@sail32:
Don't forget that that unionised bus driver's $3.65 an hour was almost TRIPLE the BC minimum wage ($1.25), which was the highest Minimum Wage in Canada at that time. The guys in the mill just down at the corner from my place here were humping about with 112-pound bags of flour for Nikita for 50 cents an hour....... and it was WORSE in Saskatchewan.
At 50 cents an hour, your weekly wage packet was $22 gross for your 44-hour work week. Forty-hour week had not come in yet. From that, you paid Federal Income Tax, Provincial Income Tax, Workmen's Compensation and half the cost of your Unemployment Insurance stamps. Health care was provincial and it was separate and you paid your own, quarterly.
You really didn't have a helluvva lot left for gun-collecting.
Better part was that you could get a hamburger made with Real Meat (Pink Slime had not been invented, thank Gawd) with French fries, gravy and coleslaw for 40 cents and there was enough on the plate that you had trouble finishing it. Fifteen-ounce steak dinner was $2.25 plus 10 cents for coffee. It was a good steak, too: we paid more for our steaks, wholesale, than you would pay retail in the stores, but we got the pick of the meat; Len Diller at Canada Grocers saw to that. I still have a menu from our restaurant (closed in late 1963), so the prices are accurate.
There WAS good money to be made: $1.75 an hour on the service rigs with S&A (Sid and Art Rockall, both wonderful wild-men) or even $2.25 punching hole with Commonwealth under Cec Russell, the hardest (and best) toolpush in the Patch. Problem was that with wages like those, competition for jobs was ferocious. The work was horrific by modern standards: no power tongs, no power slips, just nuthin' to make the work any easier.... and you might be running casing (7-inch) at a joint a MINUTE, running the rig 2 men short, everything covered in drilling mud, f*ckstick so slippery you could hardly use it at all, pulling the 220-pound slips by hand and spinning the stuff in off the cat-head, chains flying all OVER the place: lose your tin hat twice out of 3 joints..... don't have it and you lose the top half of your head. They EARNED that $2.25 an hour and a LOT of men were injured, some killed. And then there was H2S, which they were just learning about.
A 500-barrel oil storage tank, 16 feet diameter, 16 feet high, floored and roofed, watertight and oiltight, with pipe-in and pipe-out fittings, catwalk and steps, was assembled by 7 men from curved steel sections, nuts, bolts and tank-rubber, in an afternoon, with time at the end for a beer. Took 4 truckloads of curved, galvanised steel sections. No power tools, either: every single 1-inch square nut and bolt done tight by HAND. Freddie Hutton and Freddie Hellyer (H&H Oilfield Servicing) used to do that with the big old BS&B (Black, Sivalls and Bryson) tanks; there are STILL a few of those standing and being used.
A LOT of HARD work. I would write a book about it except that everyone would say that I was lying.
Gun collecting, back then, was NOT for the timid.
PRICES were sure nice, though!
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