Time is a river, running straight and true; all we can do is choose when to enter and exit. Last week I announced that I would retire from KENS-5 at the end of this year, 36 years after I started work there. In the wake of that announcement I decided to look at what was in the news on December 23, 1973, the day before I started anchoring newscasts here. The results show just how much has changed since then, and how much seems to remain the same.
Prices have changed, thanks to inflation. Gulf-Mart (a discount store in the Wal-Mart tradition) was advertising Christmas turkeys for 65¢ a pound, bacon for 99¢ a pound, and T-Bone steaks for $1.69. HEB, a much smaller retailer in those days, sold navel oranges for 19¢ a pound and apples for 29¢. You could get an air-conditioned 1974 Ford Torino (but not Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino) for $3,635 from Gillespie Ford on Broadway.
Gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon - when you could get it. The San Antonio Light had a page-one headline noting "No Gas at Many Stations" while the Express-News wrote "Standby Rationing Idea Eyed." The lack of gas was due more to federal attempts to control prices than to the Arab oil embargo. When Ronald Reagan lifted price controls in 1981, gasoline went up slightly, the supply stabilized - and then prices plunged.
U.S. soldiers were involved in an unpopular war overseas, but the location was South Vietnam. "Blast kills 17 in Saigon" was one headline. In slightly more than ten years of war there, almost 60,000 Americans were killed, versus about 4,000 lost in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. We may have lost that war but we won the battle - there were many references in the papers to tension with the Soviet Union, a nation that no longer exists thanks to our opposition to worldwide Communism.
Late Express-News columnist and Eyewitness News sports anchor Dan Cook had a headline reading "Cowboys Ready" for their big game against the Los Angeles Rams (remember when L.A. had a team?). They were ready, winning the game that afternoon, 27-16, but they lost the NFC championship game the next week to Minnesota, 27-10. To give you an idea of how bloated the NFL season has become, that year's Super Bowl VIII was played at Rice Stadium in Houston on January 13, 1974, three weeks before today's average Super Bowl date. Miami won that, 24-7.
Movie ads were full of familiar names and titles - "Willie Wonka" was playing, as was "American Graffiti" ("Where were you in '62?" was its tagline) and "The Way We Were," starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Redford also starred with Paul Newman in "The Sting," which opened in two days and would dominate the Oscars in '74. But who remembers "Papillon," the bloated big-budget flick starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman? Or Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda in "Ash Wednesday"? How about another big-budget movie, "Marco," based on the life of Marco Polo and starring - wait for it - Desi Arnaz, Junior? And we should all at least try to forget "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," a movie based on a hippy-dippy book of cornpone philosophy about, yes, a seagull that was a huge bestseller in the early 1970s, with syrupy soundtrack by Neil Diamond.
The Express-News had a feature story about a McKinney, Texas woman who would be celebrating Christmas that year in her two-room house - at the age of 112! That brings up one thing that hasn't changed in the past 36 - or 360 - years. While the average human's lifespan has increased greatly, most of that is due to the defeat of childhood diseases. The maximum lifespan of a human, a little bit over 110 years, hasn't changed at all. When we learn to affect that number, things will really get interesting for the human race.
One headline referred to a much-anticipated event that soon became a synonym for hyped expectations and dashed hopes. Astronauts orbiting in Skylab were observing Comet Kohoutek. The comet had been spotted past the orbit of Jupiter earlier that year, and its brightness that far from the Sun led many respected scientists to predict it would be one of the brightest comets of modern times, perhaps even visible in daylight. It turned out Kohoutek was an okay comet, as such things go, but the sensational buildup to the big letdown turned Comet Kohoutek into a punch line for all of 1974 and beyond.
Finally, my friend and coworker Paul Thompson, front-page columnist for the San Antonio News (and how many front-page columnists have you ever seen?) had a squib about TV news ratings in his Sunday column that day. Paul noted that the November 1973 ratings had just come out, and "regardless of what you may hear in the way of house ads and self-adoring blurbs on any other channel, Eyewitness News remains the solid late-night No. 1 of both professional ratings services."
Some things in life change and some things don't.
