Happy Birthday Ma

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

This day in 1927 my mother was born in a different America than you've come to know. Alcohol was illegal but marijuana, for medical purposes or otherwise, wasn't.

After a production run topping fifteen million, the final Model T left the assembly line in May. It was  replaced by the modern Model A, which debuted with a self-starter (no more hand crank) and a gas gauge (no disc brakes, GPS, or flip down DVD player). Inflation-adjusted sticker price: $4,474.58. One in five households owned a car and, incredibly, 22,000 died that year in traffic accidents. 

One third of American homes boasted a radio and there were 17 million telephones in service.  Ten percent of all rural farm houses sported hot running water and fifteen percent had indoor plumbing.

FDR wasn't a household name. Terms like Black Tuesday and antibiotics hadn't been coined. Kids still died from stuff like lock jaw and diphtheria. Tuberculosis was incurable and the leading cause of death in America.

Most boys left school after eighth grade. The average weekly family income was an inflation-adjusted $880.00 and it wasn't subject to income tax or the yet-to-be-invented social security ponzi scheme.

The day before Mom arrived, Babe Ruth became the only man in baseball to hit the ball completely out of Comiskey Park in Chicago. In September he hit number sixty.

The first movie with a soundtrack premiered, Grauman's Chinese screened its first film in Hollywood, Duke opened at The Cotton Club, and Lorraine May took the stork to St Paul.

Ma (on the left) and her sister Betty taken sometime in 1939.

As Ever,

TWC

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

This day in 1927 my mother was born in a different America than you've come to know. Alcohol was illegal but marijuana, for medical purposes or otherwise, wasn't.

After a production run topping fifteen million, the final Model T left the assembly line in May. It was  replaced by the modern Model A, which debuted with a self-starter (no more hand crank) and a gas gauge (no disc brakes, GPS, or flip down DVD player). Inflation-adjusted sticker price: $4,474.58. One in five households owned a car and, incredibly, 22,000 died that year in traffic accidents. 

One third of American homes boasted a radio and there were 17 million telephones in service.  Ten percent of all rural farm houses sported hot running water and fifteen percent had indoor plumbing.

FDR wasn't a household name. Terms like Black Tuesday and antibiotics hadn't been coined. Kids still died from stuff like lock jaw and diphtheria. Tuberculosis was incurable and the leading cause of death in America.

Most boys left school after eighth grade. The average weekly family income was an inflation-adjusted $880.00 and it wasn't subject to income tax or the yet-to-be-invented social security ponzi scheme.

The day before Mom arrived, Babe Ruth became the only man in baseball to hit the ball completely out of Comiskey Park in Chicago. In September he hit number sixty.

The first movie with a soundtrack premiered, Grauman's Chinese screened its first film in Hollywood, Duke opened at The Cotton Club, and Lorraine May took the stork to St Paul.

Ma (on the left) and her sister Betty taken sometime in 1939.

As Ever,

TWC