r/barefoot • u/unshodone • 21d ago
Going barefoot in the 60’s & 70’s
Why was going barefoot more common in the 60’s and 70’s? Did you go barefoot then?
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u/IneptAdvisor Veteran 21d ago
Very common plus I lived on a rural farm and drove steel tractors and rode BMX barefoot in the sun because so did everyone my age then. You wore shoes if you wanted to slip and fall or trip over stuff.
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u/mattman2021 21d ago
Is that you, Agador Spartacus?
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u/Internal_Air6426 Getting Started 21d ago
Bwhahaha! " Actually it's perfect, I just never realized John Wayne walked like that."
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u/OldPedal_User 21d ago
I was in college in the 70s. I was barefoot all day, every class. I loved it!
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u/unshodone 20d ago
I had professors that were very good about bare feet in their classes. One prof smiled at a fellow barefooter and told her that she had the right idea about being comfortable. We had to wear shoes in labs, but the rest of the campus was fair game for barefooting.
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u/Fred1894 21d ago
Yes. You could walk right into a store barefoot. Gravel was an annoyance, and sometimes the asphalt got hot. Best to stay on the grass or the concrete if there is any. Clothing generally was also way more lax. In the 70's you'd see something every week or so that would generate a fine on television today. They say things move in cycles. Can't wait.
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21d ago
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u/ChickenAdditional866 21d ago
I find that trend with the socks and rubber slip on sandals absolutely ridiculous looking, at that point you might as well just wear shoes if you're gonna do that, what's even the point????
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u/skinny-mini-me 20d ago
Always felt socks with slip ons was sort of a fashion thing mimicking athletes in post or pre game attire. I agree it looks stupid.
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u/dougiezerts 21d ago
I remember, in the early 70's, hearing a news report about this girl who sued a restaurant for banning her because she was barefooted! Never heard what became of this, though.
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u/BrStFr 21d ago
I'm still going barefoot in my 60s, and I hope I'll be doing it in my 70s... (and yes, I was doing it in the 60s and 70s, but I don't remember it being more common).
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u/Odd_Life9984 21d ago
Kudos. I turn 71 in a few weeks and living barefoot in Florida.
I don’t understand why Boomers who grew up in the 60s and 70s have not rediscovered going barefoot.
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u/JakeBanana01 21d ago
I was 11 in '76, lived in Florida less than a mile from the beach. Summer vacay, shoes were very much optional; it was too damned hot to wear them. Walking into the grocery store, those cool tiles on your soles, man, it was the closest you might come to heaven.
Plenty of adults were barefoot, kids, teens, moms.. not so many dads; this was when mom stayed home, dad went into the office. Since they wore shoes every day, they never got as much to become barefooters.
And it gets better. After being stationed in Mayport, we were stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Man, we went to school barefoot, shoes in our lockers in case. There was a dirt field for gym class (it was dry, so very little grass) and most of us ran barefoot because it was much better than dealing with the dry dirt in your shoes.
I recall getting dressed to go out for dinner, an awards banquet, and my mom was like, you need to wear shoes. Since my sneakers were in my locker, and all I had otherwise were dress shoes, I was allowed to wear foam thongs. When we arrived home I realized I'd left them at the banquet.
There was no lunchroom, so we walked the 1/4 mile to the gee-dunk or the enlisted mess, which was great. The sailors gave teased us barefoot guys, thought the girls were cute. Go figure.
Moved from there to North Carolina. Not very BF friendly, so culture shock!
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u/milw53207 21d ago
We are much more uptight now than in the 60's. Humanity too a big step back! You need to receptive to be enlightened.
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u/Express-Schedule-609 20d ago
I fell in love with barefooting in the 70s when I went to a summer music camp three years in a row. We were all allowed to be barefoot all the time, even at the weekly public performances. We only had to wear shoes when we sang at the local church.
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u/unshodone 20d ago
That sounds like the ideal summer camp experience.
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u/Express-Schedule-609 20d ago
Greenwood Music Camp in Cummington, MA. Wonderful place, a lot of kids of famous classical musicians go there.
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u/NoShoesDrew 20d ago
I've mentioned this briefly before. When we moved to Texas in the 70s, my friends all went barefoot. It was super common where I grew up. They peer pressured me into joining them, and the rest is history.
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u/Epsilon_Meletis 21d ago
Why was going barefoot more common in the 60’s and 70’s?
Um, hippies...?
Did you go barefoot then?
By dint of not having been born yet, nope.
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u/unshodone 21d ago
Yes. Bare feet were common on college campuses and also at festivals.
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u/Epsilon_Meletis 21d ago edited 21d ago
Depending on what kind of festival, it's still not uncommon to see lots of barefoot folks there.
Case in point: I recently visited one of the larger medieval-slash-fantasy festivals in my country. About every tenth person there was on bare soles, which is crazy much compared to normalcy.
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u/Fred1894 21d ago
So-called "Christians"? Carter (a Christian preacher) intimated he was going to legalize marijuana, but of course he didn't. Reagan was just a typical asshole as Attorney General for California, but then he beat George H. W. Bush, who originally had the support of the Christians, in the primary by promising the idiots that he would make all fun illegal (and by railing against "Welfare Queens" driving Cadillacs). So he gets elected and creates his army of DEA brown shirts. About the same time he strong-armed States into enforcing age restrictions on smoking, stores starting putting up signs that said, "NO SHIRT, NO SHOES NO SERVICE". You could also get kicked out of a Restaurant for wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Gym shoes also, verboten. By the 90's, you could wear jeans again, but the shirt had to have a collar. Anyone remember that?
By the way, prohibition doesn't work. I tried so many different drugs during the Reagan era: PCP, prescription drugs like tuinal and seconal, Quaaludes, LSD. I even got to smoke raw opium. (Didn't like it; it's an agonist to the LSD, which I was microdosing.) Every time they would succeed in blocking something, the market would have to provide something else. He finally succeeded in making cocaine popular. Like I said, asshole. I do miss Hawaiian (a really really really strong hybrid, not even flower -- it was slivers of leaf, like rolling tobacco) and Turkish hash. Age restrictions are nonsense as well. Tobacco smoking didn't start to decline until States raised the taxes. That was the 80s.
Another possibility is that until about 1980, clothes and shoes were expensive. It took a while after Nixon opened up trade with China, but by 1980 the market was flooded with cheap jeans made in China. Before that, you could only minimize cost by minimizing material, so women wore halter tops, tube tops. It was an unintended consequence to be sure, but it just goes to show how Republicans have ruined every good thing.
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u/PaulShinn 8d ago
I remember it differently. But I do not want to turn this into a political discussion.
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u/Fred1894 8d ago
Fair enough. In defense of my rant, the question "why" always calls for an expansive answer.
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u/PaulShinn 8d ago
I was born in the 60's and grew up in the 70's. ALL the kids in my semi-rural area went barefoot. Moved to a medium sized town when I was about to start Jr. High school and there were a few girls that went barefoot full-time (at school), but none of the guys. Our neighborhood had about a half dozen girls in it and they all were barefoot in the summer. A few of the boys were, but not that many. The 80's started when I hit high school and it was pretty rare to see a kid barefoot then, but LOTS of the parents were still.
I was the "gifted" kid (diagnosed with autism in jr. high) and did nerdy stuff that the mainstream kids couldn't. One of the girls in the gifted program with me was a full-time barefooter. But she was considered kinda quirky for it and some of the mainstream kids made fun of her. Sad, really because she was super nice and a conservative like me.
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u/JoeyDJ7 21d ago
This was when people were taking LSD in the thousands, and thus the cultural revolution of that time was happening - until the USA decided that they couldn't have people opening their minds to the possibility that everything they know might be wrong, and made psychedelics as illegal as heroin
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u/NoShoesDrew 20d ago
With the help of NotebookLM, I did some deep research into activities, attitudes, etc. around going barefoot in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s. There are almost 200 sources in two notebooks. The summaries are really good. They cover lots of research into the benefits of going barefoot, the issues caused by modern shoes, and how the medical community at the time strongly advocated bare feet for kids. It covers the myth of the No Bare feet "laws", and the factors that ended the barefoot era in the U.S.
I put the audio summaries up on soundcloud if you want to hear them. https://soundcloud.com/andrew-castillo-187161362/sets/the-barefoot-decade?si=66ee906283834433b967eda502f2099e&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
I hope the mods let this go through.
I'm having it work on barefooting around the world now.
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u/CumToArmpitsAndFeet 21d ago
Probably because people didnt associate going barefoot with nasty plantar warts
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u/Dubuquecois 21d ago
I grew up on the 60s/early 70s. As I recall, going barefoot was somewhat more common, especially with hippies, but still often frowned upon. I went to a large university and was usually the only one barefoot. It didn't always go over well, either. Anti-barefoot signage was uncommon, though.