Sting-Ray Afternoons: A Memoir
This is a story of the 1970s. Of a road trip in a wood-paneled station wagon, with the kids in the way-back, singing along to the Steve Miller Band. Of brothers waking up early on Saturday mornings for five consecutive hours of cartoons. Of growing up in a magical era populated by Bic pens, Mr. Clean and Scrubbing Bubbles, lightsabers and those oh-so-coveted Schwinn Sting-Ray bikes. And of a father — one of 3M’s greatest and last eight-track salesmen — traveling across the country on the brand-new Boeing 747, providing for his family but wanting nothing more than to get home.
In Sting-Ray Afternoons, Steve Rushin paints an utterly nostalgic, psychedelically vibrant portrait of a decade overflowing with technological evolution, cultural revolution, as well as brotherly, sisterly, and parental love.
“Funny, elegiac… a remarkably sunny coming-of-age story about growing up in a Midwest world.” — NPR
An Amazon Best Book of July 2017: I am a child of the 70s, and for me, the years before I became burdened with job/girls/nuclear holocaust-based insomnia were filled with The Six-Million Dollar Man, Evel Knievel, baseball cards, and Gilligan’s Island reruns, all set to a soundtrack featuring both Led Zeppelin and the soulless, sexless croonings of the Brothers Gibb.
If you can relate to any or all of that last paragraph (and it’s perfectly understandable if you can’t) imagine it extended to over 300 pages. Sting-Ray Afternoons – Steve Rushin’s memoir of the Golden Age of candy cigarettes, sugar on your grapefruit, and Nixon on the TV – is an exhaustively thorough, exuberant recollection of growing up in the Me Decade. Exhaustive might have been just exhausting, but Rushin’s takes on artificially colored culture are laced equally with humor and affection, and he captures both the wonder and fear at the tipping point between childhood and adolescence. Sting-Ray Afternoons is the best kind of nostalgia: celebratory yet clear-eyed, wistful but not overly sentimental. –Jon Foro, The Amazon Book ReviewThis is a story of the 1970s. Of a road trip in a wood-paneled station wagon, with the kids in the way-back, singing along to the Steve Miller Band. Of brothers waking up early on Saturday mornings for five consecutive hours of cartoons. Of growing up in a magical era populated by Bic pens, Mr. Clean and Scrubbing Bubbles, lightsabers and those oh-so-coveted Schwinn Sting-Ray bikes. And of a father — one of 3M’s greatest and last eight-track salesmen — traveling across the country on the brand-new Boeing 747, providing for his family but wanting nothing more than to get home.
In Sting-Ray Afternoons, Steve Rushin paints an utterly nostalgic, psychedelically vibrant portrait of a decade overflowing with technological evolution, cultural revolution, as well as brotherly, sisterly, and parental love.
“Funny, elegiac… a remarkably sunny coming-of-age story about growing up in a Midwest world.” — NPR
