Time travel

~ Liz A
May 25, 2021 – Peace, love and tie-dye
May 26, 2021 – Flower power

With the promise of lower health insurance premiums when I go on Medicare next month, I decided it was time to get a second cell phone so Don won’t have to borrow mine anymore.

I switched providers and for only $20 more per month, we now have two brand new iPhone SEs (which look suspiciously like my 4-year-old iPhone 7).

All that by way of saying we also got one year of free Apple TV (something I never would have subscribed to, but hey, it’s free). Great timing because it turns out Apple recently announced a new “docuseries” about music in 1971, titled (wait for it) … 1971.

Far out.

We started watching last night and I’ve gotta admit it was pretty good. So of course, today I googled “1971 music” and realized that my then 15-year-old self was in transition from AM to FM radio.

That was the summer I started hanging out at the baseball fields and basketball courts on Shelter Island. The guys would pull up their cars and blast their radios while playing ball. I learned a lot about Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and how many people could fit in a VW bug … went to dances with live cover bands and beach parties with bonfires … which is to say it was a coming of age summer accompanied by that incredible 1971 soundtrack.

At first I thought I’d just list a few of my 1971 favorites … Wild Horses, Won’t get Fooled Again, Riders on the Storm … but then I thought, how cool would it be if you google them yourself … and maybe share some of your favorites in the comments.

Back home, as I entered my sophomore year in high school, things were far more tame. Most Saturday nights were spent watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show while babysitting for the Vogels’ three boys aged 3, 6 and 7 … for 75 cents an hour if I remember rightly, and rounded up to the nearest dollar if I was lucky.

I spent my hard earned cash pretty equally on rock & roll albums ($3.33 on sale at Korvette’s)

and Elsa Williams kits (which you can still find on eBay) …

That was about the time I started to try designing my own needlework. Envious of my cousins, who had traveled to Norway to meet their dad’s relatives, I tried to imitate the counted thread needlework they brought back to the states. So I splurged on a yard of Elsa Williams Belgian linen and bought variegated Coats & Clark embroidery floss from the 5&10 on Hillside Avenue. Too late I realized the linen wasn’t even-weave, which meant all my designs came out as elongated rectangles. Sadly, those early pieces are long gone and with them, any memory of what they looked like.

But the loopy flowers of yesteryear …

are still clearly visible in my mind’s eye, which I suppose is understandable given how many of them were doodled into the margins of my high school notebooks. Those notebooks may also be long gone, but the drop-the-needle memories remain.

Peace, love and thanks to Tina and Deb for their dyed cloth.

22 thoughts on “Time travel”

  1. Michael and I were married in 1971 .. so this post is that much more special.
    Love this post .. Peace and Love to you and yours 😘

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  2. LA – an amazing connection and trip down memory lane – love the peace symbol and tie-dye. 70s music – tops. B

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  3. What a great post! I too was in AM and moving towards FM. I knew and loved all of the Top 40 hits and probably still have many of them. Summer 1971 I was heading into 8th grade, listening to it all, hanging out with girlfriends and watching MTM too 🙂 Those were the best years for music really. 1960’s -1970’s…nothing like that music and it still rings so true. I may have to go listen to something!
    We really need new phones, as our 3G flip phones will be obsolete soon. I have no idea where to even begin the choice making! I just keep hoping AT&T will have some deal for us old fogies. Last time, when 2G was going away, we got free “upgrades”. sigh
    Great patches to represent and love the mushroom etc stickers. These flowers, mushrooms, – things I could draw!

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  4. In 1971, I had been married for a year, was the mother of twin girls and Rich was finishing his 4 yrs of Navy reserve duty, going once a month until 1972. I had met him when he went to college after he had served 2 yrs active duty as a Navy corpsman. “In the Navy and Marine Corps, the hospital corpsmen (HM) are emergency medical technicians (EMTs). Though they have more education and training than the basic EMT, they also perform duties as assistants in the prevention and treatment of disease and injury” . Thankfully he did not get sent to Viet Nam. Instead he was stationed at the Naval Hospital in Long Beach, CA and then transferred, as a corpsman, to the Naval station at China Lake, CA. After his active service, he wanted to get away from southern CA so came up to attend California State University Stanislaus in Turlock, CA where we met.

    Without a doubt, the best music from that year was “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye. I was a Motown girl and The Temptations were one of my favorite groups. In 1971, their song, “Just My Imagination” was # 1 for a time and it was the last time that Eddie Kendricks performed with The Temps before going solo. I also loved The Doors and Riders of The Storm. The Doors hold a special place in my memories: side note:

    I met Jim Morrison and The Doors in 1967 at The Matrix, a night club in the Fillmore in San Francisco. They recorded a live album there and it was the first time that I heard the long version of Light My Fire…and boy was my fire lit !!!!!

    BECAUSE during a band break, somehow Jim Morrison had spotted me and came over and introduced himself. I had been dancing most of the evening and when he came up to me, I just about danced on a cloud He said some complimentary things which miffed my date but all of these years later, I remember that time as it were yesterday even though 4 yrs later, I went from being a long-haired flower child to a wife and mother of twin girls, with short hair for ease and who barely had enough time to sit and listen to music but once in a while, I played my Doors records, closed my eyes and was once again the girl who danced at The Matrix to The Doors…and truth be told, I still do on those rare occasions when I listen to Light My Fire on Youtube…

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    2. A side note? I’m thinking it’s worthy of a banner headline: Present at the Summer of Love in San Francisco!

      And “What’s goin’ on?” was a key element of the opening episode of 1971 … sadly, so little has changed

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  7. Laughing…by 1983, just a decade and a bit more I started babysitting for $1.00 an hour… FM firmly established for radio stations and videos on the rise. 🙂

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    1. your comment inspired me to look up the FM station that I used to listen to on Long Island … according to Wikipedia, in 1971 WPLJ “pioneered the very first album-oriented rock (AOR) format … playing only the best cuts from the best-selling rock albums with a minimum of disc jockey talk”

      sadly, in 1983 they changed to a Top 40 format, although I was long gone from New York at that point … as for videos, MTV and VH1 never really made it onto my radar (probably because I was busy working, going to grad school, and raising our two girls in Virginia)

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    1. well you can’t believe everything you read on the internet … curated blog posts included … I was a pretty geeky kid all in all, that summer being the exception rather than the rule

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