By Bill Frazer
We daughters are helping Bill with his articles while he is rehabbing his hip and bragging on his guitar skills to any nurse that walks in the room. Though we’ve been editing his articles for the past couple of years (somewhere around the time he wanted to say exactly what he thought about politics) he is very clear about what he wants to write about. This week he asked Tina, daughter #3, to print a few stories she wrote about him decades ago. They still stand, and here is one of them.
My dad, being a child of the Depression, has never understood the onslaught of plastic water bottles. He even wrote a column and pointed out that a high-end bottled water at the gas station cost as much as a gallon of gas. He isn’t sure what high-end water even means, but he knows my mom always insists on Callaway Blue which is about 10% more than Kroger-brand water and 100% more than tap water. But even if my dad is aggravated with the cost of bottled water, it is the waste of plastic and piling up of trash that drives him crazy.
If you know my dad, then you know he is quite thrifty. We never ate out much as a family, even on the road. On our annual trip to visit relatives in central Florida, mom would pack a cooler with milk and cereal. Since we usually left at 5:30 am to avoid traffic, we would find ourselves just across the Florida/Georgia line in time for breakfast. We’d pull into the welcome center, get our free small cup of orange juice, and then proceed to eat Frosted Flakes out of paper bowls on top of our station wagon.
If we did visit a restaurant, three rules ALWAYS applied—1) no appetizers 2) no desserts 3) only water to drink.
Dad always valued quantity over quality. On our trip to the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, we ate at Duff’s Cafeteria for 3 days straight due to their “All You Can Eat” food bar. At Disney World, we would load up on the hotel breakfast bar and then be given $5.00 each to spend for the rest of the day. Even in the 1970s, five dollars does not go far at Disney World. I can remember saving for the grape juice popsicle and eating a plain hamburger for the rest of the day.
At a forestry convention in Williamsburg, VA, the hotel advertised an “all you can eat” seafood buffet for the participants. We didn’t eat the whole day so we could justify the price for supper. We couldn’t believe our dad was going to splurge; this was going to be the fanciest dinner our family had ever seen. It was a total bust! I was very young, but I can still remember the disappointment on my dad’s face.
But Dad got it right regarding water. And Dad got it mostly right regarding careless spending. We were able to go on trips because he economized. We are familiar with the saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But what about the saying that you can teach a new dog old tricks? I think that our current generation could learn LOTS from some old dogs. Maybe the new generation could pick up on what our fathers knew a long time ago: live within your means.