Juke Boxes: A Strange Value Distortion

Juke boxes were very common in the early 1960s. They were in many soda shops, every diner, most bars, and all of the many bowling alleys. They were in all of the White Castles, and the donut places. We played them, too. It was very exciting to find a song that you really liked on a juke box, and it was lots of fun to play songs that you knew would make the straight people crazy (like Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the B-side of “Rainy Day Women”). I don’t remember discussing the value-for-dollar with my friends.

Those juke boxes were ten cents for one play, three songs for a quarter. By now I realize that twenty-five cents was a lot of money at the time. The minimum wage was $1.25, which came to about a dollar after taxes. (That’s $50 per forty-hour week; $40.41 take-home with one dependent.) In other contexts a dollar seems to have gone much further.

For instance, twenty five cents would buy:

1.   Two good comic books (now $6);

2.   Most of a pack of cigarettes (then thirty cents, now between $7 and $12);

3.   Most of a gallon of gas (then ditto the cigarettes; now about $3);

4.   A piece of great pizza with a Coke on the side (now $4 or $5);

5.   1.8 Subway rides (fifteen cents each; now 1.8 rides would be about $5);

6.   One transit of a major bridge (now between $5 and $12).

We pay more or less cheerfully the inflated prices for these other things, but would we pay a similar increase for mere songs on a juke box? Without video, no less?

Maybe it was the coin-operated scene in general. When I was in first grade the candy store across the street from school had a Mighty Mouse viewing machine that cost a dime. The dime let you watch a very short cartoon of the Mouse of Steel kicking some cat’s ass. That’s pretty steep too, when you think about it.

Some research is in order. The previous price had been five cents for one song, and a dime for three songs. Now at that time you could get a good sandwich for fifteen cents, and a meat-loaf dinner for thirty-five cents. Those songs were pretty steep, too.

Maybe we were all just crazy about our tunes!

What are the outstanding value distortions right now? Maybe you could say books from Amazon. They charge you the same price for an actual copy of the book or the transmitted file. There’s real overhead for the book, but very little for the file. Once they have the hardware and the software, sending it to you is free, actually. I still buy e-books from Amazon. Song files on iTunes are another freebie for the vendor. Those I don’t buy.  

I’ve talked about a couple of those weird new value distortions on this blog. Ticket prices at baseball games and concerts have spun all the way out of orbit, losing all touch with reality owing to the extreme increase in the ability of the rich to compete for all of the good seats. Then there’s the exponential increase in the price of a university education, well beyond any budget based requirements, along with the disappearance of the old free university education for the children of working class parents at city or state institutions. Gone like the wind, that last one. For the private universities it’s all due to sheer greed; for the public universities it’s due to the Republican politics of lowering taxes to nothing and then pleading that “there’s no money!” The intent being to reduce all benefits and services associated with the old Social Contract. It’s a crime, or it should be.

Are there still juke-boxes? There are none where I live, anyway. Everyone in Thailand has a smart-phone that’s packed with songs and games. They carry extra battery packs so they never run out of juice. Me, I’m happy to wait until I get home. There’s plenty of good listening up on YouTube, and the price is right. 

A New Kind Of Hanging Out

I copied this out of an article that was shared on Facebook: 20th Century Photos of People Holding Record Albums or something. This one spoke to me.

This was almost certainly taken in Vietnam in the late 1960s. I was in the service myself at the time, the U.S. Navy. Nothing fancy, just a deck-ape driving a pickup truck. These fellows look like they know each other pretty well, and they get along. Just knocking back a few Pabst's and Bud's, and listening to a little Brother Jack McDuff. This was pretty new stuff for the times. I don't have any pictures of myself, but I was in this situation many times.

I can tell you, a lot of black guys were surprised to find white guys that had interests in common with them and wanted to hang out. And a lot of white guys were surprised to find out that it was so easy to hang out with the black guys. A lot had changed after WWII, and it took some catching up with. It all seemed very natural to me, and these guys seem to have taken to it like ducks take to water. We might have been the first generation that could manage it so easily. Some of us, maybe many of us, but not all of us. I took some flack from the more reactionary white fellows, and guess who stood up for me? That's right. I remember everything, and I still appreciate it.

It's been a few steps forward and a couple of steps back since the 1960s, and I don't know if it's really any better now as far as race relations goes. Maybe a little bit better. I hope so. It's not so hard, you know. We all put our pants on one leg at a time (read: we all have jobs; families; friends; interests; bills to pay; troubles; successes). As Rodney King said so eloquently, "why can't we just get along?"

Morbid Anxiety And The Threat Of Being Challenged

My life has been a long exercise in the avoidance of being challenged.  It has happened, however, and I must admit that I have generally done better than I had expected in challenging situations.  “Challenging,” ha!  When you read what I consider challenging, you’ll think that this is a humor piece.

I’m thinking primarily of personal challenges, but the world itself was a very challenging place when I was a boy.  Society was faced with the aftermath of World War II; Korea; the Cold War; the ever present threat of nuclear destruction; Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement.  Then Camelot . . . and then JFK’s assassination.  It’s hard for anyone who was not on hand for that shocking event to understand just what a profound impact it had on the top to bottom of American society.  It was like splashing boiling water on a toddler, a deep and powerful trauma, indeed a re-set moment. 

The years from 1964 to 1967 were the years when America grew up.  By 1967, people were seeing things like the Vietnam War more naturalistically.  In 1968, even Walter Chronkite was saying on TV that “war is foolish.”  Growing up somewhat did not bring the onset of wisdom, though, and things only seemed to progress from bad to worse, and in leaps and bounds too.  Institutional racism fought back vigorously against the small advances made in civil rights, and we were treated to the spectacle of the extrajudicial murder of Black Panthers like Fred Hampton.  There was more to come, including Nixon and Watergate, the oil embargo, and the beginnings of a new brand of mass incarceration masquerading as a “War on Crime,” etc.  By 1980, America had become very cynical. 

Personal Challenges

Challenging situations can be merely exciting, like appearing on Jeopardy, or they can be truly terrifying, like being in the first wave landing on Omaha Beach.  In either case there are likely to be some residual effects once calm has been restored.  This may vary from a pleasant thrill upon remembrance to the inescapable horror of full blown PTSD.  All shades of experience are represented, and all degrees of aftereffects may be observed as well.

 

My own personal challenges might seem like garden snakes to many people, but to me they were mighty king cobras, I can tell you.  The challenge of learning how to deal with my parents was so depressing, and the effort so doomed to failure, that I am still haunted by it.  (And that will be my only comment on the subject.)  Navy boot camp was, I think, a challenge well met.  I amazed myself by doing fine and getting through it with no trouble at all (although they do seem to have marked my file, “do not let this young man anywhere near our ships or explosives”).  Law school, at the age of forty, was another one, another amazing surprise.  Law school, followed immediately by the bar exam and actual law work, is an effort that is sustained and heroic.  I got through that fine as well.  I met all my goals, clerking in a law office during my third year, graduating in the exact middle of my class and passing the California bar on my first try.  Notice that I prefer modest goals.  I’m sure that there are reasons for that, reasons based in my boyhood.

Which is the challenge that I’d like to discuss. 

Maybe, dear reader, you were one of the lucky ones, and you grew up in a town where it was an easy matter to become one of the boys, or one of the girls, and everyone kind of got along with only a smidge of that common cruelty that children sometimes encounter in other children.  We were not so lucky in my town.  I was a boy in a working class enclave of the New York City borough of Queens.  It was an isolated town of about 30,000 residents called College Point.  The East River wound around one side, and of the four roads that led to town, three ran through a barely drained swamp and were subject to regular flooding.  It was a rough place.

I adopted this formulation many years ago: we were hit by our parents at home; we were hit by the nuns at school; and when we were on our own, we hit each other.  It was a challenge to fit in, not to mention the insurmountable difficulty in trying to make sense of it. 

I was a sensitive boy, kind of day-dreamy, and I did not take naturally to all of the fighting.  Many of the boys that had temperaments similar to mine simply chose to stay at home at all times.  They went to school, certainly, but after school they went directly home and stayed there.  You just never saw them, unless it was on the bus after school.  And in those situations, the odds were that one of the other boys was drumming on their head with a pencil or something.  Staying home wasn’t an option for me.  My agenda was to spend as little time at home as possible.  Whatever was going on outside, home was worse, more dangerous and unpredictable. 

Besides, I enjoyed the games and the running around wild, the dirt-bomb fights, throwing snow balls at cars, playing with matches, I enjoyed everything but the bullying and the fighting. 

Between home, school, and the outside world of the boys, I was afraid most of the time.  That kind of situation is corrosive of the brain itself, not to mention the soul.  The challenge of learning to be a boy in College Point was one that I was not up to, and I’m paying the price for that failure to this day.   

Mea maxima culpa!  But it’s okay.  I haven’t written this by way of complaining.  Any failure for which only one person pays is small potatoes, by definition.  Besides, I’ve almost gotten used to the price that I pay in morbid anxiety.  It won’t be much longer anyway; that's the way of all flesh.  I saw a beautiful photo of Katherine Hepburn on Facebook this morning, with a quote.  “Life is hard,” she is reported to have said, “it kills us all, you know.” 

Navy Boot Camp: Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

I entered the United States Navy in August of 1967, two weeks before my nineteenth birthday.  Why would anyone do such a thing?  The short answer is that I was sick of school, and afraid of getting drafted into the Army after I dropped out. 

A longer answer would include the fact that I had always been favorably disposed to the Navy.  As a boy I loved to read books about the Navy, from Steven Decatur up to World War II.  I’d read about Butch O’Hare, and his nephew was, in fact, a friend of mine.  I had a cousin and an uncle in the Merchant Marine.  I thought it would be a fine adventure, and a great way to avoid having to sleep in the dirt and get shot at.  Three hots and a spot!  On a warship!  Maybe I hadn’t really thought it through.  Honestly, if I had it to do over again I’d just wait for my draft notice, go to the physical, and tell them I was gay or something.  I knew they didn’t check any of that, they just took you at your word and stamped you “4F.”  With the benefit of hindsight, I now know that no harm ever came to anyone who used that tactic, no repercussions at all.  But I joined.

So, the Navy.  Boot camp was very interesting, but then I find almost everything interesting.  At the time I would not have described the Great Lakes Naval Training Center as a great place, and I would still not say that it was fun.  Even at the time though, after the ten weeks of training was over, I would have admitted that they sure knew what they were doing, and that they had made a very good job of it as far as I could tell.  From this perspective I would go further and say that they had a deep understanding of their raw material, and the task at hand, that they went about their work with outstanding efficiency, and that they got good results.  Top marks, really. 

The Program

Part of the program was to get us in shape, physically.  A big part of it was to teach us to do what we were told, almost instantly, without giving it a moment’s thought, simply because we had been told to do it.  They drilled a love of spic-and-span cleanliness into us, because who wants to sail on a stinky ship?  They wanted to instill some pride in us too, and some confidence in ourselves.  Almost every aspect of the training was designed to help us survive the situations in which we might find ourselves before too long. They wanted to save lives.

This was not an idle fear on their part, this fear that we might come to harm.  Think about it, a ship at sea, everything is made of metal, everything is wet, half the time the sea is throwing the boat around like somebody making a cocktail, and everything is run by electricity.  There are explosives all around, and flammable materials, and the outside chance, even in the Vietnam era, that somebody might shoot at you.  The electricity scared them the most.  “Over the next four years, statistically speaking,” our company commander told us, “one of you assholes will electrocute himself.” 

The Company Commander

We didn’t have “drill instructors,” we had a company commander.  He told us we’d never forget him, and as it turns out he wasn’t bragging or blowing smoke.  He was a first class petty officer, a Bosun’s Mate.  They and the Gunner’s Mates are the top sergeants of the Navy.  He was a trim, fit man who made average height and weight look powerful and menacing.  Maybe it was his hands, which were oversized and looked like they could drive nails.  He spent the first six weeks yelling at us and calling us terrible things, waking us up at three a.m. by banging on trash can lids, marching us around in the rain until we were ready to drop, and then a little more.  This was the break-down phase of training, that’s when you learn to suspend judgment and just do what you’re told.  He was good at it. 

This was followed by two weeks or so of him beginning to grudgingly give us some credit for being slightly better recruits than he had initially thought.  For the last two weeks he treated us like his children, children that he actually liked.  You may recall this pattern from the movie, “Full Metal Jacket.” It’s the way they do it. 

The Trials Of Hercules

We did some crazy stuff, you know, when we weren’t just marching around or furiously cleaning our spaces.  Stuff like running what is commonly called “the obstacle course.”  They don’t really call them that, not when they’re talking together or writing about the program.  Officially, I suppose it’s the obstacle course, but really they call if a “confidence course.”  It’s full of stuff that you think is impossible when you first see it.  A few minutes later you’re standing at the other end, quite satisfied with your heroic performance of every bit of it. 

Right at the beginning is a seven foot high wooden wall, which you are intended to simply jump over.  Not on the fly or anything, you can grab it and pull yourself up.  The first great amazement is watching your asshole friends just run up to it and disappear over the top.  The whole course goes that way.

We had something called “firefighting day.”  The idea was that the first time you find yourself in a closed space packed with other men, a space that is full of smoke, or tear gas or something, well it shouldn’t be the time that your life is actually on the line.  Same with operating a fire hose, the first time shouldn’t be when you are faced with a huge, life threatening fire.  The first time you turn on a fire hose shouldn’t be a surprise, those things will kill you and your friends PDQ if there’s not a half dozen of you holding on for dear life before you turn it on. 

Ever consider the problem of swimming in fire?  They taught us how to handle that eventuality.  We had a swimming day.  They got us all into this huge pool, all eighty of us in the company, and they put us through our paces.  They’d taught us some of the principles in classrooms beforehand.  They stood around with clipboards like it was the first day of baseball tryouts, making notes about who was good at what and who was hopeless.  You swim in fire about six feet under the surface, but what about when you need to breathe?  Simple, you come up and brush your hands around to make a hole in the fire.  Then you come up in the hole and do a quick surface dive, taking a deep breath and pushing yourself back to swimming depth.  You’d probably get burned a little bit each time, but you’d probably get better at it in a hurry too, in a real flaming water situation.  I’d hate to try it, but they convinced me that it would work, and they made me practice the drill without the fire part. 

We also jumped from a ten meter platform, and here it gets interesting.  I’m pretty sure that it was not everybody that jumped.  I don’t quite remember, but it might have been that they asked us if we’d do it.  You jump wrong from a height of thirty three feet or so and land wrong and you can paralyze yourself.  Maybe they just pulled out some of the weak swimmers from their note taking and said, “sit this one out, dufus.”  I jumped, myself, without any problem.  It was, confidence building! 

The Assholes Themselves

Taking irresponsible young men from all over the country and throwing them into a stressful situation together is challenging.  There was no cable TV at the time, so regional accents were stronger.  Regional cultural differences stood out in stronger relief too.  What to do?

My company consisted of about half guys from New York and Philadelphia, that whole area.  The other half came from the Old South, and not just the southern states but from small towns in the south.  We could hardly understand each other’s speech, and it was like we were from different planets as far as preferences for food and music were concerned.   Better we got a chance to get used to each other in the closely observed environment of boot camp than out on a ship somewhere. 

There were “scrounges” in the mix, guys for whom cleanliness was a new and unpleasant concept.  They got peeled out and gathered into “Mickey Mouse companies.”  Those poor souls had three sets of clothes:  one on their backs; one drying on the clothes line; and one buried in the ground.   Every day they washed the clothes that had been buried, buried the clothes they had on, and the next day they’d wear the clothes from the line.  They scrubbed their barracks with such a terrible intensity that the color was washed out of every surface.  Most of us were within a certain range of body type.  I was in fairly good shape, but I was slightly overweight.  I just went to a normal company, and was issued clothes that would become a little big on me.  Not a problem, I lost a few pounds and got in better shape.  Guys that were actually fat, too fat to keep up, physically, they went to “Elephant companies.”  While the rest of us could eat as much as we wanted, those guys were fed a controlled diet and marched relentlessly.  They performed the “Ninety-Six Count Physical Exercise Drill” even more than the rest of us did, way more.  They lost weight, and snappy. 

The Real Credit

The amazing thing to me now is that they were so very, very tuned in to what we were experiencing, and how we were feeling at the time.  They know which parts of the training would be most stressful for us, and they knew exactly when we needed a morning to sleep “late,” like getting up at seven or so.  They knew at what point we’d all have developed a cold from exposure and lack of sleep.  Every company took a turn working in the huge galley (the cafeteria).  They place this task right in the middle of the training.  It was a break of sorts, we had to get up much earlier than usual but there was no marching to speak of and they laid off on the inspections for a week.  We still had to shave, but not like we were digging for gold.  In between meals and polishing every surface at the galley, we had an hour or so twice a day to just sit around, smoke cigarettes, shoot the shit and listen to the radio. 

In no way were they coddling us, but we were, after all, their sailors.  We were going to operate their precious warships.  We had joined their outfit; we were in the club (at least the enlisted men’s end of that pool).  I think that they did a great job of training us. 

No Credit For Me, Please

I will tell you that I joined the Navy of my own free will.  I joined the military during a war.  I’ll accept a little credit for that, but only a little.  I did fine at boot camp, no problems at all, no demerits, no punishments.  After that I did my job.  My service was characterized as “honorable,” and at the end of it I was given an Honorable Discharge.   I will tell you, though, that beyond that, well, the less said the better.  I was not one of their shining stars. 

There’s still the matter of a flag for my coffin.