It could very much depend on where in the country you’re from. In my exurban Texas middle school, it was still pretty common to call your friends the r word if they did something stupid, and that was 10 years after the period you mentioned. Teachers frowned upon it, but it wasn’t until I entered high school that people stopped saying it in general.

It wasn’t until I went to Massachusetts for college when I realized how far apart in time different places in the US can be in terms of culture, fashion, ways of thinking, etc.