I’m getting ready to go back in time again.

CNN is presenting its series on the 70s tonight (meaning Thursday), and I’m curious how they’ll bring it about. I’ve seen the network’s series on the 80s and 90s, and both were excellent, but now they’re going back to a much more significant decade, when America actually came of age.

For many people, the 70s harken back to a time of bell-bottom pants, platform shoes, Disco (late 70s) and the decline of the Hippie movement.

The period was a lot more. It marked the time when people lost faith in the federal government, an unpopular war ended, and television had good programs.

I was in college at the time, and at the start of the 70s my thoughts turned to the draft, classes, work and my girlfriend (who is now my wife). Like a lot of other students in the South I was still a bit innocent about what was going on around me until the events at Kent State University in Ohio resulted in the deaths of four people when a National Guard unit fired on anti-war protesters. Their deaths were commemorated in a song by Crosby, Stills and Nash called “Ohio.”

In the 70s, I took and failed a pre-induction draft physical and was reclassified twice before I was deferred for medical reasons, and because I had a relatively high lottery number and the quota of draftees had been met for the year.

We watched men go into space and Babe Ruth’s home run record fall. I married my wife, started my career in journalism as a part-time reporter/photographer for a weekly newspaper in Plaquemine, La., south of Baton Rouge, and watched government run amuck.

Television featured classics like “All in the Family,” “M*A*S*H,” “Sanford and Son” and “Barney Miller.” There were also a few questionable shows like “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” and the “Six Million Dollar Man.”

Watergate was the defining word in government corruption, and the catalyst that made people lose their faith in government. Richard Nixon resigned as president in 1974 to avoid the first presidential impeachment hearing since Andrew Johnson in 1868.

People hovered by their TVs and bought newspapers to learn the latest details of the scandal. It was journalism’s finest hour.

The only major news to rival it was the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army in 1975 and the photos and video of mass panic as South Vietnamese residents tried to flee the city ahead of the NVA. Disco closed out the decade, and provided a needed, though self-indulgent escape.

It’s hard to describe the 70s in the limited space I have for this column, so I’ve tried to highlight a few things and offer some of my own experiences.

I’ll try and summarize it all this way. The 70s were a time of massive change that still resonates in our society today. To borrow a line from William Allen White’s book on the 1920s, “Only Yesterday,” the 70s brought a change “in manners and morals.”