Welcome to Our Blog! Growing Up In Columbia in the 1970s

3 Bedroom Split Level on Thunder Hill Road

This blog, "The Columbia Experience: Growing Up In the 1970s in Columbia, Maryland" is exactly what it's title suggests.  This was all Sam's "Big Idea" that we needed to tell our stories, from the kids who had grown up in the new city of Columbia and were the better for it.

In December of 1970, when I was five years old and my sister was two, my Mom and Dad bought their very first house.  It was a three bedroom split level in a brand new community just outside Baltimore and about a 40 minute drive from Washington D.C. This community was being built by James Rouse and the Rouse Company and it was called Columbia.

Being so young at the time we moved in to our new house, my younger sister and I had no idea the effect on our lives simply by my parents deciding to raise us in this community.  Like most kids we played outside a lot and we had a lot of friends in our neighborhood.  The majority of folks moving to Columbia at that time were raising young children and so it was not hard to find someone your age to pal around with.

CAA Masters 1974 at the Swim Center in Wilde Lake

We had a brand new pool at the top of our street and a brand new school down the path.  We had creeks, and open spaces to play in.  We joined the winter swim team.  When I say 'we' I mean the entire family joined the swim team.  My sister at the age of five became a "Mini-Might" and my Mom and Dad were on the "Masters".  I was just in the "Green" group.  Ho hum.  We spent time at the Swim Center in the village of Wilde Lake for practice and general recreation.

We spent our summers at the summer pool and we also started playing soccer.  We ran through the woods, played in the creeks, skated on the ponds and Lake Kittamaqundi and we went to school.  We graduated from high school and went off to college.  That first experience outside of Columbia is what opened our eyes to what we had just left behind, if only temporarily.  Some kids families moved to other places, other counties or out of state, before they got through high school.  So many of us tell such similar stories though about what happened after we left.  What we found in the world around us and how some of us today still have a hard time understanding why every place is not like the place where we grew up.  It seemed so easy to us because we just didn't know any different.

The authors of this blog are going to tell all their various stories about growing up in the 1970s in Columbia, Maryland.  Fairly normal childhoods with a small exception.  Unlike a lot of places in the United States, anyone and everyone was welcome in Columbia.  Income and race did not play a role in whether or not someone could live in our new city.  Rich, poor, young, old, black, white and everything in between all lived in one place, in the 1970s, and that place was Columbia, Maryland.