When Linda and I were first married we didn't have much money, buy the time we bought groceries and put gas in the tank we were about broke, you might say we lived on love. When we wanted to relax we had to look at things that didn't cost a lot of money. It's true things didn't cost as much back then but based on our pay we often had to pinch pennies.
We could go to the drive-in for fifty cents and buy drinks and popcorn for less than a dollar and fill up the tank on the car for another two or three dollars. Sounds good ? consider that I only made $49 every two weeks and Linda made another $50 every week, our car payment was $50, rent was $100 plus insurance, maintenance, clothes and so on and so forth. So, we found and did things that didn't cost much money.
Take for instance, when we were stationed in San Diego, I would stand extra watches at night for some of the single guys who liked to go to town, they would pay me $5 and I would loan our car to them but they had to bring it back clean and full of gas. We would double with another couple and go to the drive-in, it cost $1 per car load, to cut cost we would pop a grocery bag full of popcorn and buy four quart size bottles of coke for another $1 at the grocery store. Balboa Park and zoo was free and we often doubled with another couple.
Several single guys rented a place on the beach and invited us over one night for a Grunion hunt. At that time I had never heard of a Grunion and had no idea what it was but I soon got an education. Turns out that Grunion are small fish maybe five inches long, when the spawn they do it out of the ocean and usually on a moonlit night. The grunion would come to the beach riding a wave, as the wave receded they quickly bury half their bodies tail first in the sand to lay their eggs. They would go back out to sea with the next wave having deposited their eggs and somehow fertilized them.
Hunting Grunions was a popular thing to do, the beaches would be crowded with people running around barefoot carrying buckets. The waves would be colored silver there were that many fish coming in on each wave and all you had to do was pick them up by the handful. I remember that the air was cool and the water was cooler but the fun we had was worth it. Once we had a supply of the little fish we went inside and broke out a frying pan and cold beers, some sort of oil or maybe lard was heated in the pan and then the fish were dropped in the pan "as is", no de-scaling or gutting of any kind was needed. Just fry them little suckers until they were crisp like french fries and then pop them in your mouth and chew, catsup was optional.
We both had aunts and uncles living in Los Angles and we would spend the weekend with them on occasion, all it cost was gas. We started out when we went up to hock Linda's stereo because we were short of money, we would get $50 for it then Linda would pinch pennies to get it back. We did this a couple of times until Linda's uncle found out and chewed us out, he would lend us money if we needed it. For both of us they were family that we rarely saw growing up and we enjoyed our time with them.
Each time I returned from Vietnam we would get free family passes from Disneyland , we would go spend the weekend with Linda's uncle and aunt. They had a young son named Bobby that was about eight or nine and passed for our kid so we would take him with us. When I was discharged we spent the weekend with our aunts and uncles saying goodbye, it would be the last time we saw Linda's aunt and uncle as they passed away several years later, we never saw Bobby again although he did , for awhile, keep up with a couple of her cousins but nobody has heard of him for years.
At my advanced age I look back on those days and wonder where the time has gone, we had a good life and I'm filled with the memories of it.
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