One day, during the summer of '82, I was hanging out with Dad in the backyard, helping with some projects. During a lull, he reached for his cigarettes and realized he was out. Reaching into his wallet, Dad pulled out a fiver and handed it to me. "Here, son, hop on your bike and pick me up a pack of smokes." I spun on my heels and prepared to take on my mission. Suddenly remembering part of his "honey-do" list, he called after me. "Hey, Wayne! Get a loaf of bread, also!" I nodded and was on my way.
At the store, I found the bread, picked up two cokes, and placed them on the counter. I then asked the clerk for a pack of Marlboros. He reached behind him, found the brand, and tossed them into the bag. "That'll be $2.00, kid." I collected Dad's change, grabbed the bag, and was out the door.
Right now, the heads of any Millenials and Gen-Z'ers reading this post are exploding. There's so much to unpack here.
At the time, it was a non-issue sending your minor child on a cigarette run. Now it's a very enforceable criminal offense to sell tobacco products to anyone under 18, let alone a 12-year-old kid. In my opinion, what's more criminal is the rate of inflation.
That $0.50 loaf of bread now runs you almost $3.00. Those Cokes that were a quarter a can? Even with larger sizes in modern vending machines, at $2.00 a pop, it's still a 5-fold increase. And then we have the cigarettes. Mississippi hits you with another 5-fold increase. Out of curiosity, I checked and in the nanny state of Maryland, that same pack now costs nearly $7.00.
Back at home, I tossed the bread on the counter and ran back outside. Handing Dad a Coke, his cigs, and change, I asked, "Hey, Dad, did you know your cigarettes cost twice as much as a loaf of bread?" He seemed nonplussed to be getting a lecture from his spunky kid and regarded me with a smile.
"Really? Huh. How 'bout that." And that was the end of that discussion.
Apart from cans of Cokes, three plays on a jukebox was something else that would run you a quarter back in '82. One jukebox I definitively remember was at the local Pizza Hut on Highway 90. The times we were there, I'd head straight over to it as soon as we walked through the door. In those days, of course, jukeboxes contained actual vinyl singles, and I stood there fascinated as the mechanical arm unerringly grabbed my selections from the stack, and with cocky, mechanical precision, dropped them onto the turntable like an NBA star sinking a basket.
This was still in my "country" years, so I likely loaded up the queue with the likes of Alabama, Mickey Gilley, and Kenny Rogers. However, one night I was scanning the titles and saw one rock song in particular that made me pause. I don't remember where I'd heard it first, but it was likely when hanging out with some of my more hipster friends.
Something about the riffs and the lyrics appealed to me, but from the chorus alone, I should have seen it as a harbinger of things to come. And so it happened that on one summer night in '82, as 12-year-old me was noshing on pepperoni pizza, this single rock song belted out its forceful decree among a queue of Nashville crooners.
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