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KUDZU : KUDZU LIFE

Grandparents Then vs. Us Now

Charlie Berens | January 22, 2026

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This post currently has 34 comments.

  1. @BreeBadger

    January 22, 2026 at 10:53 pm

    My grandparents were all farm kids that were born in the Great Depression. There wasn't anything they couldn't fix or patch! And I also have no idea how they managed to cram all that stuff into their tiny little house. Grandma kept that house hella clean too! You'd never guess by just visiting that they had so much stuff stashed away in every little nook and cranny! Sure, I knew Grandpa had like every possible spare part imaginable in his shed, but I had always assumed Grandma kept the house like minimalist clean. Nope. Every drawer, cupboard, etc was just full of all kinds of things – including parts for old vacuum cleaners that broke decades before I was born.

    Although my favorite thing that I found when we cleaned out their house was a hospital receipt from when my Grandpa broke his leg in the late 1940s. They charged him $20 for his emergency room visit and cast (I can't remember if it said whether or not he got an X-Ray). Sure, that was back when he was only making a bit over $1 an hour, but uh… Yeah. Half a week's wages for an ER visit would be really nice… As opposed to the one and half month's wages I was billed when I went to the ER only for them to tell me they couldn't do anything and send me home (which means the bill didn't even have all the overpriced addons like bandages, blood work, pregnancy test, etc on it).

    Edit: I should add that that particular ER visit was when I had a decent paying office job. At the average wages I've gotten working retail? It would have been… at least 3 month's wages for that ER visit.

  2. @rat_lover-76

    January 22, 2026 at 10:53 pm

    They wouldnโ€™t have said niner. The whole point of using niner in the place of saying nine is to make sure that German NATO radio operators can understand that they are not saying nein as in no in German.

  3. @xanthosic9595

    January 22, 2026 at 10:53 pm

    My grandpa flew planes for the military until he retired, then flew for Northwest for another 20. A couple days ago I had to explain to him, again, that you canโ€™t give out your credit card number just because the guy on the phone tells you to.

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