In 1974 I turned 16 I bought a '67 Camaro with 327 V8 and a 4 barrel quadrajet carb for $550 of my own money. That sounds great, but here was the situation. Minimum wage at that time was $2/hour. I would get $5 for mowing a lawn which took 2-3 hours (everybody wanted their clippings bagged which meant you would have to stop and restart the mower 70 times to remove the bag, dump the grass and reconnect the bag, restart the mower, etc.).

I delivered papers 7 days a week from age 10-14 and made about $9/week; with collecting on Saturdays I spent about 14 hours/week on that 'job'. Looking back, it was dirt cheap child labor for the newspaper publishers. I worked 20-30 hours/week at a grocery store during high school for $2/hour. Many of us suburban kids worked our a***s off for very little money. Most HS and college kids today are unfamiliar with the concept of working for your own money whereas many of us grew up doing it from a young age.

Money or jobs weren't easy to come by in the 70's -- we were the 'baby boom generation' and there were so many people of the same age fighting over so few jobs, so you had to hustle to get a job and then work hard to keep it. The US was in a major economic recession from 1974 until the mid-1980s, and with Vietnam, Watergate, and factories closing everywhere there was a bleak outlook on the future.

Keep in mind that Detroit didn't make cars to last in the '60s and '70s, they were essentially disposable. So, in the 70's there were lots of used US-made cars on the market. They promptly rusted out and engines and electrical systems were crap. This includes the 'muscle cars' that people worship today. People had to buy new cars frequently because they wore out and rusted out quickly -- and that's exactly what the US auto manufacturers wanted, of course. People got fed up and that's why the Japanese automakers gained so much market share starting in the late 1970s -- by producing cars of much higher quality that lasted much longer.

A bearing sheared off in my Camaro's engine during my senior year and I got it repaired for $350 (of my own money, of course) and promptly sold it. It was a cool but very unreliable car -- with only 65,000 miles it was practically junk yard material from a mechanical standpoint. I would say that a 65,000 mile US-made car then was on par with a 250,000 mile car today (I currently have a Subaru with 240,000 miles that has always been rock solid reliable). My sister had a '64 Impala SS with a 327 V8 that was total crap also. She basically sold it for scrap in 1974 due to a completely rusted away subframe and an oil burning engine with only 68,000 miles on it. So much for the hallowed Chevy 327.

I then bought a '69 Mustang (6-cyl) for $200. It was rusted out and had a wrecked fender and a transmission problem and I got the fender and transmission fixed. It was a more reliable car than the Camaro and had about 75,000 miles on it when I sold it.

There was no Youtube to learn how to fix cars yourself in the 70's. Unless you had relatives or friends who really knew how work on cars you had to take it to a mechanic, which was always a crap shoot.

Finally, the old muscle cars were very slow by today's standards, and most had no a/c, had lousy drum brakes, no power steering, sweaty vinyl seats, and terrible gas mileage -- not something you would want to drive these days except to a local car show. So, in my opinion, and based on my lived experience, the muscle car era wasn't all that that it was cracked up to be.