This is adapted from a letter I wrote to my buddy Denro that, upon review, seemed suitable for a blog post:
If you look up the causes of accelerated inflation in the 70’s, conservative economists always point to Nixon ending the gold standard for currency exchange. They completely ignore our generation coming of age, which I’m certain was, along with the OPEC oil crisis, a main driver of prices. We saw the trend in our comic books!
Comics had stayed 10-cents for over 20 years, and were 12-cents for most of the Sixties. But then in ’69 they went to 15-cents, and only two years later there was the jump to 48-pages for a quarter, before the rapid reversal to 32-pages for 20-cents. The cover date of that first big jump? August, 1971, so the issues were on sale in May-June, exactly 50 years ago. As fans we saw the immediate effect of inflation in one of the smallest segments of the American economy. When did Nixon end the gold standard for exchange rates? August, 1971. Stupidly, I had failed to see that connection while writing my senior paper for Economics on Nixon’s wage and price controls!
I see another factor behind 70’s inflation, with the high sustained wages earned by unionized factory workers at the same time the peak baby boomers were flooding the job market. As I like to point out, the Polka and Portuguese music shows at the radio station on Sundays were paid for by guys who worked union jobs at the Spalding plant in Chicopee. With me having the FCC-mandated license to operate the transmitter, they sat at the mic and played records while their families and friends sat in the talk show studio. The Polish people headed out while the Portuguese people came in, then followed by the stock car racing guys.
The car show was all talk, so I was in the control room at the Gates console, engineering and handling the calls. The guy who ran the car show owned a garage with a custom shop. (You should imagine John Milner instead of Curt Henderson being at Wolfman Jack’s station in American Graffiti.) Half of the ads during the car show were self-promotion for the guy’s business, so I have to assume he wasn’t running a chop shop. 😉
During the Polka and Portuguese shows I was checking the AP wire and reading Billboard, or in the production studio working on commercials, while keeping an ear on the over-the-air monitor, listening for trouble. The guys solicited their own advertisers, and if that money didn’t cover the station’s fee they had to pay the difference out of their own pockets. Sometimes I’d see a new RV in the parking lot, and I’d hear about their vacation houses on Lake Winnipesaukee. I’m sure they were earning more than my $3/hour. Those tennis balls and basketballs aren’t made by union labor in Chicopee anymore, and those lakefront properties now have million-dollar vacation homes owned by executive class buyers.