If he was making 7500 bucks in the 1930s that was very good I think. In 1940 during the war two bucks an hour was good money. I think his dad was making this during his time delivering milk which, if one thinks of it, was a sort of good and important job -- somewhat a combination of delivery and sales. CB's first job we hear paid 44 cents an hour -- way less than 1000/year.
Father's income pretty good (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Jeff
- Start date
Is this from Ham on rye?
Somewhere I saw a Bukowski timeline which showed the 7500 buck annual income for father in the Depression as a delivery driver -- he may have had other sources of income; in HoR, we are told that Hank's first job at a department store called something like "Meer Starbuck" (when I google, I of course get millions of spurious results and I wonder what the real name of the store was assuming it was made up: Niemann Marcus is a guess, not sure why he needed a pseudonym for a store) that Hank made 44 cents an hour. What I know about this is the following: 1. The USA had not yet recovered from the Great Depression in 1939 -- in fact, that may have been one of the worst years, although perhaps New Deal policies had already helped somewhat 2. You can read about the crazy low prices of food -- meals for well under a dollar; I even read that the nightly rate at the Waldorf-Astoria was three bucks which is hard to comprehend 3. I think the multiplier to try to understand value of dollar then was something between 20 and 30 -- so Hank's dad would have been making really decent money even using the 20 multiplier. You can also look at what professionals like doctors and teachers made in those days and I am pretty sure even for a doctor that was a lot 4. In Thompson's book Now and On Earth he works in an airplane plant in the early 1940s, either during or right before ww2, in both cases, the economy had recovered a lot and making a buck an hour (2000 a year without overtime was enough to survive on with a wife and 3 kids in San Diego -- 2 bucks would have been very good money. 5. My favorite illustration about money: One of the big robberies, I think it was the Brinks in the 1950s -- they got more than they expected and every member of the gang supposedly took 100 thousand AND THEY BURNT THE REST of the MONEY! If this story is true, seems like no one thought they would need any more than 100K and to avoid being caught, could think of nothing better than burning it. I assume these guys paid off or bought 5K houses (which was certainly possible in those days) and maybe quit their jobs. I guess in those pre-computer days, it was harder to catch people, but apparently they did get caught despite burning the remaining money. It could also be that these guys were not very imaginative or ambitious, but why then even commit the crime in the first place??
