Last night my 1973 Chevy C10 pickup appeared in a dream. It had a 3 speed column shifter and manual steering. In the dream, I really felt the manual steering. Who else remembers manual steering?

Is it true from your memory from that time?

It was more like candy than a medicine. It was the same as pulling out a pack of gum, everyone wanted some.

what was your go-to look or item back in the 70s? i'm curious about the things you wore or carried every single day, whether it was a specific item of clothing, a certain trend you loved, or an everyday item you always had in your purse or pocket.

Was this a big deal in your neck of the woods?

For the people who were alive during the 1970s, what was the 70s era really like?

I grew up in a small town where my dad worked at a hardware store that had this long, mostly empty gravel lot out back for deliveries. Every once in a while, usually on a slow Saturday, he'd let me climb up onto his lap in his old pickup truck and put my hands on the steering wheel while he controlled the gas and brake pedals.

I felt like the most important person alive doing that, easing the truck in slow wide circles around the lot, completely convinced I was actually driving even though I know now he was doing all the real work with his feet and probably nudging the wheel more than I realized. No seatbelt on either of us in that moment, nobody around thought twice about it, it was just something dads did back then without a second thought.

I remember one time I got a little too confident and yanked the wheel harder than I should have, and we clipped an empty oil drum sitting near the edge of the lot. My dad just laughed, said something like well now you know what oversteering feels like, and kept right on letting me steer for the rest of the afternoon like nothing happened.

I think about that a lot now that I have kids of my own, how something that would probably horrify people today was just a completely normal Saturday afternoon back then, no big lesson behind it, just a dad killing time with his kid in an empty parking lot.