I was doing some shredding and purging recently, getting rid of piles of long forgotten papers, bills and receipts.
In the spare bedroom, also known as the storage room, there were some boxes that hadn’t been opened for quite a while.
A couple of these cardboard safes had been in my closet at Mom and Dad’s place and followed me home when they were moving. They had been pushed into a closet and there they sat for another 12 years.
It was interesting and nostalgic to look at some of the old report cards and black and white class photos taken in the courtyard of Langley Central School.
The report comments were written before political correctness crept into the school system and teachers were not afraid to hurt a student’s feelings and ultimately get them into trouble at home.
For instance, in Grade 2 Mrs. Greenwood wrote: “James is a keenly interested pupil and has a good grasp of General Knowledge; a pleasure to have in the classroom.”
However by Grade 7 the standards seem to have been set a bit higher as Mrs. Williamson wrote: “Good student but sometimes mischievous and disruptive in class; needs to buckle down.”
A comment like that does not lead to a pleasant dinner time discussion.
When the report cards came home Dad went right to the math marks and based his opinions on that alone, while Mom was always more interested in the columns about attitude and behaviour. Unfortunately a C- in math far outweighed a G in behaviour.
The worst was when a teacher wrote: “Parent/Teacher conference recommended.” Back then there was no child abuse hotline and we were too young for the witness protection program, so we just had to take our lumps.
At the bottom of one of these memory vaults was a wad of pay slips from my first job at Keith Beadle Motors in 1967.
I peeled one off and looked at it, but it didn’t make sense. Eighty hours of work brought home a take home pay of $122.64 after deductions, or $1.65 an hour.
That couldn’t be right because I had a car, I had a great social life, was paying rent at home and I always had money in my wallet.
Some investigation provided some answers. Gasoline was 25 cents a gallon, (how many of you remember saying, “just gimme a dollar’s worth” to the attendant?) pop was 10 cents a can, chocolate bars were a nickel, a hamburger was 39 cents.
So for an hour’s work I could put gas in the tank, buy dinner and a snack cruise up and down Fraser Highway between the A&W and Dog n Suds all night.
That $1.65 was the minimum wage in B.C. in 1967.
In 2015 it is $10.25 an hour but, unfortunately, everything else has increased 10 times or more as well so the young kids today will have similar tales of woe to tell their grandchildren.
I know many of the Great Depression survivors reading this will tell me how lucky I was to be making that much money.
But I did heed my teacher and I finally did ‘buckle down’ and I try very hard not to be disruptive and play well with others.
I’m glad my old report cards weren’t around when I was lecturing my teenagers about their teachers’ comments — they didn’t need to know I was mischievous.
At least, that’s what McGregor says.