3  Daily life in the 1970s

It’s hard for my kids to understand some of the basic ways that life has changed since I was their age.

3.1 Telephones

My parents and grandparents could remember when their homes got their first telephones. Very few families had more than one. Even the Gungors had just one rotary dial, in their kitchen, to be shared among all the family members.

Local phone calls, including to most locations in Clark County (for my mother, this thankfully included the area where my grandmother lived). Anything more distant required a per-minute charge. The fees to places in the Midwest were fairly reasonable – maybe a few cents every ten minutes? – but more distant locations and the charges could really add up. A call to California, or to John Svetlik in Arizona, might cost a dollar or something per hour – the equivalent of, say, $5 or $10 today. This was something you might do on a special occasion – a birthday, Christmas, or perhaps after a funeral or birth – but generally we didn’t call unless it was very important.

Fortunately – or perhaps, as a result of this – we didn’t have many friends or family that were distant enough that this would matter.

Instead we relied on the mail. Much, perhaps most, communication with people outside of Neillsville occurred through the post. I wrote many letters, and postcards, and received many more. The mailbox was my lifeline to the world.

3.2 Information

Our news about the world came from radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines.

Popular or common titles were available at some of the stores in Neillsville, but for more specific books you’d have to go elsewhere. There was a bookstore in the Marshfield Mall that stocked a full variety of books.

The library was a crucial resource if you needed to understand something in depth.

Cameras were widely available at prices that anyone could afford, and we took plenty of photos. But to today’s generation, raised on high-quality images and video from mobile smartphones, our photography was incredibly primitive.

The camera itself was cheap and if you couldn’t afford a commercial model it was easy to make your own. Once summer we made a “pinhole” camera out of cardboard and successfully took photos that I have to this day.

No matter what camera you had, the photos themselves required a separate purchase of photographic film. You could buy film canisters, usually in rolls of 24 or 36 images for reasonable prices – a few dollars. But, importantly, you couldn’t view the images until after they were processed – a separate step that required weeks of waiting and additional money. All told, a single photo might cost between $0.25 and $0.50 – not a trivial amount of money in a world with a $3-$5 hourly wage. Because you had to take photos in increments of 24 or more, this often meant that some events didn’t get viewed until months later.

Although it wasn’t unheard of for people to process their own photos in a home “dark room”, mostly we dropped our film at the pharmacy, or mailed it to a mail-order lab that would send the developed prints back to us within a week or two.

The significant, weeks-long lag between taking the photo and seeing the results made for special moments when at last we received the final images.

Sometime in the 1970s, Polaroid’s instant photo cameras became widely available. To us, these were revolutionary because they let everyone enjoy the images within minutes. The downside: each photo was more expensive, on the order of $1. In today’s money and relative purchasing power, that would feel like closer to $5 for a single image.

As you can imagine, at those prices each photo was precious and we tended to take them only on special occasions.

3.3 Food

By mid- and late-summer, we were eating fresh local produce like lettuce and green beans. During the rest of the year, vegetables often came in cans, or sometimes frozen.

As you’d expect from a dairy-dominated location, we drank a lot of milk. We ate cheese too, of course, but nothing like the variety you see today in an upscale supermarket. For us, cheese was always yellow-orange and came in exactly two varieties: cheddar and colby. It was a source of some pride that colby had been invented in the nearby town of Colby Wisconsin.

Typical meals

Breakfast was some type of cereal with milk. Corn flakes and Cheerios were probably the most common and popular. My family always had those boxes on hand, served poured into a bowl with fresh full-fat milk. My mother taught us to sprinkle a bit of sugar on top as a special treat.

In our house we often ate hot cereals, usually oatmeal served with milk and perhaps brown sugar. My mother sometimes made other hot cereals, like Ralston or Cream of Wheat.

Bacon and eggs were another standard, especially when visiting grandparents. On Saturdays we often had pancakes as well, usually served with a corn syrup sweetener like Aunt Jemima or another “maple-flavored” topping. Although we had access to fresh, local maple syrup, for some reason my siblings and I thought it tasted like medicine and we refused to eat it.

We referred to our mid-day meal as “dinner” and this was often a sandwich of some kind. Cheese was common, perhaps served with sliced meats like turkey or ham or roast beef. My mother taught us to spread a leaf or two of iceberg lettuce on top, though I generally refused the mayonnaise or mustard that she suggested.

The final meal of the day we called “supper”, and in my family it was typically some type of meat – often beef, pork, or chicken – with reheated canned vegetables like peas or green beans. We ate this with store-bought sliced bread, preferably as bleached white as possible.

My mother often cooked potatoes, usually mashed and topped with generous amounts of butter. Beef roast was a common meal, cooked to perfection in her electric oven.

At my grandmother Pulokas’ house, the bread was always homemade, usually a dark rye or whole wheat bread. My grandfather preferred thick crusts, served with copious amounts of freshly churned butter.

For fruit, either as a snack or served with a meal, we ate apples (usually red delicious, but often a variety from a local tree), pears, and perhaps other fruits gathered locally, like raspberries, blueberries, or strawberries in season. The grocery stores stocked plenty of imported, cheap bananas year round. In season we could also get fresh peaches, cherries, oranges and grapefruit. Some of those fruits might be available at other times of the year, but always at exorbitant prices.

Snacks were simpler than today. My mother would regularly bake cookies, brownies, or pies, and leftovers were always available. To top off the calories required by the teenage boys of the household, we also ate boxes of packaged snacks, like Oreo Cookies, Fritos Corn Chips, and Twinkies. I don’t think the idea of “healthy snacks” would have occurred to us. Like dessert, the whole point was to have something that tasted good.

I remember the day our family bought a dishwasher. Before that, everything was washed by hand, and usually hand-dried too with a towel. Visiting Grandma Pulokas it was a treat to be assigned the drying duties, but I don’t remember doing this at home. Maybe it was a duty related to my sister and mother.

Microwave ovens were exotic and expensive, so we didn’t have one but the Gungors did. It was a treat to try putting different foods in the microwave to see what would happen.