the video box to see the movie poster on the cover to get ideas for what you might draw.)
Make Sixties buttons.
(Political ones would be like ones for Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy.)
Does anybody still have a lava lamp that you could borrow?
Ask your parents friends to each bring at least one genuine item of late Sixties memorabilia that they have saved all these years.
Think *back-to-nature*!
I realize that you are really under a time-crunch.
You could have one poster with pictures cut out from a magazine with all the items that I listed that were NOT available in 1968 with a big X on top of each of them.
(Does that make any sense?
Something to the effect that life in 1968 was BEFORE these items were popularly available.
Then another poster with the ideas that I mentioned that WERE current in 1968 such as abortion being illegal, *in loco parentis*, draft, Vietnam War, MLK & RFK being shot, etc.
My hope that you are able to drop by your local public library plus your local video store & canvass also all YOUR friends parents for Sixties memorabilia!
(You will be surprised what may emerge from peoples closets and attics!!)
Let me know if this helps.
Good Luck!! --Margaret