Looks like 20k of that was just inflation: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=34000&year1=197301&year2=197812 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

Looks like 20k of that was just inflation: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=34000&year1=197301&year2=197812 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=34000&year1=19... While still a lot, I’d suspect it’s quite different from today’s situation.