Dear D&C Subscribers — Before this week, I doubt I ever in my life had uttered or written the phrase “totally tubular.”
Quite likely, you haven’t either.
But that quintessential 1980s slang phrase came into mind when I saw the staggering amount of reader interest in a photo gallery we posted regarding life in Rochester during that decade.
Across America, the 1980s were a time when the enormous Baby Boom generation began to put away youthful pursuits and to bear down on career, family, home-buying and the comforts of life in an era when cable television and VCRs were relatively new. Goodbye, protests and long hair. Hello, morning visits to the gym and soccer parenting.
Michael J. Fox’s well-dressed character on “Family Ties” certainly helped define how America was beginning to see itself, a far cry from, say, Rob Reiner’s son-in-law character on “All in the Family” in the 1970s.
We all know now that the 1980s were the early tremblings of the corporate and technological earthquakes that would make Rochester in subsequent decades something other than a “Kodak and Xerox town.” But life felt fairly stable for most, except of course in some sectors of manufacturing, where jobs began to move south or overseas. We bowled, we shopped at Marketplace Mall and we continued to enjoy eateries like Don & Bob’s in Brighton.