A new website revisits the good old days
The Seventies was a time of bright colours, rotary-dial phones and parents who did not mess around when it came to discipline.
If Philip Ingham, 54, had a time machine he would go back in a heartbeat.
“There was a social structure in place where parents, teachers and the law reinforced standards of behaviour, which led people to become better,” Mr Ingham said.
However, it is the TV from that time that really makes him smile.
“People looked forward to their television shows,” he said. “People would rush home from work to watch the Jeffersons, Happy Days or Soul Train. Then people would go to work the next day and talk about the shows with their colleagues.”
He can remember being a little boy, watching shows like the Six Million Dollar Man and Chopper One.
“I totally forgot about Chopper One until I got the DVD a few years ago,” he said. “I said hold on a minute; I have seen this. Then the Seventies came flooding back to me and my childhood home in Warwick.”
He shares his passion for “the good old days” with his longtime friend Vanessa-Lynn Burch, 61.
"The Seventies was a prime time for collaboration, growth and experience,” Ms Burch said.
Mr Ingham has a YouTube Channel called Back in De Day where he re-enacts television newscasts from the Seventies and Eighties. A year ago he started talking to Ms Burch about creating a Facebook page that would also be an ode to that era.
“Vanessa-Lynn stepped in and took it further, creating the website Back in De Day,” he said.
Ms Burch grew the concept to highlight music, cartoons, movies and hairstyles from the 1950s to the 1990s.
“The website started off small and just got bigger and bigger,” she said.
“She did a great job,” Mr Ingham said.
The website launched in February and is slowly building a following.
“There has been a small response so far, but it has been positive,” Mr Ingham said.
Ms Burch put the website together herself using the free website domain Wix.
“It is very user-friendly,” she said. “When it comes to website design, I am entirely self-taught. I have done a lot of websites for other people but I have never charged. Everything I do is from the heart. I love to do it. I love creating things.”
For Ms Burch, the challenge of building the website was just making sure all the information was there.
“I also had to make sure everything was linkable and clickable, and went to where it had to go,” she said. “I did have some challenges with that, because a few of the links I put up initially stopped working.”
They also worked hard to make sure that the website was colourful like the Seventies.
The longtime friends created the website not only for the nostalgia factor but also as a teaching tool.
“A lot of children today do not have the respect and manners that they used to have,” Ms Burch said. “If we could get this into schools, they could see how different things used to be in Bermuda.”
Her ten-year-old granddaughter often watches her working on the website, and sometimes asks questions.
“The other day, I showed her a photo of a rotary-dial telephone,” Ms Burch said. “She said, how do you use it. I said you had to stand there and talk, you could not go anywhere.”
Her granddaughter was astonished.
Ms Burch felt that young people today also tend to take things for granted.
“You buy something new for them and a couple of weeks later it is broken,” she said. “When we got things new, we kept them for ever. We found people on other nostalgia websites selling Batman toys from the 1960s in perfect condition. It is amazing that they kept their toys so well preserved.”
Mr Ingham said that now we are living in a corporate era, where everything is about business and money.
They thought the website would have special appeal for senior citizens who miss the old days.
It includes pop culture specific to Bermuda, highlighting musicians from the past such as Hubert Smith and the Talbot Brothers.
Ms Burch said sometimes people were uninterested because they wanted to live in the present.
“However, what happened back then is relevant to what happens today,” she said. “Today is just a continuation of that.”
They admit not everything about the Seventies was fun. Writer Tom Wolfe dubbed it the “Me decade” because disillusionment with national and global action led many to look inward and find solace in discovering more about themselves.
Gen X, the generation born between 1965 and 1980, have also been called “the most under-parented generation”. In many families, both parents worked and there were not as many after-school programmes and camps set up to supervise children, as there are today.
“I hardly saw my mother,” Ms Burch said. “She was always working. As a result, I often had to do the cooking and cleaning, from a very young age.”
In Bermuda, the 1970s were also a time of social unrest triggered by racism and discrimination.
“The first big event I can remember in Bermuda was the 1977 riot,” she said. “I was 14 and we were living on Sound View Road in Sandys. The rioters were coming through, throwing bottles, so my mother dashed us out of the house to my grandmother, who lived on Scaur Hill.”
As soon as they were settled, however, a curious Ms Burch crept out of the house and sat on a wall near Fort Scaur to watch the protesters go by in their cars.
“They were shouting and cursing and waving beer bottles,” she said. “However, I wasn’t fearful. I just sat there watching, until my mom found me. I got the shouting at of my life and when I started walking, then she started smacking. Later, in school I learnt more about what took place to make the riot happen.”
• For more information, see https://www.backindeday.net
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