I was a junior in high school in 1969 in Philadelphia. What I remember most was that that was the year my school allowed girls to wear pants (but not jeans) to school for the first time. Before that we had to wear dresses or skirts. Boys were not allowed to wear jeans either, and had to wear shirts with collars. This was a public school in a middle/lower-middle class neighborhood. Girls also had to change clothes for gym and wear these dreadful ghastly yellow gym suits that were one piece with a skirt and bloomers underneath. And you had to take a shower after gym. You had a number and someone checked off your number as you went into the shower, but you were excused from showering if you were menstruating . My kids think this all sounds weird. Field hockey was the big girls' sport at my high school girls and girl's basketball had very different rules from today.
The other huge thing was Vietnam. There were lots of protests. The process of assigning military draft status by random drawing of birthdates had begun a year (or maybe two years) earlier, and this was a huge deal. Many men can tell you where they were when the draft drawing took place and virutally all adult men who were 18 then can tell you instantly what their draft number was. The My Lai massacre occurred in November 1969, accelerating protests against US involvement in Vietnam. The Kent State shooting happened in May of the following year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
Many men taught school to avoid the draft. Teaching was a draft-exempt position. Other men went to Canada to avoid the draft, and there were any number of strategies for getting a medical deferment. I lived in an area where there were many Quakers. Quakers are pacificist, and life-long Quaker males almost always got granted conscious objector status. Other guys resented this (at least in my high school). You heard "America, love it or leave it." a lot from the pro-military crowd.
Men still didn't swear much in front of women, and it was considered coarse and unladylike for girls to swear. The f word was considered shocking in mixed company and not used casually like it is today. Anyone who said "That sucks" would have been considered crude. Adults, like your friends parents, were addressed as Mr. and Mrs. In a doctor's office you would be called Miss or Mrs Last Name, never by your first name.
High schools mostly held their senior proms in the gym, not in hotels.
Marijuana use was fairly common, but circumspect. You had to know someone fairly well before the topic was discussed. LSD was also popular. Muscle cars were popular with young men. The station wagon was the standard large family car. Families were bigger then. Having 4 or 5 siblings was not unusual. Hardly any of my friends came from two-child families. Air travel and long distance telephone calls were much more expensive than today. There was a single phone company (Bell Telephone) that provided all local and long distance service and the telephone that went in your house (a rotary dial phone, not a touch-tone one). In my town, phone numbers were still designated with 2 letters and 5 numbers rather than 7 numbers e.g. MA5-5555 rather than 625-5555. Airlines were regulated monopolies and there was not the variety of fares and competition there is today. Going to college was the exception rather than a middle class expectation. Manufacturing jobs were the ticket into the middle class. There were a few malls, but not too many, and no discount department stores like Target or K Mart. People ate much less ethnic food, and ethnic restaurants were uncommon outside urban areas. I didn't go to my first fast food restaurant (a McDonald's) until 1968. Most stores were closed on Sunday.
Race relations were unsettled. Interracial dating was considered radical by both parents and most kids. In the summer of 1968 there were race riots in Detroit, Newark, NJ, and other places ("Burn, Baby, Burn"). Tommie Smith and John Carlos did the Black Power salute at the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City. You can read about it here
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/mm-mexicocity.html.
The Black Power movement was quite strong in urban areas and the nation seemed very racially divided. Black students took over the administration building at Cornell University and were pictured with maching guns on the cover of Newsweek. I wanted to go to Cornell, but after that, my parents would not even consider it. The SDS and the Weathermen were violent radical student groups active on some campuses (UC Berkeley, U Michigan). Environmental activism was practically non-existent. People were only just beginning to become concerned about pollution.
Abortion was illegal everywhere in the US, and boys who "got girls in trouble" were still expected to marry them. Having a child out of wedlock was scandalous and reflected badly on the whole family. Birth control (pill, diaphragm) was available but in more conservative areas some doctors still refused to prescribe it for unmarried women. Condoms were kept behind the counter at pharmacies (usually called drug stores at least where I lived) and boys had to ask for them (often causing them to feel a mixture of embarassment and pride). Tampons were not advertised on television. Rape was often thought to be the woman's "fault" and was considered shameful, was hidden and not talked about.
Someone mentioned long hair on young men. This, and girls going braless, seemed to be flash points for the older generation. Looking back, I can't believe how many families were bitterly fractured over the length of a son's hair. Long hair seemed to symbolize rebellion and anti-Americanism to the parental generation. Flag burning was another flash point, as were flag symbols on clothing. Peace signs were everywhere on clothing. I don't know any women who had tatoos then and very few men that I knew had them with the exception of sailors and other military types and those who got their tatoos in prison. Some girls had pierced ears - they were just becoming more popular in the middle class, but other girls stuck with clip-on earrings. Boys always asked girls out. A girl in 1969 might make her interest in a boy known by telling her friends who would tell his friends, but she would never call him up and ask him out. Young people tended to go on formal dates rather than just hang out.
The space program and landing on the moon ([size=-1]July 20, 1969), [/size]were a big deala. Communism was the enemy. Beating Russia to the moon was a big "victory" for the US.
You might also want to look at this site. You can put in a date and it will tell you how much things cost, what songs and tv shows were popular, etc.
http://www.dmarie.com/timecap/
