When my husband returned home from the Navy at the end of World War ll in 1945, jobs were easy to find. No experience was necessary for most of them. The first job this farm boy found was in a nearby factory machining automobile crankshafts for the Detroit car companies. He was still working there when I met him in 1947. With no experience as a machinist, he was soon looking for another job. Machinist training would have been an excellent use of his GI Bill, but that was not to be.

My husband's name was Kenneth, but everybody called him “Pug.” His pug nose as a child reminded his family of a character in a 1930s comic strip. He would be Pug all his life. With only farming experience, he looked for something he would feel comfortable in. That turned out to be a job at the local lumber company where my two cousins worked as well. He would be there five years.

Pug's wages never increased during that time. Eighty-five cents an hour seems like slave wages today, but it was all right back then. No income tax was taken out and the Social Security deduction was minimal. With my wages at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company we would build a house on the build-as-you-had-money plan.

The work at the lumber yard was hard. Most homes in the area were heated with coal. Coal came to the lumber yard in a railroad box car. It was unloaded by hand, shovel by shovel. The coal part of the business fell to Pug. He shoveled it from the box car to the coal truck, then from the coal truck to the homeowner's basement. All for eighty-five cents an hour.

That wasn't the only hard task that fell to him. He also unloaded bags of cement and plaster from those boxcars. There came the time when it was too much for him. Pug looked for another job. He found it in a factory making automobile undercoating and caulking. He would work there until it closed in 1969. The work was much easier.

A few weeks after he quit, the owner of the lumber yard came to our house. He wanted Pug to return to work there. He couldn't find anyone else to shovel coal. Pug asked if there would be a raise in pay. There wouldn't. He wanted Pug back at the same money. Pug politely told him that he would not return.

During the years he worked there, Pug had been given a ten per cent reduction in the cost of materials he bought at the lumber yard. He was required to buy all our building materials there. That deduction wasn't worth it. Working in a factory at a higher rate of pay, he could buy lumber wherever he liked.

Things changed dramatically after the war. Wages went up, working conditions improved, but income tax became a way of life. Can you imagine not paying any federal income tax? But could you imagine working for eighty-five cents per hour? For a forty hour week that figured out to be thirty-four dollars a week.