October 12, 2012
A New Great Depression and Ladies on the Moon: 1970s Middle School Kids Look to the Year 2000
People in a space colony of the future (by Rick Guidice, 1977)
The February 26, 1977 edition of the Herald-Star in Steubenville, Ohio published dozens of predictions for the year 2000 made by the people of Steubenville, a working class town in eastern Ohio (and the birthplace of Dean Martin). Some of these letters came from local middle school kids 10-12 years old and they provide a fascinating snapshot of the era; unique in their ability to reflect the pessimism stirred by a down economy and shaken faith in government in a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War era, while also laying bare the irrational optimism of youth.
Many of the predictions are clearly influenced by the energy crisis, with many kids predicting there will be tough times ahead without access to cheap energy. However, there’s also optimism about space exploration and more than one reference to women as astronauts. Even though Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, the first American woman (Sally Ride, who died this past summer) wouldn’t become an astronaut until 1983 — a full six years after these kids were making their predictions.
Interestingly, for being middle schoolers these kids sure seem concerned about high taxes. All of these kids are now between 45 and 48 years old and if you happen to be one of them, I’d love to hear from you. How do you feel reading your predictions from the vantage point of “the future”? How do you feel about the years to come?
Some of the letters from the February 26, 1977 Herald-Star appear below:
New Great Depression
I think that by the year 2000 we will be in a great depression. People are saying that we are running out of fuel. People will be using machines to do everything. And machines run on fuel. If we run out of fuel we won’t be able to run the machines and people will be out of jobs. So we can save fuel. Everybody should try to save by turning their heat to 68 degrees.
Debbie Six, 12 (Harding School)
We’ll Find More Oil
My view of the future is that we will find more gas and oil. No one will be poor and we all will live in peace! Also in the future, I think they will find some mechanical device that could make kitchens, dining rooms and etc. You’d just push a button and WHAM!! An instant living room or WHAM!! an instant milkshake. And that’s my view of the future!
Emma Conforti, Age 11 (Harding School)
Robot Maids, Robot Teachers
In the year 2000, we will have all round buildings. We will have a robot teacher, a robot maid, and all workers will be robots, too. We will have a pocket computer that has everything you can name. We will even be able to push a button to get anything you want!
Marty Bohen, Age 10 (Harding School)
Electric Cars and Ladies on the Moon
The year 2000 might have everybody walking instead of riding in their cars because there might be a gas shortage by then, and the cars give out a lot of pollution. Or there might even be electric cars instead of gas cars. The year 2000 may send ladies to the moon to explore and look and see if there are people living on the moon. And when you work you will push buttons and robots will come out and do the work for you. And there will be lower prices and taxes, I hope.
Tim Villies, 10 (Harding School)
Cures For Every Sickness
In 2000 I will marry a doctor and maybe have kids. I would like my husband to be a doctor because he would be helping people and would still want to be close to my family. As for a job for me I would help the crippled boys and girls. I would still like to have my same friends. And the most important thing for there to be is no wars and killings. I hope they could find cures for every sickness. And everybody will care for each other.
Monica Katsaros, Age 10 (Harding School)
The Last Five Years Haven’t Been So Good
I think 2000 will be a good year. I hope so because the last five years haven’t been so good with people dying and getting shot and murdered. I will be a grown man by then and will be married. I’ll probably have kids. I hope it will be a good America.
Michael Beal, Age 10 (Harding School)
Women Astronauts
In the year 2000, I think there won’t be any crimes of any kind. Shorter school days and lower taxes. I hope there will be lower taxes and no crimes because I’ll be 33 years old and I am sick of crimes and high taxes. I hope woman can be astronauts. I also hope there won’t be any pollution. And I also hope there will be town in space, where people live in space capsules.
Lora Ziarko, Age 10 (Harding School)
Cars That Float On Air
I think the future will be better than it is now. The pollution problem will be solved and there will be cars that float on air. I will be 34 in the year 2000. I will have a good job designing modern houses with push-button controls for everything to make it easier on everyone.
You could push a button and a bed would unfold from the wall. Everything would run on solar energy so you wouldn’t have to worry about the fuel shortage. You wouldn’t have to go to school. It would be on TV and living would be much easier for everyone.
John Vecchione, Age 11 (Harding School)
Young People Unemployed
I think by the year 2000 we will be riding bikes or driving solar-energized cars. By then more younger people will be unemployed. The price of gas will go up and so will the price of coal, silver, gold and oil.
Pietro Sincropi, 10 (Harding School)
Living on Mars
I think it is going to be an all-new world. People are going to be able to live on the moon and on Mars. Man is going to have computers to do the work for him. It is going to be a computer run world.
Tracy McCoy, Age 12 (Harding School)
Most of the World Will Be The United States of America
In the year 2000 I will be 34 years old. And actually I don’t think kids will have to go to school, because I believe that families will have computers to educate students. That’s all for education. I also believe that most of the world will all be the United States of America. I also believe that business and industry will be up 75 per cent. And as for culture, the Model T will be an old artifact. And, if you have children or grandchildren, they’ll all be more interested in culture than ever.
Mike Metzger, Age 10 3/4 (Harding School)
I Hope By Then Things Will Get Better
I think that everything by the year 2000 will be different. I hope the violence will all be stopped. I hope that the computers don’t take over people’s jobs. I hope by then things will get better.
Mary Gallo, Age 12 (Harding School)
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I’m exactly the right age (but not from Ohio) – 34 in the year 2000 – and I remember in Jr. High reading class, we read some of my first exposure to “Dystopian” sci-fi short stories as part of our curriculum. I recall stories set in the future when all the fossil fuels had run out, or another ice-age had begun. And we learned a lot at such a young age about crime, capital punishment, inflation and such that it does seem to permeate the “future papers” of the young of that time. Wow…brings back memories.
All the comments about buttons plainly shows the impact the Jetsons cartoon had on what people thought the future would be…
Pietro Sincropi is plainly a visitor from the future (you can tell by the made up name) who was having a laugh by giving a super-exact prediction of the future.
Emma Conforti is by far my favorite from the list. WHAM. I wonder if she’s as awesome a person now as she was then.
It is interesting that there was no mention in this selection of nuclear weapons. I suppose things were a bit on a positive trend, with weapons talks between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., but I recall growing up with the threat of nuclear war always in the background. There were several mentions of the environment in these selections. By the end of the century, much had been done to change the alarming trend of environmental degradation, followed by a series of crises in the form of acid rain, the ozone hole and global warming. I guess the challenges never stop.
I love all the parents either actually writing or “coaching” their kids to write about taxes being too high. As if any 10 year olds had any concept of taxation, let alone whether or not taxes could be perceived as too high.
Even as far back as then thePpretendertarian, anti-tax crowd was using a non-political venue to spew their selfish, “me-first” poison.
I’m exactly that age as well, where my vision of the future was molded by the Apollo and Skylab programs, dystopian sci-fi in books and film, the threat of total nuclear annihilation, future utopias based on science and technology presented in magazines like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Omni, and books like Nigel Calder’s “Spaceships of the Mind.” I hoped to be an astronaut when I grew up, but Skylab’s disintegration and the Shuttle program delays were clear indications that the year 2000 wasn’t going to be like that shown in “2001: A Space Odyssey” but maybe more like “The Lathe of Heaven” (1980 version) instead.
Even so I still had an optimism that science and technology would guide us towards utopia or at least an improved quality of life, but now I’m not so sure. Have all the high-tech gadgets and stuff we associate with technological advancement really improved the quality of life for most of us? We now seem farther away from having a space colony like that pictured above than in 1977. Do children nowadays have visions of the future beyond what’s provided to them in massively multiplayer online role-playing games? Do today’s kids still dream of jet packs and flying cars as something we’ll have and want someday? Is the constant gazing on our smartphones making us myopic? Technology advances but is there the momentum to move humanity forward as well? I’m now thinking the future will be more like “The Lathe of Heaven,” maybe eventually like “Soylent Green” in some respects, and in the long term like “The Matrix” when the massively multiplayer online role-playing games provide a better “reality” than that of a resource-constrained world. Cryonics just doesn’t look as enticing as it once did, where the future might involve being revived as an app siting on cloud storage somewhere.
I wonder if the people mentioned in this article will be able to find their names and read this! Pretty amazing =)
I’m not sure if our class had the assignment because of this project but around 1977-1978 I remember writing this very essay. I was wrong obviously but my imagination did go big. From what I remember, I wrote that we would have an African American president who was a wounded veteran of the Arab Israeli war. We would also have TVs the size of walls. All wrong of course but fun assignment. I wish I could find that paper but have given up looking for it. Thank you for that walk down memory lane.
I doubt that the kids who mentioned taxes were all being coached by their parents to insert politics. Growing up with only 1 TV in the house, I watched the news with my parents, since it was that or nothing. My parents got to answer all kinds of uncomfortable questions from a 10-year-old (“What’s AIDS, dad?”)
It’s likely that these kids saw the news and were aware that the industrial economy of rust belt states like Ohio was moving down to the South, largely for tax advantages. Kids probably even lost friends whose families relocated to follow these jobs.
Wow , Its really great to read the comments from 1977,
Well, in the area of computers we are done as exactly they predicted – pocket computers (ipad, laptops, smartphones, tablets), computer dominated world (internet as a major technological breakthrough),
But we really lagged in robotics (robot teachers, maids anyone?) and space ambitions (still cannot send a live human to mars or starting human colony on moon)
Man, I wonder when we are going to have robotic maids and human settlement on other planets (May be 100 years, maybe more, who knows)
I’ll be 34 in the year 2020. I imaging a world wear I can push a button and it pushes another button. World peace and we’re all gonna die!
Science & Technology are amazing. What’s not amazing is the way they have been used simply to make profit. Put a global purpose behind our technology and humans could redeem themselves.
Allow me to say “WOW!!!!!!! What a blast from my past!”
Also, back then, we didn’t call it “middle school”. I believe we called it “elementary school”. Our school, Harding was K-8. 7th & 8th grades were called “Junior High”.
What really tickles me is how close to the mark we were on a lot of things. Especially computers for education. I read these names and thoughts and actually remember this as an assignment in school (Mr. McCauslen’s class, I think). I read these names and thoughts with fond memories. We thought we were so advanced…and then I think about all of the things that have changed in this country, and the world, since then. Pretty amazing!
Thanks for posting this. It truly made my day!
I can’t beleive no ones mentioned Marty Bohen’s “pocket computer with everything you can name”. Genius!
Love how Pietro equates “anti-tax” with being “hateful”. I guess theft is loving? If so, let’s tax 100% and be super-loving!
Sorry, meant “selfish” (and “me-first”) instead of “hateful”
Some of the predictions have nuggets of truth (computer run world) and others are way off (violence free world?).
A lot of these predictions simply have their timing off. Pocket Computers came of age as smartphones closer to 2010 rather than 2000. Rooftop solar panels are slowly becoming more common in recent years. Electric cars such as the Volt and Tesla Model S are just now gaining a bit of steam (Volts in particular are definately inching closer to becoming almost “common” here in Northeast Ohio).
As for robotics, well we don’t have Rosie yet but robots are common if you know where to look for them. Industrial robots are well established and are becoming lower priced and more intelligent, UAVs are a major technology on the world stage and it appears that civilian versions are on the way.
Robots are being either currently used or close to being available for use in surgery, milking, agriculture, bomb disposal, fire fighting, disaster response, military reconaissance, ocean surveilence, lifeguard duty (EMILY), etc. If you follow news in the robotic industry, the consensus is that a ‘tipping point” is approaching.
As always, the predictions about space travel are always the most depressing, for me. It’s probably because we were on the right track, with the first moon landing less than a decade after the first manned flight and all, and the total failure of Congress to keep us on track. Here’s to hoping that the rise of private spaceflight companies like SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Mars One, Virgin Galactic, and co. will step up and realize the dream.
In response to the poster who asked if our technology really makes life better: I’d say so. Sure there are always downsides, but I love being able to access virtually any kind of information on whim, I love being able follow a GPS route to an unfamiliar destination as opposed to squinting at lines on a paper map, I think it’s great that we complain about “working” at a desk in front of a PC as opposed to toiling in a field to make enough food to both eat and sell for a living. I think being glued myopically to a screen is really the fault of the user and not the technology. I still go for runs outside, enjoy seeing animals and nature at parks, and as a college student the idea that this generation is lacking social skills due to technology is a flat out myth.
What I would really like to know is how many of these young dreamers grew up to be Limbaugh conservatives who supported the Iraq war, howled in indignation about Solyndra, bash EVs as “Obamamobiles,” rabidly support fossil fuel industries and practices like fracking, moan about “the good old days” without computers, and decry space exploration as a waste of money?
Dan, as one of the kids in this piece (now 46), I can tell you that a large number of my contemporaries are FAR from being Limbaugh conservatives. There are a few, but they are not the norm. I can’t think of a one of us who “moan about the good old days without computers” or “decry space exploration as a waste of money”. Remember, we all watched man land on the moon. That was our childhood. We all drank Tang because we were told the astronauts did! LOL
We also grew up under the real threat of nuclear war. None of us ever really talked about much…but we were always aware of it. I remember the drills in school. On the rare occasions we did talk about it, we would try to guess who woul survive and who wouln’t.
My girlfriend is much younger than I am (only 31) and there are times that I am reminded that her childhood was a different time than mine. Not really a large number of years but a large number of things had changed. We didn’t have computers in school until maybe junior or senior year…and those were TRS80s! LOL
I hope that the kids today get to experience something like this – being able to look back and see something in print that we said. It seems like no big deal nowadays…but when I think back to 1977, so much has changed. I can’t wait to see what the next 35 years bring!
Mike Metzer – You comment really stuck out as something very strange for a kid to say. “And as for culture, the Model T will be an old artifact. And, if you have children or grandchildren, they’ll all be more interested in culture than ever.” I don’t think I understood the concept of culture at that age. I’m curious. What did “culture” mean to you?
Is it just me or did these kids sound more articulate and literate than kids of today. The writing seems like that of a middle schooler or beyond. Good article. But what is it with gas and oil being such a fixation. Didn’t these kids ever watch science fiction or Star Trek jeez!!! I guess if I brought one of these kids to present day, they will think I power my ipad with fuel! lol
… A few retrofuturistic collages of mine on my blog, please check discoglosse.com
Michelle, my comment on the Model T was based on the fact that just a day or two prior to writing this assignment for school, a friend of my dad’s stopped by in his newly refurbished Model T and took me for a ride. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and tended to fixate on it for weeks.
As for culture, it meant to me then pretty much the same as it does now. Everything from art and literature to music and fashion to the societal mindset as a whole (although I doubt I used the term “societal mindset” at that age. LOL). I saw us moving away from a society looking out for each other. There were still a lot of folks with community pride then…not so much of the ME ME ME types as today. I’m not saying either is right or wrong, just different.
Jaime, oh yes, we watched Star Trek! LOL And Space 1999 was a biggy too! But if we, as kids, seemed fixated on gas and oil, it’s because that was a major concern at the time. I clearly remember gas lines…people waiting in line to get gas. Where we lived it wasn’t as bad as what we saw on the news, but it was still there. As for watching Star Trek, or any show really…TV was popular, sure…but it wasn’t a dominant factor in our lives. We played out in the streets until dark or until our parents yelled for us to come in. The world didn’t seem to as filled with creeps as it is today. You rarely heard about pedophiles, etc. I’m sure the existed, but you didn’t hear about them all the time.
Mike Metzger…
My name is Mike McElwain and I’m the online editor of the Steubenville Herald-Star. I want to do an update story and include you and others from the class who were involved in this project.
I hope to go into the surrounding schools and have teachers ask the question again for historical reasons and then publish today’s answers.
If you can, go to the Herald-Star’s website, click on “Contact Us” then click on “Contact Us” again to get the list of email addresses.
Look for my name under “Newsroom” and that is my work email address. Sometimes email addresses get removed from posts such as this.
If anyone participated in the project back in 1977, please feel free to contact me as well.
Thanks,
- Mike
Hey Mike Metzger, You’re right. I shouldn’t have made such a blanket statement like that. You know what they say about assuming…