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The 50's

And we had polio, poor care for diabetics, Elvis Presley, Senator MacCarthy, and believe it not there was a commie under every bed and chair, noisy 6 cylinder Chevvys that had to be overhauled at or before 100,000 miles, Uniroyal tires that lasted almost 20,000 miles, slide rules that not everybody could figure out, real ice cream, folks building bomb shelters in their homes, Kookla, Fran & Ollie....shoe stores with x-ray machines giving us overdoses of radiation.........jobs that paid $1per hour, the 44 and sometimes more hours a week, that meant working Saturdays at least until noon, booze stores that you had to brave the local minister watching as you walked out with your clinking bottles in a brown paper bag, draft boards, shot gun marriages, gas ration stickers still on the windshield of grandma's car, hand scooping animal poop, all the feed, open tractors in freezing weather, coal miner strikes, usurious loan rates, cars coming on with powerful v-8's and the roads still narrow, killer pie crust concrete shoulders, narrow bridge with concrete railings, .....I think I better go get an aspirin...IaLeo
 
(quoted from post at 20:10:25 05/21/15) And we had polio, poor care for diabetics, Elvis Presley, Senator MacCarthy, and believe it not there was a commie under every bed and chair, noisy 6 cylinder Chevvys that had to be overhauled at or before 100,000 miles, Uniroyal tires that lasted almost 20,000 miles, slide rules that not everybody could figure out, real ice cream, folks building bomb shelters in their homes, Kookla, Fran & Ollie....shoe stores with x-ray machines giving us overdoses of radiation.........jobs that paid $1per hour, the 44 and sometimes more hours a week, that meant working Saturdays at least until noon, booze stores that you had to brave the local minister watching as you walked out with your clinking bottles in a brown paper bag, draft boards, shot gun marriages, gas ration stickers still on the windshield of grandma's car, hand scooping animal poop, all the feed, open tractors in freezing weather, coal miner strikes, usurious loan rates, cars coming on with powerful v-8's and the roads still narrow, killer pie crust concrete shoulders, narrow bridge with concrete railings, .....I think I better go get an aspirin...IaLeo
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I was born ten years too soon. I bought and paid for my first used car at half of those wages.
 
I was born in the '30s, so that means I've lived in 9 decades. And I agree with everything you said.

My great grandmother had ten children and outlived five of them, including my grandmother.

My grandmother died of complications from childbirth the day after my father was born. My great grandparents had to go the Minnesota by train in February to bring her body and the baby (my father) home. My grandmother's husband somehow disappeared. After the train arrived in their hometown, my great grandparents still had to travel eight miles in a horse drawn wagon in sub zero weather to get home.

Sometimes the "good old days" weren't really that good. It truly was survival of the fittest.
 
I was born in the '30's. It wasn't easy, but we learned how to get by without going deep in debt. Moral and ethical standards were much better then than what I see going on around us now. We could listen to the radio if the wind charger had charged the battery that day. Most everything was "done the hard way", but we learned how to work - a lesson that most youth don't get to learn these days.

We learned how to respect other's property and avoid things that would get us in trouble. We also learned how to pull together as a family for our greater good.

Oh, and we also learned how to crank and engine without getting an arm broken!
 
Goose, Dick2, et al..... Greatest Generation
a191987.jpg
 
Yeah, me too. Something over 29,000 days, 690,000 hours. And IMHO the music was pretty good. IaLeo
 
(quoted from post at 17:32:46 05/21/15)
(quoted from post at 20:10:25 05/21/15) And we had polio, poor care for diabetics, Elvis Presley, Senator MacCarthy, and believe it not there was a commie under every bed and chair, noisy 6 cylinder Chevvys that had to be overhauled at or before 100,000 miles, Uniroyal tires that lasted almost 20,000 miles, slide rules that not everybody could figure out, real ice cream, folks building bomb shelters in their homes, Kookla, Fran & Ollie....shoe stores with x-ray machines giving us overdoses of radiation.........jobs that paid $1per hour, the 44 and sometimes more hours a week, that meant working Saturdays at least until noon, booze stores that you had to brave the local minister watching as you walked out with your clinking bottles in a brown paper bag, draft boards, shot gun marriages, gas ration stickers still on the windshield of grandma's car, hand scooping animal poop, all the feed, open tractors in freezing weather, coal miner strikes, usurious loan rates, cars coming on with powerful v-8's and the roads still narrow, killer pie crust concrete shoulders, narrow bridge with concrete railings, .....I think I better go get an aspirin...IaLeo
Click to expand...

I was born ten years too soon. I bought and paid for my first used car at half of those wages.
Click to expand...

Thing of it is back then a person could live on a buck an hour. The closest cost of living was to minimum wage was I believe in 1968 when that wage was 1.60 an hour.

You forgot to mention the drugs that they later found could cause birth defects, the chemicals used for various things that caused cancer and a lot of other tings that make the "good" old days not so good.

Rick
 
(quoted from post at 18:10:25 05/21/15) And we had polio, poor care for diabetics, Elvis Presley, Senator MacCarthy, and believe it not there was a commie under every bed and chair, noisy 6 cylinder Chevvys that had to be overhauled at or before 100,000 miles, Uniroyal tires that lasted almost 20,000 miles, slide rules that not everybody could figure out, real ice cream, folks building bomb shelters in their homes, Kookla, Fran & Ollie....shoe stores with x-ray machines giving us overdoses of radiation.........jobs that paid $1per hour, the 44 and sometimes more hours a week, that meant working Saturdays at least until noon, booze stores that you had to brave the local minister watching as you walked out with your clinking bottles in a brown paper bag, draft boards, shot gun marriages, gas ration stickers still on the windshield of grandma's car, hand scooping animal poop, all the feed, open tractors in freezing weather, coal miner strikes, usurious loan rates, cars coming on with powerful v-8's and the roads still narrow, killer pie crust concrete shoulders, narrow bridge with concrete railings, .....I think I better go get an aspirin...IaLeo
Click to expand...

Funny, but i don't remember all of that as affecting our lives in a negative way ....... it was just the way it was (I was born in the 40's). Today, every scrap of 'news' anywhere in the world is reported on in the media but now we think it's our responsibility to to 'do SOMEthing about it' (as opposed to then when we 'took care of America first') ....... back then 'low wages' meant that $5 would buy about the same amount of groceries as $100 does today, a bottle of 'pop' was a nickel and dial phones and television was something that they had in 'the city'. I guess we were 'ragged but right'.

With all the 'progress' that has occurred I still miss those times; but, that's just me! :wink:
 
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