Probably the assassination of Martin Luther King. I’m just a little too young to remember Kennedy’s assassination.
In elementary school, for social studies, the teacher would show us maps of who had how much territory in Vietnam. Even as a kid, i noticed that the words were positive, but the US part of the map kept getting smaller. And i saw someone on fire on TV.
I didn’t think it was political at the time, but in retrospect, the moon launch was a political act. I remember that pretty well. My mother fed us chocolate and coca cola so we wouldn’t fall asleep and miss it.
True, but if the roof collapses the desks protect you from the roof hitting your head. You’re supposed to get under a desk or table in an earthquake too. (Drop, cover, hold)
Our first grade teacher told us in a very serious tone that Whitlam had beaten Snedden in a national election. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. I thought the guy who lost had a funny name.
Well I was certainly affected by my father’s range anxiety very early in life at any rate!
When I was 4 I didn’t understand most of it. But in the subsequent decades I’ve had numerous conversations with each of my parents about it to fill in the gaps that my 4-year-old brain didn’t understand. The things that I understood at the time were the hours and hours of waiting in line, going to the gas station every single day, eating in the car (which we never normally did), how unusual it was that I got to sit in the front seat of the car, and my mother’s willingness to play board games with me… the latter three really just being part of the hours and hours of waiting.
Whereas my father explained that he’d been buying gas and getting his car repaired from the same guy for years, and that guy filled his tank. I wonder, in retrospect, if that was legal. But i know my parents were only slightly inconvenienced by the gas lines. They were more affected by the high prices, and inflation in general. I remember my mom debating paying off the mortgage, when she was making more interest in the bank than paying on the mortgage. She said she’d never expected her electric bill to be larger than her mortgage payment.
My first remembrance of gas prices was definitely post 1973 crisis since prices were in the 0.70’s . I remember watching the gallons spin at a different rate than the price and thinking that it would be easier if gas were $1.00 per gallon. If i made such a comment to my dad, i didn’t remember his reaction. I don’t remember waiting in long gas lines.
I’m surprised they didn’t just cancel that trip. Waiting in gas lines for hours every day doesn’t seem worth it for a vacation. I guess your family prioritizes road trips.
Depending on where it was, the enforcement may have been pretty lax. According to my father there was no cheating in Philly as they were sending people to monitor gas stations and one or two did get caught cheating and were shut down… (slightly) more gas for the others to sell. The gas stations would completely sell out of gas every single day, so they had no financial incentive to cheat, other than perhaps bribery.
I’m sure the gas must have been very expensive and I’m sure that affected my parents as we didn’t have a ton of money (university professor & SAHM) but they were willing to pay to go on the vacation.
Well we were visiting a bunch of different people as we had friends & family scattered throughout the area: two days here then four days there then three days this other place, etc. And my Dad had scheduled the vacation days and everything. Quite a bit of planning had gone into the trip.
He was prepared to cancel the trip if my mother couldn’t get enough gas. And he’d figured out how to siphon gas from one car to the other if that would have made the difference between going & not going, but that turned out to not be necessary as she got enough gas in the small car that we could take the trip.
I forgot to mention that there was every-other-day rationing. If your license plate number was odd you could only buy on odd days and if it was even you could only buy on even days.
But they had two cars and they’d moved into Pennsylvania and gotten both license plates at the same time, so the license plates were consecutive, so one of each.
They were originally going to take the bigger, newer car on the trip but it seemed like they wouldn’t be able to get sufficient gas for that to happen, so they took the smaller car instead. Plus they had a 5 gallon can, which extended the smaller car’s range a lot more than the bigger car’s range. Both cars had about the same range on their own but the bigger one had a much bigger tank so it was going to be harder to get it completely full plus the 5 gallons extra wouldn’t cover as much distance on the bigger car.
So on the big-car days my mother would either fill up the 5 gallon can or put gas in the big car. My Dad was using the can to fill his motorcycle, which got above-average use during the gas crisis since it certainly got the best MPGs of the three vehicles. But he had a long commute, so to take the motorcycle when it was pouring down rain was no good.
She ended up getting enough gas that we could go on the trip, and it ended up being fine.
They did draw the line at gassing up on the weekends. That was too insane, in that you had to be in line crazy early in the morning in order to get gas. But during the week wasn’t as bad. We could leave after breakfast and be ok.
Oh… the other issue was that the bigger / newer car only took unleaded gas whereas the smaller / older car took regular, which meant that in point of fact it could run on either.
My Dad also wanted the flexibility of being able to buy either kind of gas as opposed to being locked into only unleaded. Another reason to take the small car.
I think it was a 1976 Dodge Aspen station wagon vs a … maybe 1968 Toyota Corolla (which back then was a much smaller car than today’s Corollas.)
My wife assures me visiting family is necessary to the extent that the universe will cease to exist and I will be in for a world of grief should family visits not occur.
About a week before Christmas, my mother-in-law got an ambulance ride and spent a night in the ER because my stepfather-in-law hit her with his pickup…and while we think it was an accident… . My brother-in-law, who is on disability due to severe OCD, was still in extra-germaphobe mode when I showed up for Christmas due to his reaction to having sat with his mother in the ER all night.
And that’s just one example of the many, many stories that could be told.
It’s bad enough that my wife’s therapist has gently suggested she consider limiting contact with her family, because the stresses of visits and phone calls are aggravating her health issues.
