Life In 1968

Life in the US 50 Years Ago: 1968

1.         Getting cash required a trip to the bank.  (Although Barclays introduced the world's first automated teller machine in London in 1967, ATMs didn't make their way across the big pond until 1969.)

2.       The were no 'R' rated movies.  (Or any other rated films, in fact. The voluntary Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system replaced the all-or-nothing Motion Picture Production Code on Nov. 1, 1968 with G, M, R, and X designations.)

3.       The Beatles were still a band. (The group released their White Album and their movie, Yellow Submarine, in November 1968.)

4.       Humans hadn't walked on the moon. (In 1968, the Apollo program's second manned spacecraft orbited the moon and safely returned on Dec. 28—seven months before Apollo 11's actual moon landing.)

5.       Couples married much earlier in life. (In 1968, the median age of first marriage was 20 for women and 23 for men. Back then, close to 70 percent of American adults were married; today only 51 percent are, according to a Pew Research Center study from 2011. The modern bride is 26.5 years old on average.)

6.       Secret Service didn't protect presidential candidates. (After presidential hopeful Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail on June 5, 1968, Congress passed legislation calling for Secret Service protection for major presidential candidates.)

7.       The drinking age was 18. (It became 21 when Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act on July 17, 1984.)

8.       Interracial romance wasn't for TV.  (William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols broke that barrier with a kiss on Nov. 2, 1968 in the Star Trek episode "Plato's Stepchildren." Before it aired, NBC censors reportedly expressed concern that Southern TV affiliates would refuse to run it.)

9.       Seatbelts weren't mandatory.  (The first federal seatbelt law, requiring all new cars to have a belt for each seat, took effect in1968, but it would be decades before the first state law that required wearing one—that happened in New York on December 1, 1984.)

10.   A gallon of gas cost 34 cents.  (That's the equivalent of $2.31 today when adjusted for inflation—very comparable to today's national average of $2.48 a gallon.)

11.   Air travel was for the privileged. (The 1969 debut of the Boeing 747, which could hold double the number of passengers as its predecessor, the 707, led to a dramatic drop in flight prices.)

12.   9-1-1 didn't exist.  (A single, nationwide phone number for emergency assistance was established in1968 following a meeting between the FCC and AT&T. The digits 9-1-1 were chosen because they had never before been used as an area code or other service code.)

13.   Heart transplants weren't an option.  (Although South African cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard completed the first successful heart transplant in 1967, the first adult heart transplant in the U.S. took place at the Stanford University Hospital in 1968. Of the roughly 100 heart transplants worldwide.)

14.   Local calls were only 7 digits. (Calling someone in the same town didn't require an area code until the early 2000s, when, the New York Times reported, telecomm regulators began facing "number exhaustion" due to an expanding population.)

15.   Getting a credit card was a breeze.  (In fact, many were opened by credit card companies on behalf of the recipient without their consent. Consumers received active cards in the mail that they hadn't even applied for. The Unsolicited Credit Card Act of 1970 put a stop to that practice.)

16.   Soda cans had pull tabs.  (Beaches used to be littered with the shrapnel of discarded soda-can pull tabs (hence the Jimmy Buffett lyrics "I blew out my flip flop/Stepped on a pop top") prior to the invention of the push-through tab in 1975.)

17.   The internet hadn't even been invented.  (The internet's predecessor, ARPAnet, developed as an alternative means of government communication should telephones fail, sent its first message in 1969.)

18.   Computers took up entire rooms.  (Floppy disks and microprocessors made the devices more manageable in the '70s, but IBM's PC (1981) and Apple's Macintosh (1984) brought the computer home.)

19.   Child car seats weren't regulated. (The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration set the first standards in 1971, requiring that all seats be held by safety belts and include a harness to keep the child in place.)

20.   Millions more people sported eyeglasses.  (Glass contact lenses existed, but a more comfortable alternative became available in 1971 with the debut of soft contact lenses, followed by disposables 16 years later.)

21.   'Made in China' items were hard to find.  (The Korean War put a freeze on all U.S.-China trade and travel until the early '70s, when President Nixon's administration reestablished diplomatic relations.)

22.   There were only three major TV networks. (NBC. ABC and CBS were the other two. (A previous contender, DuMont, shut down in 1956.) Fox joined the lineup in 1986 but didn't earn "major network" status until 1994.)

23.   The U.S. was at war in Vietnam.  (The Vietnam War continued until April 1973.)

24.   And the draft was active. (The government employed conscription from 1940 until 1973, even during times of peace, to supplement armed forces without enough voluntary recruits.)

25.   The environment was an afterthought. (The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was formed in 1970.)

26.   Radio was the only means of portable music. (Until Stereobelt developed the first portable cassette player in '72, transistor radio was it.)