Always eager to be “right up-to-date”, in 1981, a large theme park was built at the north end of Toronto, called Canada’s Wonderland. Year by year, more rides and attractions were added. I saved up my pennies, back when we still had them, and by 1987 was able to visit for a day.
A few years later, the owners did as many Canadian business people do. They sold out to the Americans, and the place became Paramount Canada’s Wonderland. Like Military Intelligence and Business Ethics, this makes sense only if you squint your eyes a lot.
Back when computers were only a gleam in most people’s eyes, there was a booth with a computer. It was loaded with tons of basic facts, and, for the lordly sum of $1, it would provide a laminated sheet, showing what things were like on the day you were born, and compare old prices to (then) new.
27 years later, I ran across it during a flurry of spring cleaning, and I’ve scanned and included it, so that you can have a double chance to compare, what things cost, first in 1944, and again in 1987, so that you can really miss “the good old days.”
With this was an even older newspaper sheet from my home-town weekly. Printed April 1, 1981, it gave replays of local things which occurred 10, 20, 50, 100 years before. From twenty years earlier, in 1961, there was a story about me and nine others from my little sharpshooter rifle club.
Apparently we went to the next small town for a challenge shooting match, and beat their ten-boy team quite handily. Our informal little rifle club had officially become the Junior Conservation Club, but somehow, in the article, we were listed as the Boys’ Athletic Club. We were many things to many people, but one thing we weren’t, was athletic!
Archon's Den 
I have so many thoughts but have to be at work in 4 hours, stay tuned until tomorrow 🙂
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You’re welcome any time. I’ll have tea and scones ready, with some spiced peach jam and crab-apple jelly. 😆
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I wish it included the cost of a college education or an annual physical. It’s amazing how some prices seem reasonable compared to income and some don’t. Of course, I’m sitting at a computer, I guess I could look those things up…what fun would that be?
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If you’re like me, it’d be a lot of fun. One price I’m sure has gone done is the computers. In ’85, I worked with an engineer, who had worked for Ferranti-Packard in ’65. A company in Montreal had paid $2.5 Million, to install a room-sized monstrosity c/w tubes, to do (mostly) payroll. He convinced our company to provide him a pocket-sized Texas Instruments calculator, which I picked up at Sears for $125, which would do more, faster. 😕
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No wonder the subject of economics is so difficult to understand. It is based on the premise that money is actually something rather than an elastic and ultimately undefinable convention for trading stuff. Back in the day, my mother and her relatives often compared with actual amazement current prices with what they remembered things costing decades ago. Now I find the wife and myself occasionally falling into the same trap. Ouch.
Calculators and computers are good examples of real prices coming down. I dare say, food has also fallen as a percentage of average income, thanks to automated (and computerized) farming, and clothing is dirt cheap thanks to the global economy and economic slaves in the Third World. But, inflation is necessary to any healthy economy. it is the natural motivator over stagnation.
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Having read Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, I totally agree with you. It’s like Voodoo. The economy works because we believe it works. 😕
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I’m not getting any of your pics in these posts I’m reading to catch up. I guess I should have read them when they were new?
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I don’t understand WordPress’s witchcraft. Some of the pictures of my older blog awards have disappeared also, but they’re a year, or two, old. This is less than a month. OCD, I decided to delete a lot of pictures from the media file. If I can locate it in my own photo files, I’ll attach a copy to an email. 😯
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