The price of things back when…

My parents saved a lot of random items, though the term hoarder would only have applied to my dad in his last decade.

But somehow, I just came across this medical bill:



I remember falling out of bed at age 5 and cracking my left clavicle. But this is when I was 18 months old.

>1 2wonderY: $1 in 1955 was worth $11.60 today. Still a deal.

>1 2wonderY: Lucky you! Your parents took you to the doctor. When I was five (spring of 1963) I was leaning one of the kitchen chairs on two legs. It slipped out and I hit the table brace with my left collarbone. My parents waited a week to take me to the doctor, who said nothing could be done except rest. While my brother was at school, I "borrowed" his Flash Gordon coloring book and used my favorite magenta crayon to fill in a few pages. He was not a happy boy when he discovered my artwork in his coloring book, and he punched my left arm. I remember screaming bloody murder - because it hurt - not just to get him in trouble. So much for healing rest!

I just finished a reread of one of my favorite books from when I was a kid - maybe 9 years old. Flash of Phantom Canyon cost me 45 cents on my Scholastic book order. I loved those book orders!

MAD: 35 cents cheap. Those Bantam sci fi paperbacks were 85 cents at the drug store. A 45 rpm record was 50 cents. A package of the "good" nylons was $1. You could get a small cherry Coke and plate of fries for 75 cents.

We were forbidden to spend our money on comics; not that we ever had that much to spend. Luckily, the proprietor of the local drug store was fine with us standing in the back, next to the wire spinning rack and reading all of them - Archie and Jughead, Little Lulu, Richie Rich…

The price which sticks in my mind is from 1972, when I reached the age of 18 and was legally able to buy alcohol. In the university bar you could get a pint of beer for 10p, which was two bob in old money (decimalised currency was only a year old by then and many people still did the conversion in their heads). Mind you, the 10p pint was Tetley's Mild, which was scarcely worth drinking - you might just as well take your glass to a stable and fill it up directly from the horse. A bottle of Newcastle Brown was a couple of pence more expensive and well worth the extra cost.

>6 2wonderY: We used to go house to house of our friends with our stack and swap comics. Wish I had some now.

>4 Hope_H: Same here. In the school I attended it was The Teen-Age Book Club - same idea. Not too long ago I re-read my original copy of The Time Machine which I ordered from that source - 35 cent paperback.

My husband worked at a gas station as a teen ager, actually pumped the gas and washed windshields. When he started, gas was $.25 a gallon. When he quit, it was $.35 per gallon (about 1970-1972???) He quit that job, paying $1.50 per hour to go to a job that paid $1.60 per hour.

Perhaps this is before my time; but it was a real thing in my community. Pig farm, fed with the municipal kitchen wastes.
It doesn’t mention the cost of butchering and processing, so perhaps people did it in their back yards!