Back during our teenage days at S.D. Lee, we would spend our weekend nights cruising around Columbus. Just cruisin’, cruisin’, cruisin’. Doing nothing constructive. Maybe, if someone in the car had a few bucks and their older brother would get it for you, drinking … six-packs of Budweiser.

Hit all our friends’ houses … maybe take a spin around MSCW to see what there was to see. The Hormone Tour. Motor on down Main Street. It was North Mississippi’s version of American Graffiti — but sometimes halfway to an “R” version.

We were driving big, gas-guzzling cars of every variety. A fill-up would burn out of the tank like being sucked into a black hole. Then we’d just squeal up to whatever gas station was handy. Problem solved. Drive … repeat. Drive … repeat. And so on all night.

Do I hear gasps? A younger person reading this (as if!) would either laugh at that old guy’s dumb joke or be in shock. People above a certain age would be getting out their blood pressure machines.

Were we rolling in cash? Did one of our dads own Shell Oil? How did we do it?

With pocket change.

I remember paying 25 cents a gallon when I first got a driver’s license. We would hand whoever was driving … all our pocket change. Throughout the night, we would accumulate more change. And so on.

People will argue that it’s “just inflation” and that wages are more, so it evens out. So I did a little digging. That’s slightly bending reality.

During my Class of 1968 days, I could buy a Burger King Whopper and a small drink for about 55 cents. And it was BIG and tasted like good hamburger meat. Most of the chains’ food was like that. Remember Burger Chef on 82?

Recently, while out doing errands, my device beeped that my sugar was very low. So I pulled into a BK (which I almost never do anymore) and ordered that same Whopper and small drink.

It was about the diameter of a roll of Scotch tape and tasted like someone had taken a piece of cardboard and accidentally set it on fire. The surly, non-English-speaking counter person flopped it on a tray that they might have cleaned every other week. Maybe.

My tab: $9.98 — over $10 with tax. Back in ’68, you could buy a pound of sirloin steak with your dollar and get 15 cents change (which we teenagers saved for buying gasoline: see above).

That year you could buy a fairly decent new car for about $2,900. And we had some damn good cars. If you inflate from the scale, those dollars would magically become $26,869 — what you would have to spend now on your imaginary car.

Today, if you walked into a dealership and you told them that’s what you have to spend, the salesmen would all go on lunch break and hope you were gone later.

Here in Florida, where I am held captive, we have golf carts with higher price tags.

If I could crank up my time machine and carry some cash back with me, I would skip buying the newest iPhones for us now. Instead, I would attend Harvard for a year with the $2,000 I didn’t spend. Quite a bargain compared with tuition in 2026.

$86,926. Eighty-six thousand nine hundred twenty-six dollars.

“They” (conspiracy theory alert) hand us a bunch of busy, busy, busy data and say, “Well, you know … wages go up … prices go up. It’s just inflation!”

It ain’t just about the numbers on the computer screen — which, even then, don’t match up that well with the wage-price comparison they push.

The goods, the services, the food, the cars. They’re not of the same quality or quantity. (Especially the Harvard degree. Look around Washington.)

How do you put weight on that?

Thom Caraccio ([email protected]) is a retired musician and retired motion picture scenic artist living in West Palm Beach, Florida who hails from Columbus. He graduated from S.D. Lee High in 1968 and still considers Columbus his real hometown.