Stop On a Dime

I turned 10 years-old in 1963. Back then 10-year-olds had more autonomy than most kids have today. We could ride our bikes to the store to buy horrible quantities of awful candy that we craved. It’s a wonder I have any teeth left.

As a consumer, I was limited to buying things that involved coins. I had the occasional dollar bill, but mostly the things I bought cost less than that.

My dad had a Studebacker Lark
like this one back in 1963

It is a classic old-guy thing to do, but let’s look at what a guy or a gal could get for a dime back in 1963.  For perspective, the purchasing power of 10 cents back then is now 97 cents, which doesn’t seem to be that much of a difference considering how costs seem to have gone up.

In 1963 a bottle of Coke in a machine was a dime, as was a local phone call on a pay phone. A cup of coffee at a drive-in was a dime, though no kid I knew would drink the stuff. Baby Ruth and Reece’s candy were 10 cents. You could buy two packs of baseball cards for a dime, and that included a piece of pink something that was supposed to be bubble gum. If you didn’t want the cards, you could clip them to your bike’s spokes to make a motorcycle sound. Or you could skip the cards and get 10 pieces of Bazooka Joe bubble gum.

If you had a pen-pal you could buy two First Class stamps for a dime. You could get a small cone at some Dairy Queens for 10 cents. In my hometown of Oshkosh, Wisconsin you could buy four “Alaska Pop” frozen treats for a dime. I don’t know how they made any money!

If you found a glass pop bottle and returned it for the refund you could add that to your dime and get a comic book. I got a fair amount of my spending money returning bottles back in the days before disposable bottles were a thing.

All that and, believe it or not, a small bag of potato chips could be purchased for 10 cents. And, if you really wanted to ride the mechanical horse or rocket ship outside the grocery story you could do that for a dime too.

Yeah, that was a different time. Back then my dad would say how he could get a coke for a nickel, so I guess it’s just a function of the passage of time. Lately it seems like more than that. Lunch used to be $5, and now, all of a sudden, it’s over $10. Or is it my imagination that it’s happened so fast?

I like thinking about slipping that thin dime into the pop machine and pulling out a bottle of Coke or Pepsi, or that brand new soft drink, Mountain Dew.