I’m opening almost five decades of scrapbooks and uncovering the personal as well as the cultural headlines of each year. If you missed segment one on 1978, go here:
1979 came in with a deluge of snow in Chicago:
A near-record pace of 20 inches in 2½ days (Jan. 12-14). (This still didn’t top the 23-inch snowfall of 1967.) According to the National Weather Service, snow stayed on the ground for 51 days, until March 6.
Sometime in that period, my dad and I were shoveling our front walk when he told me he had been thinking about our family moving from Chicago.
He explained that he had been courted by a client in Northern Indiana to consider leaving his longtime job with Borg-Warner and work directly with them, overseeing their data department.
His position would be a management job with commensurate pay.
With a lower cost-of-living than Chicago’s, he could work less and be home with us more.
I was unsympathetic.
I’d attended six different schools between kindergarten and eighth grade, returning in eighth grade to the school I attended in third and fourth grades. (That was especially awkward.) When I entered high school, I made my dad promise that I could stay put. I figured this was why he was telling me one-on-one, without my younger brother and sister around.
Despite the trauma of freshman year at Notre Dame High School for Boys, things had improved for me as a sophomore.
I had a successful debut on the speech team.
And I was moving toward an editorial position on the school newspaper.
I hated to give it all up.
But as the snow melted over the months, so did my resistance.
For as long as I could recall, my dad put in far more than 40 hours a week at his job. I always thought he did so because he enjoyed it. To a degree, he did. But now I saw that part of it was that he felt he had to – to meet the needs of his family.
I told him I’d do what we had to. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I understood.
On The Big Screen:
“Superman” took flight.
The debut performance for Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel was a runaway hit, taking in more than $130 million from late 1978 into 1979.
Its record-setting $55 million
budget covered part of its sequel, shot contemporaneously.
I remember loving both Reeve’s performances as Superman/Clark Kent and Margot Kidder’s work as Lois Lane – but being irked by Gene Hackman’s campy Lex Luthor. And I hated the climax of Superman going back in time to change it – something he had never been able to do successfully in comic books.
On The Small Screen:
New in the fall season on ABC were Hart to Hart:
Starring Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers,
And The Lazarus Syndrome, starring Louis Gossett Jr. and Ronald Hunter.
I remember liking both a lot, but audiences only agreed with me on the Harts. Lazarus was swiftly cancelled, freeing Gossett up to do movie work like An Officer and a Gentleman a few years later. Hart to Hart would run for five seasons and eight follow-up TV-movies, but I only stuck with it for a season or so. By senior year, I had little time for television watching.
On Stage:
I’ve mentioned before, winning tickets from a South Bend radio station to see the Eagles at Notre Dame’s ACC:
That was in the fall of 1979, only a few months after our move. The concert was good, though I remember preferring their performance of album cuts like “In the City,” “The Disco Strangler” and “I Can’t Tell You Why” (which would later become a single) to their big hits.
In pop culture:
Our household decided we wanted to buy albums as well as singles, but we couldn’t really afford it. So …
We were the perfect
audience for Columbia House and its “Buy 12 albums for a penny” promotion.
We eventually bought the three to four albums required at list price. These were all on cassette tapes, because we didn’t trust that albums would arrive without being broken or scratched. (I guess cassettes could have arrived warped, but we lucked out.)
I got rid of my cassettes decades ago.
But I remember they included the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Little River Band’s “First Under the Wire,” the Eagles’ “The Long Run,” Peaches and Herb’s “2 Hot” and KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Do You Wanna Go Party?”
That Christmas, I received Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” LP, which I still have.
On my radio and turntable:
A curio: the song at number 77:
Between 1976 and 1979, my friend Tony and I had not only followed the Billboard charts and created our own surveys, but we also created “amateur acts” made up of ourselves and some of our relatives and friends.
One act, “Doubletrouble,” was the two of us doing a cover of the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.”
(I know: I still didn’t know I was gay? All I can say is it didn’t feel like we were singing it to each other.)
I can say I’m grateful there’s no audio evidence. My singing voice is not my strength.
And at home:
By August we were settling into our apartment in South Bend, Ind., 45 minutes from my dad’s workplace in Elkhart. (We insisted that Chicago to Elkhart was just too big a change, and he agreed, so he made the daily commute.)
I bowled my first game over 100…
…settled in as a junior at St. Joseph’s High School…
and found my world opening up tremendously.
Next up: 1980…
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Lots of fun stuff there. I remember my first time breaking 100 in bowling as well. I’m impressed that you kept the scorecard. Looks like whoever Lisa is had a rough go of it. What is your highest score?
That first Superman installment is a mixed bag, and your complaints about the saving the world scene as well as Lex Luthor’s clownishness are both valid. 2nd movie was far better.
Lisa’s my younger sister; at the time, I would have been 15-16 and she, 12.
My highest score has been in the upper 190s. I’m in a Thursday night league, where my average is in the low 140s.
I agree that Superman II was the better movie. IV was the worst, and III wasn’t exactly great either.
Random question that I don’t expect anyone to know: The Columbia House records were on thinner vinyl than the regular releases. Were the cassettes also of cheaper quality?
I’m guessing so, although high-quality cassette tapes sounds like an oxymoron to me.
“I Think I Can Love You” can simply be about friendship, too.
Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit teams up with Craig Finn on a rousing cover of Elton John and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart”. It’s sung in the spirit of early Greta Gerwig. The biggest romance in your life is with your platonic friend. (Frances Ha, Ladybird) Gerwig is a music gal. Maybe she got the idea from The Rolling Stones’ “Waiting on a Friend”. Keith Richards gets a mention in Ladybird.
Not counting your number 77, I can start singing 9 out of every 10 entries you have in your top 100 for 1979. Which is either impressive or scary, I’m not exactly sure which offhand.
Well, since I’m sure you know the original, you can count 77 in there, too. 🙂
Exactly…1979-1980 I was just glued to the radio. There are 6-10 in there that I didn’t recognize, though. Glad to see Kermit represented in the Rainbow Connection.