Jasimo’s Blog

As of this post, I am officially fifty years old. Perhaps older depending on when you found your way to Jasimo’s Blog and caught this article by mere accident. If you did, then pleased to meet you. Fifty years of life experience including work and education has led me to the making of independently crafted digital projects including websites and drawing ‘Melody’ whenever I can catch a break. I’m sure millions of us in the world are doing the exact same thing right now. Voices matter when we have access to tools that freely distribute our thoughts and feelings. Fifty years ago, we wrote mailed-in letters to the newspaper editor or special friends. Fifty years later, all it takes is a simple click, a touch on the screen, or a social media post to deliver this information to you.

Young people in Generations Z and Alpha don’t seem to have a full idea about what life was like fifty years ago, unless they knew that Microsoft was founded since then. There was no internet, obviously, just a bunch of analog tech, and that’s basically it. But we still had love and compassion that never changes, even to this very day. Our daily errands never changed. The beauty of women never changed. The way we take care of ourselves never changed. The foods we eat mostly never changed despite industries pushing for ‘plant-based’. Yet, most other things have changed in daily American life and most evidently so fifty years later, although not very pleasant.

Like that musical number coming straight out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I shall take you on a ‘time warp’. The year 1975 is obviously one of the most important years in history on a pop culture scale. Modern life in the 70s underwent a transformation even when it wasn’t always perfect. When compared to the hectic melancholies of 2025, it felt like simplicity but it was not always that way. Even when things got rough, everyone got together while the times they were a changin’. This was the year when hippies were being replaced by yuppies, when the fresh sounds of disco, uptempo pop and arena rock lifted spirits up after the peace-era turmoils of Vietnam and Watergate, and when fuel-efficient Toyotas and Datsuns were out on the road following the consequences of an oil crisis that struck years before. Still, everybody is drinking Pepsi out of a steel can, and not environmentally sound.

We still had our fair share of problems back then but only when we sat down in front of Walter Cronkite on the evening news or read a newspaper. After all, no one had the Internet where you can leak out information in mere seconds, just a set of rabbit ears on the ol’ Zenith console that sits in the living room corner. Occasionally, viewers would be annoyed when their favorite TV program is interrupted by the words ‘Special Report’ — too bad we didn’t have live-streaming. That year, the Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon along with its brutal legacy. President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts — by two women! Inflation was hitting us square in the gut, but look back fifty years and everything sounds like bargain basement deals — in fact, the purchasing power of one dollar back then is worth over six bucks today! The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald happened shortly before I arrived to this world — it was later immortalized in a song by Gordon Lightfoot. 

Entertainment is always a talked about subject and was changing like never before. What began as first-season upstarts would turn into enduring legends as time went by. Everyone including anyone far younger than age 50 knows by now that Jaws was the first major summer blockbuster film, which is really a coincidence when you absolutely know this was a disaster movie related to the summer season. The year before, 1974, actually brought out major box-office ‘event’ fare like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake — both of them being star-studded disaster flicks crossing over into the next year, obviously — but no movie ever crossed the $100 million mark for the very first time until Jaws. Science fiction movies like Rollerball weren’t crossing into Star Wars caliber event fare just yet, but we still marveled over Planet Of The Apes in reruns and re-releases. Nevertheless, the foundation was being laid out. Fifty years later, we get Kpop Demon Hunters and history repeats itself.

“Island Girl” by Elton John was the number one song playing on the radio during the time I’d been born in a small town in North Carolina. Fifty years later and ‘The Fate Of Ophelia’ by Taylor Swift proves success only comes in the number of audio streams and social media hype.

Television was very big business in 1975. Variety shows were in abundant supply, along with premieres of ‘Good Morning America’, ‘Saturday Night Live’ (but not a similarly titled program with Howard Cosell), ‘Wheel Of Fortune’, and the current one-hour format of ‘The Price Is Right’ beginning that November. Time has been very kind to these long-lasting TV staples despite all the new tweaks and modifications. ‘All In The Family’ was still America’s number-one sitcom thanks to bigoted Archie Bunker, as its spinoff ‘The Jeffersons’ premiered that January for eleven seasons. Meanwhile, the Fonz was becoming TV’s mass-marketing muscle for the third and re-formatted season of ‘Happy Days’. At the same time, viewers bade farewell to ‘Gunsmoke’, once the longest running prime-time TV series in history after twenty seasons, along with farewells of ‘Adam 12’, ‘Ironside’, ‘Kung Fu’, and ‘The Odd Couple’.  As for ‘The Brady Bunch’, a family sitcom that was never a prime-time ratings success in the first place, it ended the year before, then found greater popularity in reruns until a variety series came on that following year, 1976. We danced to all the latest songs in front of our TV screens to ‘American Bandstand’ and ‘Soul Train’. Weekend sports on TV didn’t have all the flashy graphics and camera angles, just by-the-book commentators and a sharp focus on the game itself. And for the kids, you had Saturday Morning cartoons full of chases and mystery solvers, only to be dominated by live-action fare such as ‘Land Of The Lost’ and ‘Shazam’. The only catch is that you had to make an appointment once every week to watch your favorite shows — here’s where a physical copy of TV Guide became useful. Still, there was something for everyone and you didn’t have to deal with a gazillion streaming services looking for cash grabs.

Gas-guzzling station wagons and long four door sedans with the toxic smell of polluted emissions were plentiful out there. My parents owned a Ford LTD (?) with AM radio if I’m right while grandparents had a Ford Maverick. Now, we have SUV’s that disguise as automobiles, getting smaller and more shrunken by the year, meaning the aesthetics have greatly evolved with the times. It’s awfully rare to spot a 1975 model automobile like the Chrysler Cordoba on America’s roads today, now the sort of collectors items that fetch in six figures at a Mecum car auction. Unfortunately, cars back then lacked good safety standards other than the old reliable seatbelt. Airbags didn’t exist and certain models like the Ford Pinto were prone to exploding fuel tanks.

Stuff was crazy then and I have to agree the more time had passed, the crazier they’ve become, and that’s the whole charm of rekindling Americana. I dunno about the crazy clothes, but in my opinion, everyone dressed too funky in 1975 with layers of polyester and wide width bell bottoms as if they were ‘gettin down’. Looking through YouTube, those campy ads pitching K-Tel music compilation records were one more way to keep people spending hordes of cash. Automobiles had a weird design factor — my personal favorite ugly car would unanimously have to be the AMC Pacer (it debuted in 1975, no doubt) that would make a starring role in the comedy Wayne’s World seventeen years later. That one, plus Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (again, 1975) pretty much helped bring back seventies gold into the nineties consciousness.

Dad was working in retail at a time when there were numerous choices of walk-in department stores and grocery stores available from Kmart and Sears to regionals like Murphy’s and Roses. Enclosed shopping malls were booming as well, providing consumers with a broad assortment of prestige retailers and restaurants under one roof. Even small towns had upper-end stores to cater the populace. Walking in places like these meant community and trustworthiness, not the mass surveillance treatment you get by walking into a Walmart or similar outlet today. We spent money like fives and dimes to buy our much-needed essentials, and now we get mass privilege by carrying too many loyalty program cards to get reduced prices and have our data collected. 

Theme parks enjoyed a commercial boom since the early 70s. If you lived in Virginia during 1975, then two amazing new theme parks were opening their doors. Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Kings Dominion north of Richmond offered plentiful amusements and attractions to fulfill a family’s single-day outing. Wouldn’t you believe the prices were affordable back then as compared to today’s inflation-plagued rates? Insane.

Angelina Jolie, Drew Barrymore, Tiger Woods, 50 Cent, Sia, Fergie & will.i.am (both from The Black Eyed Peas), Enrique Iglesias, Charlize Theron, Bradley Cooper, Eva Longoria, Allen Iverson, Mayim Bialik — the list of famous people born in ‘75 started to make waves in the 90s, 2Ks and beyond, and it goes on…

And me? I just laid in my crib or sat in a stroller while learning the world in baby steps – how to eat, how to love, how to play with toys, how to look at a TV screen. It would take me until about the summer of 1977 (est.) to fully envision life and see my parents’ faces in full circle. The life cycle of school, employment, self-sufficiency and responsibility is a part of everyone’s life story including mine.

As the old saying goes, life goes on and the rest is history.