I grew up on it too. My mother started buying me Jugheads, (plus the cartoon series, which I have never been able to get in NYC. As soon as our cable system got whater channel was playing it, and the rest of the Filmation stuff, it would be pulled from the air!
) and I kept seeing the avertisements for the big digests, so I had my parents send away for a couple of them (Including the first "Jughead with Archie, Plus Betty and Veronica, Plus Reggie Too, which I believe I still have), then when I was around 10, and could start buying them for myself; I went and got a bunch of stuff from the local bookstore. It soon burned down (and it was all the paper that fueled the fire that took out the whole row of stores), but I was then able to get a bunch, though charred or logged with sooty water) for free.
I shared them with a friend of mine, who loaned them to someone else who never gave a bunch of them back. But I still have many of them from over 30 years ago.
This was the heyday for Samm Schwartz, who had such a flair to his style. In the Feb.77 Jughead, though, his style seemed to lose its edge, and I lived off of the old ones and eventually lost interest until my teens, when my interest was renewed by a 1983 PEP. It contained an ad for Jughead #331, and I wanted to see what it was like "these days", so I sent away for it, and it appeared Schwartz had gotten some of his edge back (It seems for a few years in between, someone else was doing the Jugheads, and he had just come back from a hiatus). So I would buy new comics off and on, until 1987, when they decided to restart the Jughead series from scratch, and Schwartz was gone for good. Archie was never the same since.
I also remember the first Archie magazine my mother gave me, which at the stime was still being done by Harry Lucey. I could not even recognize Reggie at first, with his curly hair. But it was interesting to see such a totally different interpretation of the characters. It reminded me of the pre-1959 Peanuts (which was the other comic series I was heavily into as a child) where the characters were drawn completely different. He later disappeared, (and it was hard to even find out what his name was, because he was long gone by the time in the 80's when the artists' names were printed on the title page), and it was in recent years I realized a long time quest to find out what his version of Ethel and Jughead's mother looked like. Since Lucey did mostly Archie comics, you only saw Jughead in his dealings with Archie, and did not see his own supporting characters. So I had never seen his version of those two characters. But in an old comic book store which had a large Archie selection, I found a 1974 Jughead that was done by Lucey, and it had a story with both his mother and Ethel at the same time (the, as I figured, looked very silimar to one another). It was actually a story where Jughead was being mean to Ethel, but his mother gets him to be nice to her. (The first Jugheads I had gotten as a child, were 1975, and Schwartz was doing them again).
