PEA RIDGE — It is nice to live a long time, but living a long life means passing through several phases in life, and the changing times can take some getting used to. One of the things I am always trying to get used to is prices. We can pay $2 for a bottle of water these days, sometimes more if we buy it at a sporting event.
Maybe to those who never saw the prices of years ago, these prices today may seem par for the course, but to us 70 year olds, the idea of paying so much for a pint of water is staggering.
When I was a boy, water was usually free at the soda fountains and restaurants.
We never thought about paying for water. Once in a while a place would charge a few cents for ice or for the cup, but usually the water was free. A few years ago, on a trip to South Dakota, we became familiar with the power of advertising, even in an erathat normally didn’t charge for water to drink. On our way across that state, we came to the city of Wall, S.
D., and stopped at the Wall Drug Store. The Wall Drug Store was much more than a drug store or soda fountain, although it was founded back in the days when those two things seemed to go naturally together.
Wall’s is something like today’s Walgreens, with a variety of merchandise, but the store is huge, occupying a whole city block. You could even order a buffalo burger at the Wall Drug Store.
Way back there in time, the owners of the Wall Drug Store started advertising with signs along the highways for hundreds ofmiles around them, inviting tourists to come by the Wall Drug Store for Free Ice Water. The signs were tremendously successful, and thousands of people flocked to the Wall Drug Store, for the free ice water, and of course for lots of other stuff they could buy there.
For those of us who started life in the 1940s, we became accustomed to nickel candy bars, and a cold bottle of soda pop for a nickel. That was back when all bottles were made of real glass, and the soda pop in them didn’t taste like plastic. After you drank your soda pop, you were encouraged to save and return the bottle for recycling. In many stores we got paid for the returned bottles. The bottles went back to the plant to be washed and sanitized and used again for a new bottle of soda pop. I’m actually of the opinionthat our civilization went backward when we started getting away from glass soda pop bottles and glass milk jugs and the like. It was a much “greener” arrangement to be recycling those glass bottles and jugs than it is today to be putting so much plastic in landfills. Besides that, the drinks taste better from a glass bottle, far better than from a plastic container.
We were still drinking soda pop from glass bottles in 1984, but after that, things started going plastic.
I’ll always remember my first two new cars. We bought our first new car in the winter of 1962, a 1963 Chevy II (pre-Nova).
We paid $2,600 for it. I remember the $63 per month payments. Those were a bit hefty for the times, but we paid the car off in two years.
Then, in 1970, we bought a new Dodge Dart Swinger, a blue and white hardtopwith the slant-six engine, automatic transmission, and an AIR CONDITIONER. The Dart cost us $2,900 cash. It probably would have cost $500 more except for the cash deal. The dealer liked the cash idea. We drove the Dart for about seven years, and when we traded we swapped our 1970 Dart Swinger for a 1975 Ford Granada, and paid $3,400 to boot. I remember that that deal smarted! It almost felt like I was paying them to take my old car off my hands.
When we lived in Atkins, Ark., in the late 1970s, I had a friend who drove a big Oldsmobile 88. I thought it was 10 feet wide and 30 feet long. It was a big car, a great V-8 with extra smooth hydramatic. I think he paid about $8,400 for it in 1976. Then in 1982, I came to trade in our 1975 Ford Granada for a new car, a 1982 Dodge AriesK. The sticker price was $11,000. Talk about paying the dealer to take your old car! They said they were giving me $1,000 for the Granada, but to me it felt like I was paying them that much just to take it. And what did we get for all that? Four little carbureted cylinders, a car about 15 feet long, weighing about 2,000 pounds, power enough to make it up a hill in Carroll County if you turned off the air conditioner. I actually liked the little K car, but it was dwarfed by my Atkins friend’s behemoth 1976 Olds, especially considering what we had paid.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 08/15/2012