THOSE WERE THE DAYS “When I Was a Boy”
At my age I guess I qualify to be an antique, but my mind is sharp and I recall so many things going way back to when I was just a lad; but then if I do draw a blank, there is always today’s computer. When I was a boy Canada’s population was less than nine million, today there are over thirty-nine million of us and eight billion across the globe.
I was a grade two student when WW II started and prices went through the roof. My goodness, sugar was fourteen cents a pound, coffee eighty-three cents, milk ten cents, butter twenty eight cents, unsliced bread eight cents and potatoes sky rocketed to ten pounds for twenty five cents; that is, if anything was even available, most items were rationed, especially meat.
A new home in the early 1940s cost $3,775, a new car $920, and an odd thought, three rolls of toilet paper 23 cents. Tough when a Private fighting a war to save our country was only paid $1.30 a day. I got my first job in September 1949 earning the lofty sum of 45 cents an hour. Shoes were rationed during the war, so too rubber tires and inner tubes, even the ordinary radio had to have a licence.
After the war in 1945 due to the lack of rice, Japan organized all school children to gather more than one million tons of acorns which were ground into life saving flour. The same year Gimbels department store sold the first ball point pens for $12.50, the same pens that sell today for a dime a dozen. Anyone remember Elsie the Borden cow? In 1945 Elsie was in a truck accident and lost her life, she was gone but her name lived on.
The 1940s were quite a decade, the entire world witnessed total change. Throughout our lives there have been astronomical alterations but when things disappear, we seemed to accept that they are gone without any thought or true caring. Remember telephone booths on every corner? When you skinned your knee or cut a finger out came the red mercurochrome. Of course, it was discontinued when they discovered mercury was dangerous. Ether and Iodine? Oh my. How about the ice box or the manually cranked washing machine? There are no more need for castles, forts, moats, defensive walls or even swords for that matter. Oh, how I remember Dad anchoring a slice of bread on a toasting fork and placing it over the red-hot embers in our pot-bellied stove. I am sure many still have a Polaroid camera stuffed into an old suitcase stored away somewhere with the set of encyclopedias you paid a fortune for years ago. When was the last time you read a map, boiled water on a coal stove, swept with a real broom or darned an old sock? Dial a phone? Write a letter? Use an out house, or drink from a rain barrel?
Time does march on, but many items we took for granted and once depended on did not march on with it.
By Russ Sanders
epigram@nexicom.net
