Summer of '76

A few front page photos from the South Belt Press in the summer of 1976

Cathie Hawkins (now Orozco) was a twirler at Dobie and featured on the front page of the South Belt Press in the summer of 1976 when she was selected as a twirler for Sam Houston after attending Blinn. In the small-strange-world category, I, who grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same high school, taught at Blinn, and attended Sam Houston, did not meet Cathie until 2004 at a church in College Station that we both attended. And even then, we didn't figure out how much we had in common until we ended up on the same Dobie band page on Facebook just last year. 

In other news, without social media or texting or cable news stations with programming of any interest to a young person in the summer of 1976, they actually found things to do, anyway. Behold, Stringazar, crocheted by Reva Lazar and Lisa Stringer over the summer when it was too damn hot to possible be outside all the time. 

Not that the heat kept us inside for long. The Sagemeadow park on Sageyork, brand new, didn't even have nets on the tennis courts yet when Rickey Armstrong and Alan Graham tried them out in the first weeks of June.

I remember playing on these courts as a kid in the late 70s. Tennis seemed to be very big, I suppose with the popularity of Billy Jean King still fresh. Everyone played. Most of us didn't play well, but we certainly tried.

This was when kids were left to their own devices all summer long, playing outside, in the culvert and ditches catching crawdads under rocks, riding banana seat bikes with flags up to the Sagemont Rec pool if you were lucky, grabbing a bite at the Snack Shak, or 7-11. Buying baseball trading cards and chomping all the gum at one time. There were still drive-ins to pile into the back of the truck together and sit through. You went to the Skate Ranch and boogied to the disco. The skates were metal. So were the backyard swingsets, where you could slice an artery at any moment. Skateboards were really narrow. Yo-yos ruled. So did Shrinkydinks. Going on family vacations in your conversion van (or station wagon) with the eight track player, bouncing around in the back with no seatbelts, reading comic books and playing the license plate game to pass the time: classic.

Was there any summer as iconic?

Nadia Comăneci at the summer Olympics kick started the gymnastics craze for every girl under the age of 15. 

It was the Bicentennial, with the quarters that had the patriot drummer minted on them. The July 4th stuff went on forever. 

Movies that year: Rocky, The Omen, Carrie, The Bad News Bears, Taxi Diver, King Kong, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Freaky Friday, the list is ridiculous.

TV? The Bionic Woman, Laverne and Shirley, Family Feud, the Gong Show, Charlie's Angels, The Muppet Show all debuted in 1976. And we were still watching Happy Days, Barney Miller, Baretta, The Six Million Dollar Man, Carol Burnett, Welcome Back Kotter, Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, Maude, The Waltons, Bob Newhart, Barnaby Jones, Hawaii 5-0, M*A*S*H*, Kojak, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, Little House on the Prairie, Police Woman, Rhoda, Good Times, The Rockford Files, Candid Camera, Hee-Haw, Soul Train, Lawrence Welk.

As a kid? Electric Company! Fat Albert! Captain Kangeroo! Schoolhouse Rock!

And songs that summer were almost entirely disco-tastic: Elton John and Kiki Dee's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart"; Abba's "Dancing Queen"; the BeeGees "You Should be Dancing"; "Shake Your Booty" by KC and the Sunshine Band.