You can say to yourself, after looking at these pictures, that wow, skates in the 1937-38 Eaton’s catalog were only a couple of bucks, sticks a buck or less, sweaters just two bucks or so, and jock straps at $1.95 for top of the line Protex.
Beats those $350 sticks and $800 skates and all that.
But the average wage then hovered around fifty cents an hour and folks had just suffered through the Dirty Thirties. A buck or 50 cents was still a lot, unless your name was Babe Ruth or John Dillinger.
And instead of buying shin pads for 98 cents, more often than not, kids strapped on these Eaton’s catalogs for free and they worked just fine.