1977 Time Capsule

This magazine dates me. It was sitting there, dating me... a fall 1977 Life magazine about The New Youth:


That was me. I was "the new youth" in fall 1977, a college frosh, a newly minted high school graduate in June that year. It's pretty odd looking at a magazine 43 years later that was trying to look forward.

And when I say it was trying look forward, I mean, it was really trying to look forward:


They literally asked my class (though from a suburban Chicago high school) to make a time capsule to be opened in 1997, which is now also well in the past:


The items in the time capsule are mostly familiar. I'm not sure I would have chosen them, especially as a high school student, but I guess that makes sense since I'm from a small town where fashions usually reached us a few years late. Most of these things I know more from college than high school.

Jeans, sneakers, and stereos were decades-long phenomena, of course — not unique to 1977. Frye boots, down vests, painter pants, rugby shirts, even CB radio — I think those were more during my college years. The drug and alcohol stuff was alien to me personally. And I never saw frozen yogurt until I saw it in the dining hall, and it wasn't branded. Sun dresses? Rings? Bubblegum? Thongs (on your feet)? What?

All of this seems trivial now, not surprisingly. Material culture of an over-stuffed country that was at its peak and didn't know it was about to be hit by the Reagan revolution and the downward crush of Republican bad faith and a billionaire tsunami.