If 65 cents a pack is standard, and 60 cents is way out of range, what would you call a reasonable variation?
The oldest prices I remember – Michigan, ca '62 or '63 – were 30 cents for cigarettes and 33 cents for gas.
Don’t be so sure that last thing has changed. I think English common law, still in effect, holds that a married person cannot sell real estate without their spouse’s permission. A real estate agent told me that the main reason for title insurance is that someone could come and challenge that the property had been sold without the required approval.
I can recall (back in the 50s) buying a pack of cigarettes by throwing a quarter into a vending machine. A gallon of gas also cost a quarter. Long distance phone calls were fearfully expensive ($3 for 3 minutes or less) and I often signaled my safe arrival by calling person-person asking for myself.
Tuition at Penn in 1954 was $700/year. It hasn’t gone up by a factor of 100 yet, but is trending there. On the other hand, my family didn’t have $700 and I got no scholarship, so I got a full-time job and studied part-time.
The lack of cell phones meant that plans to meet gone awry could lead to real problems.
Our first TV (1950) cost $130 and was 10" BW. Our first car (1953, used of course), cost $125 and lasted only five months. Our second cost $300 and I was still driving it in 1962.
Civil rights was a big issue. I see that once again, they are trying to figure out how to prevent blacks from voting.
Peanuts, October 23, 1959:
Charlie Brown: I went down to the store to buy a Halloween mask, and they were all out!
Violet: Aren’t they going to order any more?
CB: are you kidding? They were busy putting up Christmas decorations!
And you had to smell them.
Seems UPS back then was mostly reserved for really, really large items. We had a piece of furniture delivered once, in a box my brother and I both fit into at the same time, and it came UPS. It’s the only UPS delivery I remember us ever getting.
In the late 1990s, I had a 1961 Falcon. Great car. I worked on it myself. It broke down in traffic once, and I fixed it in five minutes on the side of the road. Once, when a part on the carburetor broke, while we waited for the replacement to be shipped, I made one out of a paperclip and duct tape.
Sold it after I had a baby. Sigh
The ones who did, usually worked in family businesses, or for their husbands, like working as his receptionist if he was a lawyer just starting his own practice. It allowed him to bring home more money. Then, there were lots of teachers who had older children-- teenagers. My fifth grade teacher had high school kids, and had just gone back to work a couple of years before; she’d taught for like 8 years, then had her kids, stayed home, and went back, and taught another nearly 20 years.
Oh, man, I used that so much in college! I was one of the last college classes to use it.
Are you kidding? you could hit other people’s kids. If I was at someone else’s house and misbehaved, his mother could swat me on the butt.
If I went complaining to my mother, she’d ask me what I did, and then ask if I deserved to be punished, and I’d have to admit I did. She’d tell me I was lucky I didn’t get sent home, and she didn’t get a phone call, because I would have gotten a much worse punishment.
People worried much more about their kids’ behavior than their feelings.
It seems like now if a kid misbehaves, the parent asks “Why did you do that?” Instead of saying “That was wrong. Don’t do that again.”
My mother didn’t smoke, but I remember going by myself to the corner store to buy milk when I was four.
“English racers”!
Our milk was delivered to an insulated box on the porch. Had the same deal when I was in Scotland in '89-'90. 
I had some 45-cent paperbacks and 10-cent comic books when I was a kid, but the lowest prices I remember were 60 and 12 cents, respectively (early '60s). Hostess cupcakes and other such items were also 12 cents, until they went up to 15 around 1970 or '71.
Indian head cents, too, and the “steel” cents from WW II that someone mentioned upstream.
First time I ever saw a mall open on Sunday was around 1980.
When I was in high school, drinking age in Illinois was 19 for beer and wine, and 21 for hard stuff. About eight miles from my house, across the Wisconsin line, it was 18 for everything. I was 17 when my buddy and I started going up to Kenosha. We didn’t waste time or effort trying to get served in a bar – we found a liquor store and bought three or four fifths each. 
We went back to that liquor several times, always buying several bottles. I never did get carded; my buddy did once, but he was 18, so it didn’t matter.
Lyrics from Mame, which premiered in 1966:
From “We need a little Christmas”
“But Auntie Mame, it’s one week from Thanksgiving Day now!”
Also, I have different memories from people who lived in different places, but I don’t remember Hanukkah being treated as “Jewish Christmas” by the media and retailers when I was a kid (born 1967). I remember asking about Hanukkah presents, because a teacher in public school told me to write about what I wanted for Hanukkah when the other kids in the class were writing “What I want for Christmas,” and my mother told me “Hanukkah isn’t Christmas. Presents come on your birthday and Purim.” Since my birthday is in early January, I wrote about what I wanted for my birthday.
(FWIW, my mother now drops about $300 on my son every Hanukkah.)
I went out by myself to play at four (there was always the usual gang of kids outside, so my mother wasn’t worried); my mother just didn’t trust me with money yet. Sometimes if my older cousin Alisa was around, she sent her, and I tagged along.
My aunt and Alisa’s father were divorced in the mid-70s, and my mother was totally scandalized by the whole thing. Only divorce in the whole family.
I collect coins, and sometimes for laughs, I get really worn Indian head cents or Buffalo nickels with no dates that aren’t worth much (like 50 cents, or even just face value), and spend them. Anymore, people under 25 don’t even know what they are, so it’s getting to be less fun.
I am gonna let my fingers puked some observations for a while…
Coke machines where you pulled a 12oz bottle out of a long skinny vehicle door on the left…
Lowest I ever saw gas was 19.9cents/gal during the gas wars in '72…
Spanking…at home, on a bare ass with a leather belt…at school, up against the locker with a paddle…I HATE the motherfucking “brown nosers” that made paddles in shop class (with holes drilled) for the teachers.
Free raining as a kid…my parents don’t even have a clue about what I did or where i ventured and explored. Even my siblings don’t know everything.
TV’s were furniture. Our first color TV (c.'68) was 24"/25"? inch screen in a cabinet with a built in stereo turntable and am/fm tuner. Two huger offers and a horn tweeter flanked each side of the screen. It was magnificat, I was 7 or 8.
Racism was obvious and more blatant…we are making progress but we have a way to go…
Drinking age was different …I lived in Illinois in "79, I was 19. I could legally drink beer and wine. next year 1980, the law changed, i could NOT legally drink anything with c2h5oh…move ahead one year, late 1981, I was stationed at great lakes naval base and frequently drove to Racine and Kenosha WI…I was 21,…girls could drink in bars in Wisconsin at 18 but guys had to be 21.
Jeans were typically Levis, Lee’s or Wrangler’s. They came NEW, not distressed, acid washed, prewashed, bleached or manipulated in any way.
Anything other than straight heterosexual was ignored or severely mentally (sometimes physically) castigated. This is sad for me cause my dad was gay…My parents stayed married for 27 years cause catholics didn’t divorce back then. Thankfully dad got about 12 years of being himself before he passed.
Grandpa’s house ALWAYS smelled like a tobacco shoppe…mmmmm
to the op: …thanks!.. good thread.
Kids in the 60s didn’t correct their elders.
Oh modern cars leak just fine.
modern or old it just depends on if it is being maintained right or not.
5W20 seems to kind of blow off into the wind more though, and 10w40 seems to like to stick to the bottom of the car better and wait for you to park
Anyone else remember Toughskins jeans for kids?
I miss the world where most things man-made, from toys to machines, were made of wood, metal, and cotton. Plastics were cheap excuses and electronics were weird contraptions.
Which is pretty much how soccer football and baseball practice where attended too, no soccer moms required
Well…
Oh the beep worked perfectly, or teacher whacked little johnny upside the head for dozing off at the button
So… It was YOU!!
I got in trouble for that
Wait what?? All my women teachers were like 80 years old
Nope, there was a fix to that, it was called DAD
Fight was ended.
Something i forgot to mention.
Sears was someplace you actually wanted to buy from.
Appliances from Westinghouse, they didn’t wear out, their owners did.
Car tires lasted 5000 miles if you were lucky. They were also all hard-riding bias ply tires. When and where I grew up, not knowing how to work on and tune up your own car would bring more derision than throwing like a girl. Cars also had to be tuned up a couple times a year, too- points, plugs, condenser, rotor. Car bodies from the sixties and seventies also had factory installed rust, it seemed. Two or three years was all it took for the tinworms to eat them up. Nowadays, cars don’t rust out like they used to, you can get 40K miles out of a set of tires, and tune-ups amount to new spark plugs at 100+ thousand miles.
High Macguyver level shit:cool:.
Police could only arrest a husband for beating his wife if they saw him do it. If they arrived at the house and the wife was battered, bloodied and crying, they could do nothing but tell her to go stay at a friend’s house. There was the implication that she had asked for it by being “a bad wife.” That changed after a few battered wives killed their husbands.
Martial rape was a legal impossibility, as your husband had the right to have sex with you on demand. Any woman raped by a stranger or her date was “asking for it” by walking alone at night, wearing a tight skirt, etc.etc.
I once told a child who was trying to open the cash register next to mine that he could not be behind the register and to leave immediately. His mother complained to the manager that I had no right to discipline her child.
Females always wore a dress. If you wore pants on a cold day, you wore a skirt over them Snicker.
Littering was more common, and people left what their dog did on the sidewalk.
Music was “white” (folk, bluegrass, country) or “colored” (jazz, gospel, soul). The categories were strictly enforced in the USA, with radio stations playing only one or the other. This was especially true in the USA, which explains why rock music (a blend of the two categories) come out of England. One of the best conversations I ever had in my life was with Rudy Isley of the Isley Brothers, talking about touring Europe with the Beatles and introducing"Twist & Shout" to John Lennon.
As one person said at Chuck Berry’s funeral “He took black music and white music and turned it into music.” Indeed, rock music’s effect on integration cannot be overplayed.
Drug use was not so prevalent, especially prescription drugs. Crazy people were accepted as they were (good) or locked away (bad). People who broke the law did not have the “Yeah, but…” excuses that are so accepted today. You did the crime, you did the time.
This passage is confusing. While I’d agree that rock music came out of England, it was an extension of Rock ‘n’ Roll, a style which you even mention in the next paragraph, which also combines the two varieties of music and which came out of America.
While rock and roll came out of America, it was considered a fad. However, England’s rock music is a classic form of music that came be combined with any other form (being a combination itself) and one that will probably be around forever.
I consider rock and roll and ROCK to be two separate forms of music.
In grade school, when there was snow on the ground, the girls did wear long pants under their dresses and removed them when we got inside the building. This did indeed lead to much snickering among the boys.
When I started at my Catholic women’s college in the fall of 1966, freshmen were given a booklet with all kinds of rules and protocols. One was that we were not allowed to wear pants (trousers, slacks, etc.) ANYWHERE on the campus except in a dorm ROOM and in the gym/on the playing field. That held until the Summer of Love (we were behind the rest of the country, so it didn’t hit here until the summer of 1968). For my first three years of college, I went every day in heels and hose. In the fall of 1968, we attended classes in jeans, usually bell-bottomed.
I went straight to graduate school where I was a teaching assistant in freshman English. I taught in bell-bottomed jeans and wore a leather headband (with fringe, no less!) around my forehead. Jane Q. Cool–that was me. :rolleyes:
People wear jeans everywhere now, but not then. I remember going to a nice restaurant at night with a guy around 1970 and when you arrived at the door, the host shined a flashlight on your attire to see if you could be admitted. The flashlight revealed that my friend was wearing jeans, so we were turned away.