Much of mid-America well into the 1970s hadn’t really succumbed to the stark big-city/crime/dope cultural chaos that the nightly media presented. I’m guessing a lot of people who grew up in the urban coastal regions had different, more soured experiences of the era.
I didn’t venture much in Houston proper during that era, but I do have nice memories of week-long summer visits with my grandparents at their home in the rural outskirts of Baytown. Feeding goats, chickens, and manipulating the tv-antennae to pick up “Highway Patrol” reruns on channel-26 as late as 1974.
Forced integration by the government turned my simple neighborhood with no locks and keys left in the cars when I went into the Army, into a place of 6 foot fences and Dobermans by the time I returned.
Mass immigration was only starting to show badly in the early 1970s, but has destroyed much of our cities and towns and communities today.