#ThrowbackThursday – It was the year 1984 …
It's Throwback Thursday here at the News, so it's time to take the nostalgia machine back to 1984.
The year 1984 doesn’t only feel like a lifetime ago, it seems more like another universe.
It marked the second year for the Krugersdorp News, or Krugersdorp Nuus in those days, and the paper was well on its way to becoming a behemoth in our society.
Back then the paper included a crossword puzzle, a colouring-in section and the weekly Ster-Kinekor drive-in film line-up. An outing to the drive-in would have cost you only R6 per car (that could easily be for the whole family!).
The movie line-up for one week included the acclaimed Jaws 3-D, James Bond’s Never Say Never, John Travolta’s Two of a Kind, Superman 3 and Funny People 2. Which one would you have gone to watch first?
The paper also had a special section for women. It featured recipes, such as for macaroni and cheese, and crafts under headings such as Fabric painting is fun and economic. There were articles about Space-age [futuristic] trolleys and tips on how to clean your house in less time. How far we’ve come!
Large school sport photos filled up two whole pages, covering only one story. Nowadays space in the paper is too limited.
Bradlows regularly advertised specials on many of their home appliances. You could pick up a Fuchs 260 litre double door fridge for only R559, a 200 litre chest freezer for R369 and a twin-tub washing machine for as little as R449.
A full set of back-to-school clothes would have set you back no more than R25, and if you spent more than R30 (if you bought everything double, for example) you’d receive a free school shirt.
Eating meat every day was actually a plausible prospect, with prices from R2,68 to R4,38 per kilogram for pure beef mince and steak, boerewors, pork and lamb. Most fruits and vegetables worked out less than R1 per kilogram.
If you were looking at moving out of your parents’ house and buying your own place, you’d have to fork out R45 000 for a two-bedroom flat (back then they didn’t build it small), and a three-bedroom house would cost anything from R70 000 to R120 000.
The past seems like a strange place, and most would say they’d like to go back to simpler times. I wonder, though, how much they would miss their high-speed internet, their favourite social media, fast and safe cars and ‘futuristic’ gadgets they could only dream of in Star Trek and the George Orwell or HG Wells novels.
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