1963
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…
THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME
As we reflect on 2023 throughout this new month of the new year, I thought is might be of interest to examine what was happening in our fair town some sixty-one years ago. I was going to list some of the top stories when I came across this article. I had to share it with you.
“Greetings, fellow tax victims and born losers everywhere:
If it is allowed to go the full distance, 1963 will be a complete 365-day year as so many similar periods have been in the past.
The outlook is not so bright, so it is a pretty good match for millions of us who aren’t bright enough to look out.
Although not too critical at the moment, the business situation is nonetheless pretty sick and needs immediate hospitalization. The big question is whether to take it to Ben Casey’s hospital where it will be browbeaten and scowled at and told to quit feeling sorry for itself, or to young Doctor Kildare’s get-well factory where, if it is big business, it will receive the full staff consultation service headed by Raymond Massey. Small business, of course, will be turned over to the precocious young intern, Dr. Kildare, who will discover its malady forthwith and will give it a lecture on moral and spiritual behavior, point out the virtues of home and mother, or have, or try to avoid, an affair with. The business may not know it, but in either hospital, it would be better off dead.
Some forecasters are predicting that 1963 will be a tough year for steel. Steel is always difficult to predict, and the forecasters all admit that if they didn’t have more brains than everybody else, they simply couldn’t do it. Of course, steel is always tough – as it rightly should be if it is to be used in heavy construction and such. Now and then some profiteering bum will louse up the batch and pass off some poor-grade stuff – but mainly steel is tough. Steel is the industrial weathervane of the country. As steel goes, so goes the economy, they say. No steel, no cars. No cars, no gas, no oil, no tires, no garage work, no insurance, fewer deaths, fewer funerals, fewer tourists, no trade-ins, no movies, no roadhouse drinking, no bowling… No movies, no roadhouse drinking, no bowling? Forget it, buddy. You’ve got a depression on your hands, born “full-growed”.
Personal incomes will remain about as they were in 1962 for people who are working. Since nobody works anymore except for a few morons engaged in private enterprise, it is a mystery to us forecasters where all this income comes from. Some say the government just runs off another batch of currency when it gets hard up (a condition that is now guaranteed to continue on to eternity and a few millenniums beyond) or when it wants to look like it is paying some of its honest debts. There is no truth in this. The government merely acknowledges its indebtedness on cheap paper, and in its infrequent moments of lucidity confesses that the whole shebang might as well climb a Georgia Pine and holler crowbait till it dies.
Inventories will remain the same as last year – and I mean the same. Unless businesspeople are the type who could sell a hairbrush to a baldheaded man or a belt to a skeleton, inventories will remain exactly as they were in 1962 and will be on hand the first of 1964.
As to stocks and bonds, my father used to tell me: “Son, rabbits aren’t good to eat in the summertime.” Based on this information, I predict that the Dow Jones Average will continue to register up or down, just like always. All profits will be closely watched by the government agencies, both National and State, and will be gobbled up by one or the other, or both, like starving goats gobbling up anything in sight.
The railroads are in difficult straits. Their competition runs over roads and flies into airports that are built for them by us poor suckers and the railroads, too, but the railroads have to build and maintain their roads (at their own cost). Unless there is a war (in which case there won’t be any railroads or anything else) the railroads would be better off closing up shops and admitting they are victims of the modern evolution in transportation methods. First, it was the beast of burden, then the boats, then the rails, then highway trucks, then airplanes. This leaves the poor railroads standing on the rundown siding in the middle of the week looking both ways for a Sunday payload and it just ain’t there. The government, of course, gives lip service to this great private enterprise but is primarily interested in the transportation method which furnishes the most revenue in taxes. Railroads will have to put their locomotives out to pasture and possibly some time in the future, build racetracks for them…as was the case with the horse – who may yet have the last horselaugh!
In building and real estate, one fact remains forever in evidence, real estate will always be here and will always constitute, together with what it can be made to produce, all the wealth that there is. Smart people know this, and the government knows it. So, smart people also know that eventually, the government proposes to own and control the land and
who aren’t doing anything would be released to do likewise among our already unemployed millions. The neat trick of the century has been the hiring of hundreds of thousands of young men at rotten wages to be in the military and relieve pressure on the American labor force that is still too great for our economy. This trick is a makeshift, however, and will not last. Economists and JFK deny this but know better.
Foreign aid must remain one of our primary considerations. It is great stuff. We need all of it we can get! Unless some of the foreign countries start sending us some money, we should quit being friends with them. We have tried for years and years to buy their friendship and have failed. Why not let them try to buy ours for a change? They could even use OUR money for that purpose.
The Cuban situation promises to remain interesting. Castro beat us in a trade the other day. He got millions of dollars worth of food and medicines (possibly even some small arms, though no one said so) in exchange for some of HIS countrymen whom he didn’t like anyway. From his point of view, he beat us. From our point of view, we are the happy recipients of a lot of mouths to feed and a great horde of Spanish-speaking recruits to add to the ranks of our vast hordes of native unemployed. It is best, however, to be as humane and understanding as possible, so with this in mind, we ask why in the world didn’t the Cubans head for one of their neighboring Latin American countries instead of Florida in the first place. It would have been much the same anyway. We are also trying to be sugar daddies to ALL of Latin America – lately, that is!
The Berlin situation is constant. It cost the Bolsheviks $25 million to build the wall there, and it only seems reasonable that WE should do our part and stand guard over it. We are doing so. (The Bolshevik party seized power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917 and was later renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.)
God Bless
Patricia Richards Harris, President
Doddridge County Historical Society