Usually people submit letters TO the editor, but a recent phone call from my brother prompted me to write one to you and got me thinking about the cost of gas in Koolauloa, which has now effectively hit $4 a gallon: For example, do you realize if you're driving a big honkin' truck it costs about $80, maybe more, to fill the tank, which means a round trip to Honolulu in that same truck runs over $30. That's not much less than the cost of a Superferry ride to Maui today, or three go! Airline one-way tickets just a few weeks ago. Some things have sure changed lately.

Back to the phone call with my brother, who will soon leave their home in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife to report for a two-year Latter-day Saint mission in the Mexico City Temple Visitors Center: He was telling me that the rent for their furnished three-bedroom apartment there will cost about $300 a month, and gas about $2 a gallon, whereas gas in Venezuela today only costs about 12 cents a gallon.

That made us laugh, because when we were teenagers gas regularly cost 25 cents a gallon, or in other words, we could fill up for about $3-$4. BUT it got even better, because the oil refineries and service stations in the Intermountain West in those days would frequently have "gas wars," which drove the price at the pumps down to about the same prices Venezuela now charges. Can you imagine filling up your tank for under $2! No wonder those were the days of the "little GTO" and the 442 cubic-inch hemi engines.

Of course, such old-timer musings and comparisons are all relative, because the minimum wage then was only $1 an hour. In fact, I was ecstatic when I got my first job that paid more than minimum. Still, it's fun to remember when I was a kid:

• We had "party line" telephone service, where you shared with two or more other families and could hear everything they said if the phone was busy when you picked it up.
• There was a dairy where I could buy a big scoop of fresh-made ice cream for a nickel; and milkmen delivered bottles of milk with cream at the top to our house. There was also a shop where we could buy fresh-made donuts for 5 cents each.
• My mom was a big movie fan: It cost her 25 cents to get in, and me 10, for a double-bill: That's when theaters used to play two different movies, for those of you who didn't know. More recently, I recall Kahuku Theater used to charge 75 cents, which later went up to 90 cents before they closed…and the popcorn was so ono.
• Speaking of my mom, she always bottled fresh fruit every year (altho' it was called "canning") — cherries, peaches, pears and apricots, but I wasn't too keen on the vegetables she also sometimes did. We would buy the fruit in bushel baskets direct from farms.
• Our family ate rice, but only because my grandma came from Holland where it was a common import from what was then called the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and my dad got to like it when he lived in Mexico. Most of my friends never ate rice.
• Because we weren't all that far from the atomic tests in Nevada, in addition to fire drills in school we also did two types of atomic attack drills, the scariest one where we had to immediately crawl under our desks to take cover. The more leisurely one was where we all hurried out in the hallways and crouched down against the walls.
• Speaking of Nevada, there was no speed limit outside the cities in those days. None. We would usually wait for evening to minimize the possibility of overheating while driving across the Nevada desert, and many cars carried canvas bags of water hanging off the front bumper to refill the radiator in case your car did anyhow.
• 78- and 45-rpm vinyl records soon gave way to 33-and-a-third LPs — "long-play albums" — before cassette music tapes, and later 8-track cartridges took over the edge of audio technology.
• I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and to this day still pound the keys much harder than necessary. Most people who learned on manuals do. My 8th grade teacher, Miss Bertha Rappaport — a Jewish spinster with a scary face who immigrated from Russia — insisted we learn touch typing, and would make us cover our machines and put our heads down if she caught us looking at the keys.

Thank you, Miss Rappaport — the lessons stuck; and thank you, Koolauloa, for supporting Kaleo. ALOHA,

— Mike Foley, Editor 

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