Remember the “good old days” when you could enroll in a university for $35 to $100 per quarter, buy sirloin steak for 50 cents a pound, and occupy a hospital room for six bucks a day? Salaries, like costs, have risen sharply since then – thank goodness! But tt’s still fun to reminisce about that “almost new” 1927 Chev touring car twith the balloon tires, remember?) for $375 cash. And the movies you once attended for 10-15 cents matinee and Z0-E cents evening. Ho11ywood’s stars in the silent pictures era, you’ll recall, include Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, Tom Mix, Marie Dressler, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Norma Shearer, Janet Gaynor, Warner Baxter, etal. An old copy of the Boston Globe of 1915 (which goes hack further than most people’s memories) advertised women’s dresses for $2.% and women’s suits “especially for ladies of Boston” $5.99. Oh yes – and corsets. 50 cents a pair. A neighbor, Cathryn Sorenson, recently unearthed a 1947 receipt from the Cache Valley General Hospital of lagan. Utah where her first child was bom. ‘1’he bill was $86.50 – and that was alter the World War ll price increases. The total included $10 for delivery room, $’1.50 for anaesthetic,$2 for lah tests, and $72 for 12 days at $6 per dayl To top oft the story, CatN’YYl Plid both the hospital and her physician in one check. The doc charged $75, bringing the entire rnaterruty bill to $161.50. A normal matemity today might run upward of l1,III’I for mom and baby, depending on the hospltal and facilities That doesn’t include doctor’s fee. And ctnrrent hospital stays frequently last only about three days. Back in the forties doctors insisted on more lengthy hospital recuperation. College tuition has soared to unforeseen levels since this writer enrolled at Brigham Young University for about $40 a quarter in the mid-thirties. You’d have a hard time “worklng out” your tuition these days at 25 cents per hour as we did back in the Great Depression. An old newspaper for 1947 advertised a sofa for $07.50, Simmons interspring mattress for $32.50, ice cream $1.40 a gallon, wornen’s sheer dresses $9.59, men’s work shoes $5.00, and a five-piece solid oak breakfast set for $46. Real estate? You could buy a four-room frame home In Boise, 1da. for $8,025 and an elght-room modern brick in Provo., Utah for $12,600. in Mississippi, bt),000 acres of pine pasture land were for sale forh.50 per acre. Grocery-meat market ads for that year showed potato chips Z5 cents (large package), Clteerios 13 cenLs, and bee! roast 45 cents a pound. Twenty years earlier, ads for 1917 showed watermelons at 2 cents a pound, prime hams 19 cente a pound, and rump roast ll cents. A rarity in our ftle is a copy of the Utah Enquirer for March 5,1902 which featured patent medicines of the era, including Joy’s Vegetable Sarsaparilla “for women’s disorders,” a tonic straight from Chicago to make the ladles “as beautiful as Cleopatra,” and Ctnmberlnin’s tablets for heartburn, indigestion, liver, stomach disorders and apparently whatever ailed youl. We sort of miss those entertalng adds of the “Gay Nineties” in today’s newspapers,