The Croatia list at Rootsweb has recently been talking about roast lamb and holiday traditions and how they help keep a family and a community tied together. Then a friend forwarded this series of recollections below to me and I thought it worth asking for more details. For me this quote below is a time vaguely recalled and I think the monies mentioned underpriced even for the 50's. Aunty, when we visited on vacation, spent $30 for 4 bags of groceries to feed the 5 of us, Uncle, and Aunty, and Grandma, Mom, and me. I'd never seen anyone spend so much money. It would have been c. 1955, in Iowa. But $30 and not 20 as it says below. Mid - 60's, my oldest cousin worked in a laundry all summer to get money for college. She got either 75 cents or a dollar per hour. When I started college shortly afterwards, my first job was a plum, at $1.25 an hour, to show slides for lectures, way above the minimum. My friends were envious of me, working as they did at McDonalds. I was envious of married friends in school, he working for UPS for unheard of money around $7 an hour and SHE was a unionized grocery checkout clerk making AT LEAST $7.75 an hour. Amazing money, not available today. It meant they could go to school, buy books, afford records and concerts, dress well, travel to Europe in summer and take a brief winter vacation together too. At a guess, her union job would be inflated up to about $30 an hour today. Perhaps today computer guru's make similar money, today's grocery check out --- 35 to 40 years later -- is making actual wages less than she did then. The minimum wage maybe broke a dollar in the 70's. Baseball salaries were high in the 20's for superstars at least. Babe Ruth is famously quoted as saying, to a reporter asking about his inflated income compared to the President of the USA, 'I had a better year.' Thirty years before this author says a baseball player made more than the President, Ruth was news partly because he got paid better than Coolidge or Hoover. The fun of driving around in a new car, showing it off to family and friends, was nearly a religious ritual in the midwest on Sunday. Sunday for a drive in the country, not doing anything in particular, gas was cheap and no one calculated mileage unless they had to for work. Sunday drivers were these people, family, a car full, gawking at the rubes, the drive up restaurants, the amusement parks, rarely driving in from the country to the big city for a parade or air show. Mostly driving from the midsized towns to the farm to get fresh vegetables or maintain family contacts. Until mid - 70's, the USA produced within its borders the majority of the gas everyone needed for having fun as well as driving to work. Gas really was cheap then: today about 1/3 of the gas consumed is produced here, much of the rest is from the Arab states. Somethings have changed. From the 1920's onward, about 20 percent of adult women worked full time outside the home, with more doing so in the war years, but continuing in the 50's and 60's, then the percentage rising abruptly in the 70's. But if you consider volunteer jobs, supporting the church, running charitable events, and part - time paid jobs, working at the bakery just till time for the children to get home from school, sewing for the neighbors, etc. more than half of adult women had some paid work outside the home. Some of that work was under the table, invisible, but if Grandma acted as a midwife, her daughter 20 years on was an Avon lady or a cake baker, and the becoming adult granddaughter was a baby sitter or Saturday house cleaning helper. This is the work history that's lost because it's undocumented. I think it's important, just as the stories implied in each of the statements below are, as a reflection upward to the new century of a forgotten time. Maybe when you get around to WRITING your family history, not just documenting the dates, but talking about the people, you could consider mentioning the lives they lived, the prices they paid for groceries, the 60 hour work week, harnessing up the horse when work or church was more than 4 miles because that was too far to walk in an hour. Your grandma and grandpa would like to be remembered as they lived, not just as that collection of birth and death certificates you've worked so hard to acquire. Would some kind person next post -- Easter, in 2006, please write to remind me to count up my narrative pages, and not just how many more data bits I've added to the counting of relatives? Thanks, Ashley ----- Original Message ----- From: Mira Comments recalled from 1959 "I'll tell you one thing, if things keep going the way they are, it's going to be impossible to buy a week's groceries for $20." "Have you seen the new cars coming out next year? It won't be long before $2000 will only buy a used one." "If cigarettes keep going up in price, I'm going to quit. A quarter a pack is ridiculous." "Did you hear the post office is thinking about charging a dime just to mail a letter?" "If they raise the minimum wage to $1, nobody will be able to hire outside help at the store." "When I first started driving, who would have thought gas would someday cost 29 cents a gallon. Guess we'd be better off leaving the car in the garage." "Kids today are impossible. Those duck tail hair cuts make it impossible to stay groomed. Next thing you know, boys will be wearing their hair as long as the girls." "I'm afraid to send my kids to the movies any more. Ever since they let Clark Gable get by with saying 'damn' in 'Gone With The Wind,' it seems every new movie has either "hell" or "damn" in it. "I read the other day where some scientist thinks it's possible to put a man on the moon by the end of the century. They even have some fellows they call astronauts preparing for it down in Texas." "Did you see where some baseball player just signed a contract for $75,000 a year just to play ball? It wouldn't surprise me if someday they'll be making more than the president." "I never thought I'd see the day all our kitchen appliances would be electric. They are even making electric typewriters now." "It's too bad things are so tough nowadays. I see where a few married women are having to work to make ends meet." "It won't be long before young couples are going to have to hire someone to watch their kids so they can both work." "Marriage doesn't mean a thing any more; those Hollywood stars seem to be getting divorced at the drop of a hat." "I'm just afraid the Volkswagen car is going to open the door to a whole lot of foreign business." "Thank goodness I won't live to see the day when the Government takes half our income in taxes. I sometimes wonder if we are electing the best people to congress." "The drive-in restaurant is convenient in nice weather, but I seriously doubt they will ever catch on." "There is no sense going to Lincoln or Omaha anymore for a weekend. It costs nearly $15 a night to stay in a hotel." "No one can afford to be sick any more; $35 a day in the hospital is too rich for my blood." "If they think I'll pay 50 cents for a hair cut, forget it."