Introduction

A wild and bittersweet memoir of a classic '70s childhood

It's 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. Brothers waking up early on Saturday mornings for five consecutive hours of cartoons and advertising jingles that they'll be humming all day. A father-one of 3M's greatest and last eight-track-salesman fathers-traveling across the country on the brand-new Boeing 747, providing for his family but wanting nothing more than to get home.

It's Steve Rushin's story: of growing up within a '70s landscape populated with Bic pens, Mr. Clean and Scrubbing Bubbles, lightsabers and those oh-so-coveted Schwinn Sting-Ray bikes. Sting-Ray Afternoons paints an utterly fond, psychedelically vibrant, laugh-out-loud-funny portrait of an exuberant decade. With sidesplitting commentary, Rushin creates a vivid picture of a decade of wild youth, cultural rebirth, and the meaning of parental, brotherly, sisterly, whole lotta love.

Editorial Review

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 Review

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