Two icons of a decade are gone

As much as I consider myself a child of the '60s, it was the '70s when I really came of age. And although the '60s get all the credit, the decade that followed was in many ways more interesting.

Consider:

Tapestry. Watergate. Disco. Gas lines. Platform shoes. Plato's Retreat. Four dead in Ohio. Pet Rocks. Rubik's Cube. Peace is at hand. Ping pong diplomacy. Secretariat. The Big Red Machine. The list goes on and on.

Two cultural icons of the '70s died this past weekend, and even though both had been out of the spotlight for a long time, neither was totally forgotten. Baseball pitcher Mark "The Bird" Fidrych captivated the sports world in 1976, and actress Marilyn Chambers showed that porno wasn't all middle-aged people in domino masks.

Fidrych first. A lanky 21-year-old from New England, Fidrych had an amazing rookie season with the Detroit Tigers, winning 19 games and losing only nine. He pitched 24 complete games, which is a career for most pitchers nowadays. He was very good for a very short time, hurting his arm the next season and never pitching as well again.

But it wasn't his pitching success that made him an icon. It was his sheer exuberance and his total goofiness. Fidrych acted like a kid out on the mound, getting down on his knees to shape the ground the way he wanted it and talking to the ball before throwing it.

He was the biggest thing going in that bicentennial summer.

Chambers' claim to fame came a few years earlier, with the 1972 release of "Behind the Green Door." It wasn't the biggest hardcore film to connect with a mainstream audience -- "Deep Throat" owns that honor -- but it was the first to aspire to something more and to include a star would could just as easily have been the girl next door.

In fact, Chambers' first fame came as the lovely young mother on the Ivory detergent package, a gig she lost when Ivory executives found out she was doing porno.

"Green Door" was one of the first films that started drawing couples to porno theaters, and one thing that set it apart from others of its ilk was that it showed a woman enjoying what was happening to her. Hard to believe, but 40 years ago, there were still a lot of people who thought only men enjoyed sex.

I don't know if Mark Fidrych and Marilyn Chambers were the '70s icons. You'd have to include Gerald Ford, Chevy Chase, John Travolta and more than a few others on that list, but Fidrych and Chambers certainly are wonderful examples of why the '70s were a lot more interesting than people want to remember.