So, what's all this stuff about the "good ole" days!?

By Joseph Walther

“Look, I’m old enough to remember when gas was seventy-five cents a gallon, dude.” Yes, that’s what the man said. I don’t know how the subject of gas prices came up; it just did. Someone else blurted out, “But, those were the good old days.”

As I gazed around the room, I realized to myself that I probably have socks older than most of the others in the room. But, try as I did to stifle it, I laughed aloud. I swear; I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to sound as condescending as it must have appeared to most of them.

The silence in the room was deafening. The crowd, about fifty-five people ranging in age from early 20s to mid-40s—the speaker was only 30, for God’s sake—appeared to be waiting for this old sage to impart some ageless wisdom. And I feared that it had better be good, too!

The speaker asked me if I’d like to come to the podium. I accepted, but only because the podium was closer to an exit than where I had been.

I began by telling them that I would not give my age until the end of my comments. I challenged them to guess my age by the things I was going to tell them.

With that, I pulled my jacket sleeve up above my wristwatch, pointed to it, and explained that it’s a Bulova, a watch that my late mother gave to me the day I graduated from high school. “I still wear it, and I suspect that it is older than most of you.”

The room was deadly silent as I began to explain. Starting with my junior year in high school, I worked a part-time job at a local ACME food store. It was a Saturday in mid-June. My mother had asked me to pick up a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, and two-dozen eggs on my way home late that afternoon.

In appreciation—provided I would stop and put some gas in it—she let me drive her brand new, less than two-months-old Chevy Bel Air ($2,500 loaded) to work that morning.

My hourly rate at ACME (the part-time rate) was $1.335 per hour. In case you think that was cheap, the minimum wage was only $1.00 an hour. I worked an average of 25-hours a week—sixteen-hours during the week after school and nine-hours on Saturday.

My weekly gross pay was about $33. Subtracting the standard wage taxes and a once a month deduction of $5 for union dues, I walked out of the store each payday with about $28. Employers didn’t give employee discounts, either.

And, YES, my mother expected ME to pay for the bread, eggs, and milk on those rare occasions when she asked me to pick them up. It was also a foregone conclusion that, EVERY TIME I drove her car, I would “gas” is up. Failing to do so, Hell would freeze over before I’d get to go near her car again… EVER!

It wasn’t too bad, though. A loaf of bread was 19-cents—and it was FRESH, too. Milk went for $1.01 a gallon; the containers were GLASS and had about 2-inches of cream at the top—no one gave a crap about cholesterol back then. The price of a dozen eggs was 85-cents.

Best of all, from fumes to a full tank at 30-cents a gallon, it only cost $5.10 to “gas” up her car. But, I don’t remember it ever costing ME more than $2.00 to do it.

My mother was a widow at the time. My father died in 1956. He was a good provider, though. His life insurance paid off the mortgage on our home, which he bought for a whopping $6,000 in 1947 based on a twenty-year mortgage.

My mother had a formal education sufficient to earn at least the average weekly wages at the time, about $108 a week. With what she netted, she raised my siblings, including the cost of sending me to a Catholic high school at a tuition rate of $90 a YEAR.

You know what else I remember about those times? ALL of the adults in my life; including my mother, aunts/uncles, teachers, neighbors, and virtually everyone I overheard speaking in general, seemed to be seriously obsessed with the impending demise of civilization as they knew it.

You want to know why? It was because of the way that we youngsters—the “younger” generation of THEIR time—were turning out: disrespectful, slothful, academically lazy, beer-drinking, cigarette smoking, sex-obsessed, and self-centered whiners.

Oh, yes, about those “good” ole days… as I look back on them, they weren’t all that good. Some things were. For example, it cost less to live in those days and the real value of the dollar (what it could buy) was much greater than now. But, so many other things were not good at all.

Kids were dying on a regular basis from things like polio and childhood leukemia. Scarlett fever was dangerous and still required penicillin shots every 6- to 8-hours.

Breast cancer was an automatic death sentence. In fact, many of the things that we can cure now, killed with speed and certainty then. We didn’t even have the means for early detection for most to them.

In 1951, my best friend in the whole school, Roger Coyne, died from leukemia. One fall-morning he threw up on the classroom floor and his mother came and took him home. He was dead before Christmas.

In 1952, sixty-thousand kids contracted polio in this country. Three-thousand of them died. Shirley Trotter, another beloved classmate of mine was among them. I still think about her.

No, I don’t think of those as better days. They were simpler. But just because ignorance is so blissful, doesn’t make it desirable.

The world was smaller then. Not geographically, but in the sense that it wasn’t as crowded. It took much longer for news to travel from one continent to another—no Internet! No Email! No cell phones!

It isn’t that these things are bad for us. It’s just that we fail to realize that the more crowded the world becomes, the crankier PEOPLE become. Crime rates in most categories were about as high then (as a percentage of the population) as they are now.

It’s just that there were no 24-hour cable news outlets to bombard us, CONSTANTLY, with the same negative stories for weeks on end. The world seems to be on fire and we’re all seemingly doomed to go to hell in a hand-basket because that’s what we hear… day in and day out!

We face serious problems today. We faced serious problems back in the good “ole” days, too. We found ways to solve them, though. Today, we have unprecedented technological capabilities. We will solve today’s problems, also.

As for the younger generation of OUR era, it will do just fine. They’ll grow up and worry about THEIR “younger” generation just as we did about ours.

Just as we were, they’ll be convinced that their “younger” generation, with all of its drugs, slothfulness, disrespectfulness, academic laziness, sexual depravity, and self-centered whiners, will destroy civilization.

They won’t, though. And, ha ha, what the hell, even if they do, it won’t matter to me, being as how I will have taken the off-ramp to life’s interstate long beforehand.

So, yes, maybe you guys have some problems. I’d stop worrying about them, though, and do something about them. A good start is to stop assuming that everything you hear coming out of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC is biblically veracious.

It would also pay all of you to remember that Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Al Franken, and all the folks at Air America Radio are 99% wind and water—intrepid windbags as it were.

Oh my God! WAIT a minute. I just realized something. My parents, as well as we youngsters of that era, didn’t have these morons telling us what to think the way that you people do today.

So, yes, I guess you folks DO have something to worry about. Let me just slip out this here side door. Where is Jack Kevorkian when I need him? Anyway, I’ll be back next week. Well, maybe, if you young people don’t destroy all of us before then!.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.