World is continuously changing

Question: After consulting your favorite news media and learning of all the happenings of the day, do you go away with a feeling of joy and happiness, or are you saddened by the events of the day?

I believe we live in the greatest time in world history. I think so often of my dad, who was born in 1902 and died one week past his 96th birthday. The thing I think about most about his life and the duration thereof. He lived through an era in which the lives of individuals were changed more than any time in the history of the world.

Dad saw wagons, buggy and train travel evolve to the age of the automobile. He saw a time when telephones that were few and far between become commonplace. He saw wages of fifty cents a day. In the decades of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, he worked a six-day week, ten-hour days for as much as fifty dollars a week. There was only one car in the family and it was five or six years old, and one that dad had fixed up.

In 1956, Dad had the opportunity to buy a wrecked Ford of that year’s model. While the insurance company had actually totaled the car, meaning they didn’t think the car was worth fixing or could be fixed. But as he and my brother, Clayton, had time they rebuilt the car to its original soundness. The work was such that the insurance adjuster wanted to buy the car back. But Dad didn’t want to sell it and drove it approximately three years. The reason for mentioning this is that 1956 Ford Fairlane was Ford’s top of the line and sold for $6000. Now what do you think a new automobile would sell for? Two or three times that.

Of course today’s automobiles have many more bells and whistles than automobiles of yesteryear, but yet, if we were to really give the two cars an accurate comparison, which one would win the checkered flag? I’d say the 1966 model. It had thick metal body, comparatively speaking. Many of today’s automobile bodies are plastic or fiberglass.

I don’t remember ever really wanting anything back then, as there wasn’t much to want for in those days. I think we were just thankful for what we had. Actually we live in a different world than we did in those decades. I know soda pop was just a nickel then, but we did not drink a lot of them. The fact is it had to be a special occasion to get one. But today many of us are seemingly addicted to them. I’ve seen individuals with one in their hand all the time. Those twelve-ounce drinks are seventy five to eighty cents a can. One thing I don’t understand, I have priced the one- and two-liter drinks, and I have found in the cases I have seen, the one liter costs as much or more than the two liters. Unless they are charging for the convenience, I don’t know what it would be.

I do not get around too much nor do I hear well, but I haven’t noticed anyone complaining about the price of soft drinks. But we buy them like they were going out of style. Milk and gasoline are two items that are chiefly the concern of many. I’m not sure which cost more, a gallon of milk or a gallon of gasoline. But a few years ago when milk prices were increasing at an alarming rate, two persons were talking. One said, ‘I wonder why milk is going up’? The other answered by saying. ‘I guess it is due to the cost of production.’ The first person comes back by saying, ‘I wonder if the cows know it’?

Pretty good reply, wouldn’t you say?