The Good Old Days

Sometime around 1935, at the age of 10, I contracted hepatitis (called "yellow jaundice") and was confined to my bed for awhile. My parents called Dr. Heath and he made a house call.

(This is not to be confused with a telephone call; he actually came to our house). Doctors making house calls was not at all unusual. For some reason the amount of his fee, $3.00, has stuck in my memory.





I was often the one sent to the A & P grocery store 2 1/2 blocks from our home with a list of items to be purchased. I presented the list to a clerk, behind the counter, who then went about the store to retrieve the items. If self-service existed it hadn't made its way to our little town at the end of Long Island, N.Y. The clerk tallied the prices in pencil on one of the paper bags that he loaded the groceries in. The question, "paper or plastic?" never came up since there were no plastic sacks.




At the time:


Bread was 9 cents a loaf


Eggs, 18 cents a dozen


Hamburger meat, 12 cents a pound


A hamburger (bun, meat, ketchup) at the diner was 5 cents as was a cup of coffee or a coke





Gas, 10 cents a gal.


A new Pontiac, $745


Average new home, $3845



Man's broadcloth shirt, $1.00



Woman's wool sweater, $1.00



Washing machine,$23.95



Gas stove, $19.95





Before you think that we were lucky to live in a time when prices were so low consider this:

Worker's wages were 9 cents an hour, ---if you could get a job. Skilled labor managed to get slightly higher wages. To date, inflation has moved prices and wages to their present levels so, everything is relative.



The history of the Federal Government's handling, (mishandling, really) of the depression crisis is both fascinating and depressing (no pun intended). President Herbet Hoover seemed incapable of understanding economics and spent a lot of his time organizing commitees and conferences. The country verged on socialism with both Big Business and Big Labor briefly advocating collectivism based on their individual agendas. For example, Big Labor would have had a Government agency appointed to force businesses to hire the number of workers the agency determined the businesses should have. Big Business leaders had equally unpalatable ideas. A radical left-wing newspaper was lavish with praise for the fascist inclinations.



To say our country during the 1930's was on an extremely slippery slope is no exaggeration. Only the advent of WWll pulled us back from the abyss.

Once again our nation is on a slippery slope; perhaps not as steep as the Great Depression but still dangerous.



I may well be mistaken in my belief that in many ways we are not the nation of my earlier years. After all, greed and corruption in high places is still with us except it is more overt. We still do not have lobbyists for the mass of average citizens. We are a country divided. Often I have the feeling that nobody is in charge.

This is not the nation of my earlier years. Our liberties are slowly being chipped away but each succeeding generation does not realize it, thinking the way things are is the way it's always been.

If you've never had something how would you know if it's gone?



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Miscellany



Charles Dickens slept facing north. He believed it improved his writing (Did I hear one of you saying I ought to try it?)

The house where Thomas Jefferson wrote much of the Declaration of Independence was torn down to make room for a hamburger stand.

The above 2 facts are from "The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader"

Lincoln: "A man is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be." (It's our choice)