I was watching a 1949 film on my favorite channel the other day, and I was surprised at something. Turner Classic Movies is the channel, and as an aside, Ted Turner used some of his wealth, to buy the entire film library of MGM a few years ago, so he has no fees to pay to show his film on Turner Classic Movies. The Film was “On The Town,” and is about sailors on a weekend pass, and they are having a great time looking for girls, singing and dancing, etc. Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly are the stars, and the film was shot in New York with actual taxicabs and street scenes. I noticed that the taxi ’throw’ was 20 cents. For those of you not familiar with taxicab lingo, the “throw,” is when the driver throws the lever to turn on the meter. The ’throw’ automatically comes on before he even moves. The ’throw’ is the rate for the first quarter mile, and in New York, in 1949, the ’throw’ was twenty cents. After the first quarter mile, the meter runs on a combination of mileage and time. The ’throw’ in New York today, is $2.50, and is for the first fifth of a mile, not the quarter mile of 1949. Things do change, don’t they?
Speaking of 1949, when I was 15, here are some of the prices extant then. The average home in 1949, sold for $15,241, and the average car sold for $1420, with a new Chevy truck, going for $1200. Today, a 1949 Chevy truck, restored, can sell, or ask for, close to $40,000, which is indicative of prices in a way, but having owned 99 cars, and restored a few, the $40,000 Chevy truck, may cost $40,000 to restore, not counting endless hours. I am going by prices in Hemmings Motor News, and have no idea of whether the sellers get their asking price. In 1949, the average yearly wage was $2574. That’s about a buck an hour, but the ’minimum wage rate’ was 75 cents an hour. That’s what I was paid, working in my Dad’s drug store. I well remember thinking to myself, that if I could make $55 a week, for the rest of my life, I would be happy. Gasoline was 25 cents a gallon, a movie ticket was 45 cents, a new 6:00 X 16 tire was $9.95, milk 34 cents a gallon, and a stamp was 3 cents.
The average TV screen was 12″, and huge 21″ screens would soon be available in a couple of years. My first TV was in 1948, ands was a 7″ Hallicrafters. The first TV in the neighborhood, and boy! Was I a big shot. I had a real, honest to goodness TV set. Peter Pressenger, a friend of mine at Sidwell Friends School, had a rich father, and he invited me over to his swank apartment at Wisconsin and Massachusetts to watch a football game on his 17″, and that was a real treat. Black and white of course, and when I watch my 80″ flat screen and surround sound, I am still amazed at man’s brain and what they have produced. Manufacturing what has been invented, is nice, but the inventor is the big brain power.
On the other side of the coin, so to speak, we have government. Cancer like government, which has metastasized and grown uncontrollable. In 1949, gold was $20.67, and silver $1.25 an ounce. Did I buy any? Of course not! Why ’buy’ silver, when the coins were made of silver? Quarters and dimes were 90% silver, and all were silver, not a few of them. No one, in their wildest imagining, could picture dimes and quarters made of cheap metal. No one could visualize pennies made of anything but copper. Today, a 1981 or prior penny, has 3 cents worth of copper in it, and I always look for old ones and drop them in my desk drawer when I find one. I have heard that nickels still have nickel in them, and cost six cents or more to produce. Maybe I should start saving nickels, as they might be endangered. Save in gold in 1949? No, because even though no new gold coins had been made for 16 years, no one thought about gold, other than jewelry. We had silver quarters, dimes, and halves, plus copper pennies, and for a couple more years, dollar bills were “Silver Certificates,” which could be turned into the Treasury for a little packet of silver grains. I’ve still got one of those packets I got when I sent in a ’Silver Certificate.’
In 1949, America was at peace for a while, till Harry “The Buck Stops Here” Truman, got us into Korea. What good did that do? The North and South are still separated, with the South, a semi-free enterprise state, which has blossomed. The North is still a slave, communist, dreary, starving nation. It’s new big shot, Kim Jung Um, went to college in America, loves basketball, and has experienced what freedom can do. Why hasn’t he made, or at least tried to make North Korea free, so it can prosper? What did the Korean War do? First of all it has never been over. Only a armistice has been signed, and 27,000 American soldiers are still there, for some unknown reason, which obviously costs America taxpayers, probably a hundred million a year, and infuriates the North. The Korean War cost over 50,000 American soldiers’ lives, and an unknown number of injuries, permanent, psychological, or cured, at a cost of hundreds of millions.
In 1949, there were no Interstate highways, which cost us oil dependence and filthy air in cities. Before the Interstate system, under Eisenhower, people used the 2 lane US highways, took the train, flew in a crude DC-3 probably, or stayed home. There were no computers, cell phones, internet, cruise control on cars, and only the most expensive cars had automatic transmissions. No cars had air-conditioning, power steering, or power brakes. Streetcars still took people to work, and busses were all manually shifted, with no power steering, but they did have air brakes. Suburbia had just begun. There were no freeways. Neighborhoods in big cities were safe, clean, and consisted usually, of sturdy, brick, row houses, with high ceilings and small yards. Neighbors all knew each other, and the streets were tree lined. In the better neighborhoods, homes were detached and far roomier. Window air conditioners were a novelty, and usually used 1200 watts of power, which is twice what efficient ones use today. There were no desk top calculators, and people used mechanical adding machines, which couldn’t do division. Chevy 6 cylinder engines, still used the ’splash’ oil system, even though most other cars had been using the oil pressure system to lubricate, for decades. Flash bulbs were used to take pictures, and of course the term ’digital’ was decades away. W took our film to have it developed and printed, and lots of us took color slides. I still have hundreds of them. Dishwashers were crude and rare, and automatic washers and dryers were still in their infancy. Copper pipe was coming on, replacing galvanized and iron pipe, which rusted so badly. FM radio was in its infancy, and everyone used AM. Radio shows were sill very much on the air, with drama, comedy, and quiz shows. Stereophonic sound and records hadn’t been invented yet, and the L.P. record was new. 78 RPM’s were common, and the 45 RPM hadn’t been invented. Rotary lawn mowers hadn’t arrived yet, and we pushed the old ’reel’ types to cut our lawns. No battery powered clocks or watches. Clocks plugged into wall outlets, and watches were spring wound. Phones were dial type, and phone booths, costing a nickel a call were common. Few drug store chains, and most drug stores had soda fountains. Cokes in bottles had six ounces, and Pepsi had 12 ounce bottles, both sold for a nickel. Large department stores, hotels, and apartments, had manually operated elevators, and most had ’PBX” switchboards for transferring incoming calls to apartments or rooms. No microwave ovens or garbage disposals. So much for 1949. Times were nice, as I remember them as a teenager growing up in Washington D.C. We’d go to the beach on the Chesapeake Bay in summers, go to an amusement park, Glen Echo in D.C., or maybe play miniature golf for entertainment. There were no credit cards, so people paid cash, charged, or a used a check when they bought. I know, it all seems so crude and primitive to young people, but it really did work well.
The Krugerrand came out in 1970, and when I began doing this in 1977, that’s was all we had to sell. Gold Maple Leafs came out in 1980, and Gold Eagles in 1986. I’ve always been sort a ’first’ in developing a business, it seems anyway. I built America’s first non-smoking hotel, first non-smoking restaurant, and built a chain of ice cream parlours in Philly, when Baskin-Robbins was just beginning elsewhere. Colorado Gold began in 1998, and few were buying then, because at $150 an ounce for gold, people thought that was far too high, and it would go down, they thought. And after all, $4 silver? You must be kidding! There were no TV ads for shyster gold companies, as there are now, and we have never advertised anyway. If people want to buy something, no matter what, they will seek out a supplier. When a supplier calls them, hopefully, they will be suspicious. When you call a supplier, you want the product he sells. You pick from an assortment of suppliers, depending on price, reputation, ease of purchase, and reliability. When someone calls you, it simply means that he has something he wants to sell you, because he makes a big commission on it, or he does so little business, that he has to call and beg you to buy. We never call anyone, of course, because we aren’t trying to fool anyone. The web sites which don’t show prices are, to me, just as bad as calling people. They want you to call them, so they can jerk you around, and try to sell you something you don’t want, but which they can make a big commission or profit by selling. Reputation always spreads. In my town, there is a Chrysler Dealer, who no one seems to trust. Go in for an oil change, and there’s always something else wrong. His reputation is horrible, and I will never go back there again. Reputation is important in everything you do. Doctors with bad reputations usually fail, as do restaurants, and other retailers.
I was sent, last week, a list with web sites of about a dozen of the current ’calamity howlers,’ who are constantly telling readers that Armageddon is nigh, at least economic Armageddon. The dollar will collapse, or maybe even the entire world’s economy, according to these wags, who charge for their goofy information and predictions of the upcoming catastrophe. I say, nuts. These expensive quacks, have been predicting this for a decade or more, and it never happens. Let me tell you what I think is going to happen, if you’re interested anyway. Here goes. The dollar will continue to be printed endlessly, to pay politician created bills and compulsory spending for handouts, which they created. Look at 1949 prices, for an indication of what is coming, but not suddenly. The printing will continue, and prices in dollars for all tangibles will continue to rise, making saving in dollars pointless. Hopefully, we will not be so foolish as to go into another war, which would make tangible prices go up much faster. Gold and silver, which of course are tangibles, will continue to go up, with occasional corrections, due to futures market profit taking and buying bargains. We can hope that this November, the Tea Party candidates will throw out the Democrat majority in the Senate, and Charles Krauthammer and others even theorize that Obama may quit; like Nixon did, if it is proven that he should never have been President in the first place, or that his conduct makes him so unpopular and the subject of court action, that he may as well resign rather than being impeached. I doubt that will happen. We’re stuck with him. Probably more and more will discover the TV metals dealers are frauds, but more and more will desire the protection offered by gold and silver. What will happen in the rest of the world? I haven’t the slightest idea, but I am daily, becoming more alarmed at what has and is happening to this nation. The world is not going to end; don’t panic, and there is not going to be an economic collapse, as far as I can see. Protecting ones self and ones family from obvious, unstoppable dollar decline, with precious metals, makes so much sense, but 98% of people will never do it, and I think I have discovered why. I will tell you next Monday, after I get my reasons and thoughts together. Mean time, have a great Fourth of July, be glad and thankful that we are still the best and most free nation on earth. If you celebrate the Fourth with a fifth, don’t drive. Fly your flags, shoot off the fireworks, and salute and wipe your eyes when the flag passes you buy. God! I love America!