Today is August 23rd, and....

on this date in 1950, I packed a bag and left home to go to work as a trainee in the hydro-electric power plants of Ontario Hydro. Ontario Hydro is now reincarnated as something only vaguely resembling its 1950 incarnation, and most of my peers of those days have already preceded me to The Great Beyond - or maybe the Not-so-Great Beyond. In any case, we're no longer howling at the moon together, nor chasing women, nor getting drunk. None of that worked out very well for any of us. Those of us who were smart cleaned up our acts, and the others didn't live long enough to wish they had.

1950 wasn't a very good year. The Korean War started, the Cold War was heating up, and the famous Al Jolson died of a massive heart attack while playing cards in his suite at a hotel in San Francisco shortly after returning from a trip to entertain the American troops fighting in Korea.
My first car was a 1932 Chevrolet sedan that cost $150.00 in 1950, and if it was around now and looked as nice as this (it almost did) then it would be worth maybe $29,500 or so.

It sounds like a worn-out phrase, but it really was a whole different world back then. In 1950 automation hadn't yet made power station operators redundant, and both cars and gas were reasonably cheap and easily available, and we didn't have TV filling our heads and our living rooms with the kinds of disgusting crap it throws at us today with its multitude of channels. Wherever we could get TV, it was usually poorly received on just a couple of channels, and it wasn't full of girlie ads, or x-rated movies, or other filth you'd be afraid to be seen watching if your mother came into the room. Like I said - a whole different world back then. And in 1950, the world population was just 2.55 billion. Now, there's that many stuck in the gridlock at rush hour someplace, and our total today is 6.8 billion and climbing. But are we worried? Hell, No! We haven't got sense enough for that....