Types for Selling - The Good Old Days!

5. The good old days? Ha!

That sad refrain that times aren’t what they used to be, has been sung through so many centuries that one begins to wonder whether they really were the “Good Old Days.” Some people tout the time when a Gibson girl played croquet in a trailing skirt and leg-o-mutton sleeves and her beau in a stiff-brimmed straw sauntered down the wooden walk looking for lookers.

A generation later revolves around the twirling twenties with the Charleston, jazz and bathtub gin .. . when women wore waistlines below their hiplines, and hemlines above their knees . . . and when the sirens among them sighed for chances for advances from a sheik in a coonskin coat.

Another age group glorifies the dirty thirties with their dust bowls and depression . . . when times were so dull nobody but the scissor-grinder made any money. The going was so grim that people were poor as poets but proud of their patches. A dollar bought more than it does today- but who had a dollar?

Those were the times of happy picnics, gramophone music by moonlight-days and nights of simple living. It was also the era when children died of tuberculosis because they worked all day and part of the night; when they lived in steaming, stinking tenements, and an unpaved path led to the outhouses and dirty alleys led to the company store.

The “work week” was six days long, and the “day” went from mornings at six until nights at ten. Those also were the halcyon days when a fourteen-year-old lad replaced a man who lost his hand to an unguarded high-speed saw and was fired because he couldn’t do his job. But could he collect workmen’s compensation? Or be transferred to a job he could do with one hand? Such things were unheard of!

Those were the Good Old Days when his little family could stay in the same cramped quarters only until he came home from the hospital; then they were evicted in favor of a family that could afford six dollars a week. There were plenty of those bewildered immigrants who poured in daily, wearing tags that told where they should be put off the train. They were the workers with whom men competed for a living wage on the labor market. It might have been good to live in those Good Old Days -if you could head your own banking business or be mistress of an elaborate household where underpaid servants fetched and carried. But there were not many banking houses then, and for the few women who had a retinue of servants there were thousands who dwelt in drudgery.

In an even sorrier state was the multitude that owed their souls to the company store-or who coughed their consumptive days away over their sweat-shop sewing. So, what was so good about those good old days? A few things perhaps, brightened by the rainbow of passing years . - . good for some but hell for most. Those preceding sketches are mere “bit” pieces to start you thinking about the task of preparing that principal speech that you will be asked to make one day-soon.

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