That and nobody wants to make an Indian cry.
When landlines (pre STD) were first connected through our district in the early 60s our phone number was Thule 23. There were substantially less than 100 numbers in the district of roughly 20 miles square.
A penny got you a small gum ball with the name “Ford” on It, or 3 square chiclets. Each color was a distinct flavor. Or it got you approximately 6 coated sweet tarts.
A nickel got you a larger gumball
A dime got you a small clear plastic egg with some chintzy toy or crappy trinket in it.
A quarter got you a very large gumball or a plastic egg with a better toy, stickers, or trinket.
For my money 25 penny gumballs or 75 square chiclets or 150 sweet tarts, or 5 of the nickel gumballs were a better deal than the 25 cent gumball. This is how you had to budget your money as a kid in the 60’s.
We had 10 cent super ball machines. For my money those were the best deal.
They tasted terrible.
My Dad was a mechanical engineer, and after learning about passenger deaths due to car crashes, decided we would have seat belts. He and a machinist friend modified our car in 1962 to add full restraints (seat/shoulder). From that point on he required them on any journey, and we were the only family that used them. There was a lot of sneering, kidding, and jokes about whether we needed helmets too. He ignored it and we wore them until the rest of the world joined us. IIRC, belts weren’t even an option on our car at the time.
Contrast to my FIL, who despised them and claimed the usual crap about being trapped and knowing someone who’d been saved by being thrown clear. He refused to use seat belts, even into the 1990s. We had to forbid our kids riding with them because they wouldn’t use car-seats.
As fate would have it, we were never in an accident where our restraints “saved us”. I wonder sometimes if there’s some form of correlation, i.e. the type of people who install aftermarket restraints are also the type who have fewer accidents.
And that the people who most need them are the ones least likely to get them.
I spun out on ice one time, and I was able to recover without hitting anything, but if I hadn’t had my seatbelt on I might have been pulled away from the steering will and would have crashed for sure.
Outside of Boston once I saw a Caddie sideswiped by another car. It hit the side of the road and flipped in best movie stunt style, landing on its roof. I and a bunch of other people parked and went to the car. The driver, who had been wearing his belt, was fine. He wouldn’t have been if he had thought seat belts were stupid.
What type of car did you have? They were an option on many cars by that time, though generally they were a dealer-installed option and weren’t available from the factory with seat belts installed.
I remember in our car (some sort of Plymouth, I don’t recall the model) we had bench seats and I would stand on the seat and “help” my father shift gears. I don’t recall if the car even had seat belts but if it did we definitely weren’t wearing them. This was the late 60s so seat belts had only just become mandatory on new cars. Older cars like ours weren’t required to have them.