The one of remembering,
anyway. A real Wayback Machine doesn’t exist. Right?
Our daughter-in-law went out
this morning to buy new tires. Four of them.
Was a time, people bought
tires as needed. That is, a driver seldom needed four tires all at once. You
had a flat, you put on the spare, which was a real tire and not a pretend tire
like nowdays. The spare was not good enough to run all the time, but you hoped
it would stay up long enough to get you to a used tire place. Yes, a lot of us
bought used tires and ran on them until time to buy another used tire.
Our engines ran on used oil,
too. Reconstituted oil. When you got an oil change at a service station, the old oil went into a big barrel or concrete container and every so often a truck would come by and pump out the used oil. At a refinery, the oil went through
a filtering and reconstituting process, was canned and went back to service
stations. The price usually was 25 cents. If your car used oil, and it likely
did if your replacement oil was reconstituted, you ran it that way until time
for an oil change, when you put in new oil.
Back then, if your car motor had
50,000 miles, you had nothing to look forward to but engine problems. Your
engine was going to burn oil or leak oil soon. So, there were a lot of
trade-ins, used car for a car used not as much. For instance, a 1961 Bel-Air and $250, payable at $25 a month, for a 1963 Fairlane. A low price, sure, but minimum wage was $1.60
an hour.
Gas was around 15.9 cents a
gallon at non-brand name stations. In 1973, my wife and I were at Harding
College in Searcy, Ark. We bought gas at 17.9 cents a gallon at a two-pump gas
station. Our income was my $344 a month GI Bill check. In the fall, Egypt,
Syria and Jordan invaded Israel. Iran then kicked in an oil embargo, because
the U.S. sided with Israel. Within a week, gas at our buying place was 25.9
cents a gallon. Within two weeks, the place was closed.
Before that first oil
embargo, it was not unusual to hear somebody say, “Man, I just got four new
tires, paid $25 apiece. Twenty-five dollars each. I don’t know what this
country’s coming to.”
i was stationed in California 70-73 and remember being outraged gas was 47 cents, it had been 29 cents in michigan.its been 50 years so the numbers may not be just right, also remember $10 used tires.
ReplyDeleteIn summer 1968 in southern NY state, gas was 50 cents a gallon. I was surprised, but when you have to fill up ... I was driving from Fort Meade, Md., to somewhere northwest of Cooperstown.
ReplyDeleteIn june of 70 I pcs'd to travis AFB from Clark AFB PI my total travel pay was about $5 since Travis was where the plane from the PI landed I was a new e-4 under 2 years so I didnt get any travel money for the wife and kid in Detroit. Things were very tight in those days and had a second kid 9 months after I got home.
ReplyDeleteA story about my brother and his family's first civilian tour in Germany when Bill was a missile technician I'll work up. The Army insisted he take money he did no want or need.
ReplyDelete