Gerald R. Ford: Seventies President?

Jerry Ford was the most "Seventies" of the three chief executives who served during that decade. Here are a few ideas:

1. He was the first to be satirized on Saturday Night Live.
2. He did not pander to the religious right, or wear his religion on his sleeve.
3. Ford stumbled and fell (sometimes in the physical sense). That was what we were all doing during the Seventies. Things were not going well, and people were upset. Lucky for Ford he got up and dusted himself off. Ford saw that the myth of America's perpetual progress was just that - a myth.
4. He just found himself in the White House. Nobody elected Ford; indeed few heard of him before he was picked to replace the disgraced Spiro T. Agnew. During the Seventies we learned that much of Life is beyond our control, and to a considerable extent we're just carried along by it. Remember the Talking Heads? "You may find yourself...."

Liquid Paper

This stuff, when it came on the scene, was considered a miracle. You could cover over mistakes on typed, or even hand-written documents, done on plain paper, as opposed to sticky, blurry Corrasable Bond. The first batches of LP were alcohol-based, so that they would dry quickly. You dabbed the stuff onto the paper, maybe blew upon it if you were in a hurry, then typed your corrected text. Of course, the stuff was not easy to work with, and typewriters all over town soon were covered with splashes of white paint, as were the fingers of many a typist. Another disadvantage of this LP was that the chemical rapidly evaporated in the bottle, and you had to add thinner (sold seperately). If the LP was too thick, your corrections looked like they were typed on sandpaper.

Liquid Paper then came out with a water-based compound that was certainly easier to clean up, but took forever to dry. Most of us shunned it. They also had varieties of LP made especially for handwriting, and in different colors.

A major competitor to LP was something called Wite-Out. Some of you will recall the old "blonde joke" -

Q: How do you know if a blonde used your word processor?
A: There's Wite-Out on the screen.

Corrasable Bond Paper

So, you made a mistake typing that term paper on the IBM Selectric. Not a problem if you used Eaton's Corrasable Bond Paper. This stuff was a godsend for college kids. It consisted of thin typing paper, coated with a wax-like substance that could be removed with a simple pencil eraser. If you made a boo-boo, it could easily be removed and re-typed.

Eaton's was great for the typist, but not so for the reader. For one thing, the surface of the paper became extremely sticky when moist. Once a professor of mine spilled some liquid on a paper it took me hours to type, and the pages all became hopelessly glued together. Luckily he liked what he had already read, and gave me an A. The image on Corrasable was also not exactly sharp, and erasures could leave blurs. As a result, some of us would take our papers to a copying store and have them xeroxed onto plain paper.

70s Word Processing Part 1: The IBM Selectric

During the Seventies we all typed our school reports on typewriters, and, if we were lucky we got to do this on an IBM Selectric. The Selectric, a very heavy-duty office machine, was the product of Big Blue back when they had something of a monopoly on the market for high-end typewriters. It wasn't an "electronic" machine, like the ones Brother makes, but simply an "electric" model that used an interchangable collection of golfball sized elements, each with a different typeface, plus ribbons that came in a cartridge resembling a cassette.

The Selectric was noisy, and if you learned to type on a manual machine, it took some getting used to. Nevertheless, it was far easier to work with than your parents' old Smith Corona manual. For one, it had automatic carriage return at the end of a line, a host of type fonts available, and ribbons that didn't get ink all over your hands when you had to change them. Plus, hitting the shift key did not sometimes result in your getting half of a lower case charater and half the upper case.

Many colleges and libraries had selectrics that you could rent by the hour. I was lucky to have an old model at home.

The "Good Old Days?"

I get lots of e-mails asking about my egg cream article, which can be found various places around the web. Seems that lots of folks are nostaligic about the days of soda fountain drinks, and I hardy blame them - when it comes to the food.

Those of us in the "history business" often encounter folks who are nostalgic for the good old days of NYC. Well, I can understand longing for a good egg cream, but let us not forget that this town, like most of the world, was not as hospitable a place in years back. Crime was much more rampant, for example. Recently I was researching a murder case from 1940 and saw how routine both killings and executions were in the days of Murder, Inc. The NY TIMES would give about two inches of one column when three guys got the hot seat at Sing-Sing for robbing a man of $2. It was no big deal.

The subways were cleaner, I will agree. But they also didn't have air conditioning, and were noisy as hell! Remember those old BMT cars with the cealing fans- lit by incandescent bulbs?

As for public morality, Tammany Hall beat anything we see nowadays. There were also brothels everywhere.

Sometimes when I hear longing for the good old days of NYC I am reminded of Ronald Reagan's famous incident when he commented on how this country didn't even know it had a race problem.

Why did so many of us despise the Osmonds?

From 1976 to 1979 Donny and Marie Osmond had a hugely popular variety show. This followed their years of success in the bubblegum pop music business, in which they sold millions of records. Yet to most New Yorkers over 14, the Osmonds were "uncool," silly and fake. Why? Let's look at some common explanations:

1. They were Mormons. And so were the guys in Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Nobody cared about that with the fat guys from Canada.
   
2. They were clean. Hell, Frank Zappa never used drugs. Nor did The Boss. And what about the King of Squeaky Clean, John Denver?
3. They couldn't sing. Now wait. Donny and Marie Osmond both went on to sing in Broadway shows. You can't be tone deaf and make it on Broadway.
   

No, these reasons don't make sense. For the real reason, friends, we need look no further than their theme song - "I'm a little bit Country. I'm a little bit Rock and Roll." Put the emphasis upon "little bit." Good country and rock music comes from the gut, from the tough lives of everyday men and women. It's a little rough around the edges, sometimes VERY rough, but that's how Life is. Donny and Marie, along with their umpteen relatives, tried so hard to present a Disney-esque show, devoid of the real spirit of these forms of music. And, just like Disney's cartoons, they reeked of falsehood.