re: #88 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

It was a mythical golden age in which a man who could manage to get through High School could get on at the mines, work hard, afford a house, a nice car or two, maybe even and a boat or a vacation cabin, and still afford to put his kids through state college without even having to send his wife to work.

Where I came from, it was much the same but involved working in the steel mills or related industries. Worked for my dad, he put his kids through college and got us all into the middle class.

textile mills here. even non-unionized, my brother was making something like 14 bucks an hour in the early 80’s to run a loom at Milliken. That was hellaciously good money, considering minimum wage was something like a buck seventy-five. They paid really well because they wanted to ensure the unions didn’t get a foothold in the state. Now, the father of a friend, who had worked up to management-level there, died in his 40’s from brown lung because he’d come up when there were zero safety regulations, but that was a small price to pay for 14 bucks an hour.