ArcaMax

Looking Back to 1944

I am submitting this column to my publisher on Sept. 2nd. That day is significant to me because my wife was born on Sept. 2, 1944. That is 82 years ago. And don't remind me that I married an older woman! I'm 77, so she is almost a half-decade older than me! What was I thinking 52 years ago when I asked Becky Bachstein to be my bride?

Apparently, I wasn't thinking much. I've shared this story before. In early 1974, I called up Miss Bachstein, whom I'd only casually met a couple of times before, to ask her out on our first date. I planned to go to the hit movie, "American Graffiti," about some California teenagers spending their last night of summer vacation before heading off to college. The tagline to the movie was, "Where were you in '62?" And very cleverly, or so I thought, as an ice-breaker to our conversation, I asked Becky: "Where were you in '62?"

Now in 1962, I was in the 7th grade. And I expected Becky's answer to be something similar. But her response took me by surprise. She said, "Oh, that's the year I graduated from high school." I was stunned. I was shocked. I had no idea I was asking an "older woman" out on a date. I thought of saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, but I'm polishing my shoes on Saturday, so I can't make it after all." But I didn't. The date went on -- and six months later, I married this old woman.

Can you believe it? 52 years later, she is still 5 years older than me! But truth be told, she looks and acts and plays 10 years younger than the old goat she's spent the last half century with!

So anyway, in honor of her birthday, I got to looking back at the world in September 1944. My kids and grandkids find it hard to believe that their mother and grandmother was born while World War II was still going on. In fact, the infamous D-Day landings had taken place just 3 months before she was born!

Speaking of World War II, here is a fascinating little nugget of information. On the very day my future wife was born, a Navy pilot's jet was shot down over the Pacific Ocean. Thankfully, he was rescued. That normally wouldn't have been all that newsworthy except for the fact that this pilot was named George H. W. Bush and he would go on to become the 41st President of the United States.

I happen to have a Washington D.C., newspaper, The Evening Star, from Becky's birth date, Sept. 2, 1944. As you might guess, the front page was filled with war news. Allied forces, led by Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton, were inching their way closer and closer to the German border. American ships and planes were pounding an -- until then -- unheard-of Pacific Island called Iwo Jima. British and American planes were bombing targets over Germany daily. In Italy, American and British troops were advancing north of Rome, breaking the vaunted "Gothic Line" and opening the gates to the Po Valley,

In fact, the only non-war-related story on the front page of the Washington newspaper was about Arlington, Virginia schools delaying their opening because of a polio outbreak. For young people reading this, polio in the 1940s and 1950s was like COVID was a few years ago. Only much worse!

I also have a Life magazine from Sept. 4th, 1944, two days after my wife was born. Folks my age will remember that picture-filled weekly magazine. Its heyday was from the 1930s through the 1960s. It's fun looking at the ads. Many liquor and cigarette ads. Did you know that "apple honey helps keep Old Golds (cigarettes) fresh!" And that Seagram's V.O Canadian whiskey drinkers "are planning beyond tomorrow." Apparently, those boozers knew that "today's bombers will be turned into tomorrow's fire fighting weapons, smothering forest fires before they have a chance to spread!"

Here are a couple of indications of how times have changed in the past 80 years. One ad for typewriter ribbons featured a boss and his "girl" (i.e., secretary). This "girl," who looked to be a woman in her early 30s, was showing the boss how their current ribbons were causing messy typed pages and pointing out how the new ribbons would improve things. And he gave her an "Atta Girl" for her efforts.

And speaking of "girls," there was a two-page spread featuring 24 pictures of nice-looking young women, 6 each taken by photographers from newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Des Moines. The purpose of the article was to help Americans decide the answer to this important question: "Which city has the prettiest girls?" And even though all the young women looked attractive to me, the magazine's editors somehow decided that "Dallas has the prettiest girls."

Another ad featured a "Peeping Tom" staring at a woman through her bedroom window. But since the ad was for high heels, apparently all he noticed was her shoes! By the way, those shoes cost $12.95.

Also, quite a few ads, for quite a few products, were essentially telling readers to be patient. All of their production lines, whether for tires or cars or cigarettes or peas, were going towards the war effort. But once Germany and Japan were defeated, a full line of products would be available to the American people.

One more fun ad. This one was from Westinghouse. And it promised readers that as soon as the war was over, they would introduce a new labor-saving device for mom "that fills itself with water, washes, rinses, spins the clean clothes dry, drains itself and shuts off automatically." They were going to call it the "Laundromat." Of course, somehow over time, we came to know it as simply the "washer."

Having said all that, I know this is a column about Social Security. So let me turn my attention to that topic. But frankly, there isn't much to report because there just wasn't a lot going on with Social Security in 1944, just 9 years after the program became law.

In August 1944, a month before my wife was born, the relatively new Social Security program reached a milestone: The Social Security Administration recorded its one millionth active retirement beneficiary.

The Social Security tax rate was 1%, up to a maximum of $3,000 in earnings. Those rates were scheduled to go up at the beginning of 1945, but Congress decided to delay those changes because of the ongoing war.

In 1944, former President Franklin Roosevelt did ask Congress to expand Social Security by adding disability benefits. But I guess that was an idea whose time hadn't come because disability benefits did not become part of Social Security until 12 years later, in 1956.

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has two books with all the answers. One is called "Social Security -- Simple and Smart: 10 Easy-to-Understand Fact Sheets That Will Answer All Your Questions About Social Security." The other is "Social Security: 100 Myths and 100 Facts." You can find the books at Amazon.com or other book outlets. Or you can send him an email at thomas.margenau@comcast.net. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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