May 2019: Almost sixty years ago

Born in south Buffalo, raised on a grape farm, started career in Kansas.

Eden grape harvest, 1960

I was listening to Buffalo talk radio yesterday and they were asking listeners to select a better time to have lived than in the current day. It made me think, and it did not take long for me to reject just about any earlier time as having been better, including the Renaissance in Florence, or Victorian London, or unspoiled colonial upstate New York. But I did dwell a moment on how much simpler -- maybe also better -- those days on the farm were sixty years ago. No iPhones, no Internet, no Apple, no Amazon, no Facebook, no Google, no $300,000 college education cost.

A big Mac at that time was maybe fifty cents, probably a quarter. My weekly wage working on the South Shore golf course in 1969 was $64 -- before taxes -- for a forty-hour week. Gasoline was under thirty cents a gallon in 1969; in 1960 it was probably less than twenty cents when they had short-lived, so-called "gas wars" among Texaco, Esso and Gulf. You cleaned your dinner plate when mom reminded you that "there are people starving in China."You did air raid drills in school where you crawled under your desk.

Fifty years ago, at my Eden high school graduation, I earned the $1,000 American Legion scholarship. Today that might cover a year's worth of textbooks but at that time it paid for five semesters of SUNY tuition, after my Regents scholarship cut the nominal rate in half, from $400 to $200 a semester. But it would not come close to paying the cost of my enrollment in the honors program at the University of Michigan, not as an out-of-state student, or Penn State. So a process of elimination -- more than anything else -- made Binghamton my college choice.

While at the time I greatly disliked the fall harvest schedule, in retrospect it was a simpler, better time and life, interspersed among classes, football games, AFS pizza sales, cleaning the horse stalls, and all the other simple pleasures of rural western New York life in 1960.