Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
My first guess for the year was 1978, but the 2600 model looks like the four-switch, wood veneer version first released in 1980, and the date in the top right corner looks like ’83. I’m betting Video Olympics is what they’re playing.
There’s a record in front of the stereo I can’t identify. I wish I had that chair.
“Get yours together and get into the van scene NOW!”
I wish I had the whole brochure, because there’s so much red lushness and awkward grammar:
The Cunard Princess, the most recently built cruise ship. Nobody had ever seen before such a beautiful and functional ship cruising in the Mediterranean and probably will not still for many years.
The Achille Lauro mentioned on the cover of the brochure was named after the original owner of the Italian line and has quite a history, culminating in the ship’s hijacking by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, an incident dramatized in at least two TV movies and one opera. In 1994 the ship caught fire off the coast of Somalia and sank two days later with all hands and passengers safe on shore.
Read more about Lauro Lines here.
See more at the Billings Gazette. I totally forgot about the CB radio craze from about 1975 to 1981, although I loved Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazzard. The Wikipedia article doesn’t mention it, but Glen A. Larson’s B.J. and the Bear was another popular series spotlighting the CB.
The van was built by Gene Gamet, Terry Dodge, and Gary Glenn in Michigan in 1975, and Glenn, an airbrush legend, handled the paint job. Soon thereafter Gary took the van to Southern California, where it became a car show hero and one of the most famous custom vans in the country. Here it is in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979):
And here’s the little addition Gary made after the movie: “Twinkie Patrol” – ‘We’re coming for your daughters’.
There’s a long conversation about the van and its creators and history at Michael Poulin’s Flickr.
Gary Glenn passed away in 2013.
(Images via Cosmo Lutz/Flickr and the Gary Glenn Memorial Page)
I used foodtimeline.org to narrow down the year. More 1970s McDonald’s here.
At about 3:00AM on November 23, 1974, Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered his family—mother, father, two sisters (aged 18 and 13), and two brothers (12 and 9)—at their home in Amityville, Long Island. These are the crime scene photos not showing the bodies. In the first photo you see one of the “evil eye” windows that gives the original house, in retrospect, such a disturbing presence.
There’s such a dissonance between the innocence and ordinariness of what’s seen and the horrible events lurking just outside of view (all of the victims were shot in their beds). DeFeo, Jr. claimed he was “possessed,” laying the groundwork for later tall tales, but of course he was just an evil shit of the common Homo sapiens variety.
The photos are via Tombolare, originally from The Amityville Files, where you can see more.
(Via CalStreets)
2 Warps to Neptune 