I started to think about how things have changed since I was born. I have been around for quite a long time now and the world has really changed. I remember when I was a young boy and I was friends with an old guy who used to tell me about how things were in his time. One of the things which stuck in my brain was the fact he would buy his lunch for three cents. I don’t know why this made such an impression on me, perhaps it was the fact I couldn’t imagine anything being that cheap, but now that I am old I am sure others will feel the same way after reading this article.

I was born before World War II, seven months before. I know when kids ask me how old I am and I tell them this fact they are amazed. It would be hard to imagine what life was like when I was young for the youth of today. We didn’t have televisions and we were lucky to be able to afford a radio, so we spent a lot of time outside, something which doesn’t happen that much anymore, thanks to video games. You could buy a Coke Cola for only five cents. All the candy stores had them in a Coke tub filled with ice and other types of soda. We used to think it was a big deal to collect the different bottle caps from soda bottles and would go into different candy stores and ask if we could have the caps. The Coke tubs had a bottle opener on them and when you opened the soda the cap fell into a drawer. Soda caps were sort of like money to us kids, we would trade them for caps we needed and other things.

Nash-Kelvinator produced the Nash 600 in 1941. It was the first car with a unitized body. Abbot and Costello were recording films for the government to convince us to buy War Bonds. Jack Benny was honored for his 10th year in radio. We all used to listen to him on the radio along with the Lone Ranger, Duffy’s Tavern, Hashknife Hartley, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Edgar Bergen, Death Valley Days, The Fred Allen Show, The Green Hornet, The Shadow, Hopalong Cassidy, The Life of Riley, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, Quiz Kids, Sky King, The Whistler and others. We would sit in front of the radio, listen to the stories and be as entertained as if we were watching television, which came much later in my life.

Gasoline was a lot cheaper when I was a kid in the 1940s. It was about 17 cents a gallon in the mid-1940s and I remember my uncle in the early 1950s buying gas for his car by asking for two dollars’ worth and getting a little over six gallons for that money. The down side was cars in those days didn’t get very good gas mileage and I seem to remember his car getting about eight miles per gallon. When I became a teenager I did what all teenagers did at the time, I bought cigarettes, hide and smoked them. They cost me twenty-five cents a pack at the time and if I wanted to roll my own you could get a pouch of tobacco and paper for about ten cents. They used to sell little machines which would roll the paper for you, but most people did this themselves. The cigarettes which were rolled had much looser tobacco in them. Smoking was a big taboo and one time a cop saw me smoking in the park and chased me. I was about 13 years old and probably 110 pounds and he was about 45 years old, and terribly over weight. The chase lasted for less than a block when he had to stop and I got away. I wonder if any cop would even bother today.

When I went to the movies with my friends sometimes we would go to a bakery and get two buns for five cents and eat them during the show. There were candy bars for sale as cheap as two cents in the movies. If you wanted potato chips they came in a waxed bag. One of the things we all loved as kids was something called a Charlotte Russe. It was a round cake covered with a lot of cream with a cherry on top and inserted into a cardboard sleeve. If you look up this type of cake on line today it looks completely different. This was one of the best things you could eat according to my friends and me. One thing which was also very popular was bubble gum cigars. There were also candy cigarettes. They were hard white candy with a red tip to simulate a lit cigarette. When we were young we thought we were big deals having one of these clamped in our mouth.

No one had much money and having a telephone was a very big deal in my Brooklyn neighborhood. There was a problem with these phones. There were two types of lines, a regular phone line and a party phone line. Even those few people who had a phone usually went for the party line, because it was cheaper. The party line was a line where several individuals or families shared one phone line. If someone was using it, you couldn’t make or receive a call. Worse yet you were able to listen in to the conversations of those using it since your phone was basically an extension. Today you can call most countries for free with some phones or for very cheap rates. In the old days it was super expensive to call long distance. Staying on a call to Europe for more than a minute or two could cost more than a week’s pay.

We didn’t have much money when I was a kid so we had to amuse ourselves by making things and one of the most popular things a boy could make was a scooter made with a wooden crate for the front, a board to stand on and a roller skate. The skates came apart and you could nail the wheels to the front and back of the board, nail the crate to the front and you had a scooter. The hardest thing to find was a skate. Another thing we used to make was a linoleum gun. You would get a mop or broom stick, a clothespin, the type which stayed closed with a spring, several heavy rubber bands and some old linoleum someone was throwing away. You would then attach the clothespin to your end of the stick, connect a few rubber bands together and nail the end to the front of the stick. Next you cut the linoleum into small squares, stretch the rubber band back to the clothespin, insert a piece of linoleum into the rubber band and insert the end of the rubber band with the linoleum into the clothespin to hold it. When you wanted to fire you simply pressed on the end of the clothespin to open it.

I have to wonder how many people are left who had the same experiences.