50 years ago!

okcorral1881

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Enjoy!
OK

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How much was a case of beer back then ??

In Quebec taverns at that time a glass of beer was $.05
You'd get wasted with just $1.00
UI (Unemployment Insurance) was $35.00 a week
Studio apartment of mine in downtown Montreal was $80.00/month
Ounce (so I was told) was $10.00
 
i remember here in hamilton the Woolco in Eastgate square sold the 303 sporters for $125.00 the nice parker hale / churchill models they also sold regular No4Mk1 for iirc $60.00....btw im not that old (51) i rode horses on the property where eastgate is ....there was an pld busy bee store that was closed there for a long time and a huge field and parking lot ..
 
Manitoba had recently brought in a minimum-wage law. It was 50 cents an hour, regardless of the work.

Friend of mine was humping 112-pound bags of flour for the Soviet Union at our local flour-mill for that.

He got into construction because he was good, made $1 an hour.

Women were paid less: 45 cents. Labour Code at the time prevented women from carrying heavy loads: 35 pounds was max for a woman. Nowadays, they are "equal" and are allowed to wreck their (weaker) backs along with the men! Women working after 11 PM were entitled to be driven to/from work at the employer's expense. Now, we just turn 'em loose and let 'em get raped. I am told that this is PROGRESS.

25-pack of smokes was 41 cents, gallon of gas the same (4.54 litres), burger with fries and coleslaw was 45 cents, extra nickel for gravy, portions were huge, fries were made out of real actual potatoes.

You could make up to $1.75 an hour working on one of the old Commonwealth rigs. That was fine if you really liked running casing in 30 below, soaked to the skin with sal####er, in a howling wind and running with no power tongs, spinning casing off the cathead and tightening it in with a 48-inch pipewrench, also off the cathead, running fully-manual slips. Insanity. REAL easy to get killed. Did it anyway because the $$$ was great....... until the pneumonia hit. Back to washing dishes.

We had a restaurant at that time. Girls made 50 cents an hour, later we put it up to 55; highest-paid restaurant staff in the district.

The guns were cheap enough, but it was a long time saving up to get ANY of them. By contrast, you could get a Snider for $6 locally, a .43 Mauser carbine for $4 (I paid $3 for mine) and real nice '86 Winchesters in .45-70 ran $25 for a good one, $30 for a REAL good one, 1873s were $20 and up, 1866s were expensive: $45 or more. Never could afford one of THOSE.

Nice old ad. I remember drooling ALL over it when it was new!
 
(smellie)
Women were paid less: 45 cents. Labour Code at the time prevented women from carrying heavy loads: 35 pounds was max for a woman. Nowadays, they are "equal" and are allowed to wreck their (weaker) backs along with the men! Women working after 11 PM were entitled to be driven to/from work at the employer's expense. Now, we just turn 'em loose and let 'em get raped. I am told that this is PROGRESS.

Too funny!! U sir are making my ribs hurt!

Great post, The p 38 was $79.95 back then? At that price it's defiantly a bargain today.
 
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Tinman: check that ad VERY carefully. That's not a standard P-'38; it is an HP. Firing-pin was different on this model, which is the civvy model of gun prior to its adoption by the Wehrmacht. These would have been Trials, Polizei or possibly early SS pieces. They were ALMOST identical but not quite. Rather a scarce bird today, an original HP.

Coyote Ugly: I am just a bit (20 years or so) too young to have got in on those; wish I had. By the time I got my first Luger, they had gone 'WAY up: $20 plus it needed parts, which were just as ridiculous then as they are now. But for $37.50 total I had a REAL LUGER. Worked just fine. Still does, too.

Now it has a couple of friends; they stay in the vault together, drinking beer and singing "Deutschland Uber Alles" and "Wenn Wir Fahren Gegen Engelland" and all the other Hits of the Blitz. Really hard to hear sometimes, with the Tokarev shouting the "Internationale" over top of them. The Steyr keeps interrupting with the "Kaiserlied" in a Spanish accent (it spent a lot of years in Chile) and that is quite bad enough. I keep the Webleys and Enfields in another vault because, no matter what your taste, "Rule, Brittania!" and "God Save the King" just do NOT sound right amid all those others. And I am REALLY glad that Albania never developed a huge local arms industry!

Have fun, all!

That's what it's all about!
 
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The pre-1960 prices were even better! My first machine gun was a complete Lewis Gun, complete with wooden carrying chest, new spare barrel, recoil springs, firing pins, tools, and other small parts, with anti-aircraft sights, five 47 round drum magazines, and a magazine loader. The cost was $65 at a Gun Show.

How about a Number 4 Mark 1 Lee-Enfield Sniper or a 1903 Springfield for under $40?

1962 was a bad year. That was the year I got married, and it screwed up my Gun Collecting.
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Klein's ad: fellow named Oswald bought a Carcano with a Jap 4x scope from a very similar ad.

I got my first Carcano CLIPS from them because they weren't available in Canada at all. Saw the ad in LIFE, with Oswald's rifle over the page, realised that if HE could get clips there, then so could I. Sent off my dollar and got a handful back. We had that nice Western ammo available back then, too, $6 a hundred in Canada. It was great stuff.

We also had Lebel ammo for $4 a hundred, but it was 1939 production, 85% missfires. A German fellow who had been through the Battle of France told me it was like that when it was made; the Communist unions were sabotaging France's war effort against the Nazis because Hitler and Stalin had that nonaggression pact! "I spent 5 weeks riding around in the back of a truck. I fired my rifle two shots only and one of those was at a rabbit. That was the Battle of France!" Pvt. Theodor Schroth, Wehrmacht, told to me in 1963.
 
It was1964 and I went with my dad to the Army&Navy store. We drove down there in his 1949 grey chevy sedan. They had wooden barrels of 303 Enfields for $13.00 the magazines were sold seperatly and were laying on 4x8 tables..tons of them, $3.00 each. He bought a rifle and I got a pup tent, then we walked down Central Avenue down town with " gun in hand" and Nobody blinked. Try that today LOL. I used to love digging through all the Surplus Junk....radios, wind up phones, canteens, socks,uniforms, boots, helmets. and a couple miles out of town they sold old jeeps and Medical Vans with a large Red cross on them with hammocks in the back....I played in them many times.
 
Ribtor Sales and Crown Surplus in Calgary used to be great sources for MILSURPs and surplus items. In the 1972-74 timeframe I recall buying a M1903 Springfield, a stone mint M1917 Enfield and a fresh West German re-work M98K with a new 7x57 Mauser barrel from Ribtor, all in the $35-$45 price range. I also got a Long Branch 1942 receiver, complete with DND inventory tag, from Crown Surplus for 9 or 10 bucks. I bought a new Ruger 10-22 at the same time for $99. Seems the MILSURPs were a better investment than the Ruger which currently sells for around $250.
 
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