Ralph Kramden's salary was sixty-two dollars a week. (Sixty-two dollars a week!) And that was in 1956 or so - and more importantly, in New York. I bet Albuquerque prices would be a helluva lot cheaper than New York so that $60 would go pretty far.
I want the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.
Right. Tatum's annual salary would have been $3120. I knew people who told me they made around $3500 in New York City in the early 50s -- even someone who began his career in finance making $4500 in 1969 -- '69, not '59 or '49. And I knew people in Missouri in the mid-1970s making only $5000 a year. Tatum's salary was also about typical for a newspaperman in that era, even in bigger cities (maybe about $1000 less than in NYC or Chicago). So no question, he was doing all right with that money, especially in Albuquerque.
And remember, in trying to get the job he was eventually willing to go down to $40 per -- only $2080 a year! That was low even for 1951.
Not really. Sixty a week in 1950 would be about $30,000 in 2016 dollars. But stuff was cheaper back then, and they didn't have cable or satellite TV to pay for, or smart phones, WiFi or home theatres. It truly was a simpler time.
shareWell, while stuff was cheaper back then, wages and prices are all relative, so the dent in one's income is relatively similar. Even so, $60 was about a normal salary, which means enough to live on but without much room for frills. $30,000 today is tight just as $3000 was in 1951, and as far as things we have now that they didn't have back then, you can live without cable, and certainly without home theaters, but you pretty much do need a computer or smart phone. Medical costs are probably the real killer in terms of increasing out of control.
In Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment, Jack Lemmon's weekly take-home pay is about $94 a week, or about $4900 a year, and again, in much-more-expensive New York City, and almost a decade later than Douglas's salary in Ace. So such salaries seem in keeping with actual norms for the time: decent, average, but with little leeway. Yet people managed to raise families on such salaries.
$30,000 in Albuquerque today is only tight if you are blowing money all the time on a regular basis. Today's real income for people is about $12,000 a year here. Tatum would had done well, moneywise.
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