Jan 23, 2024 4 min read

By Nick Jacobs

One of our university professors regularly sponsored European theater tours. My wife, who was in theater productions all through college and later worked in Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s professional summer theater program, suggested that we take a trip with him. It was during the holiday break of 1969, and the trip included Holland, France, and England.

​We were both teachers, and our combined salaries came to about $13,500. This trip cost us $300 each. That amount included all airfare between the U.S. and Europe, lodging, at least two meals a day, and transportation between the airports and hotels. It also included tours in Holland, Paris, and three theatrical productions in London. But that’s not all. Because there was no European Union or Euro, the dollar was extremely strong with a buying power of nearly $1.24 for every U.S. dollar.

​Before your head explodes, that $600 in 2024 money would be about $5,200 now, and the $13,500 that we were making in combined salaries would amount to just short of $116,500 in purchasing power today.

So, back to my story.

​My father-in-law was an infamous, nationally recognized, world-renowned connoisseur of beer. Short of one of our current Supreme Court justices, he loved his beer as much as or more than anyone I’ve ever known. Because of that, and because we were missing our families and the holidays completely that year, he asked me for a personal gift, a few six-packs of Dutch beer.

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Since I had just graduated from college a few months earlier, my beer knowledge was limited to the cheapest beer a college student could afford to buy. But the fact that he wanted Dutch beer seemed like a perfectly reasonable gift. That was the good news. The bad news was that Amsterdam was our very first stop on the trip.

​That meant I’d be carrying beer for the next 10 days. Yes, I was young and naïve, but I was also a new son-in-law who wanted to impress him. You see, I had a very limited ability to communicate intelligently about most sports and had no understanding of what it was like to be an ironworker. But beer? I could do beer. Consequently, I made a solemn vow to get him his Christmas beer.

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We landed in Amsterdam early in the morning, went to our hotel, and began searching for Dutch beer. As soon as I found some, I bought it, put it in a gym bag, and carried it with me to Paris and London. We also decided to buy some alabaster Greek statues, hand-painted ashtrays for our relatives who smoked, wooden, hand-carved statuettes, a small oil painting from Montmartre, Paris, and a few scarves.

​Because my wife and I were both professionals, we began buying European clothing that would have been much more expensive in America. We also had packed only clothes that we didn’t want to keep. So, everywhere we went, we bought something and left something behind. It was a good solid plan. A three-piece, tailor-made suit in London was $50. And wigs? Well, wigs and maxi skirts and coats were big in 1969, and my wife loaded up on them.

As we were landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, I saw a billboard on the road near the runway for Heineken beer. I had purchased Heineken beer for my father-in-law and carried it all through Europe. When he saw it, he laughed and said, “I could have bought the same beer in Carnegie,” but he loved it and drank a warm can of suds right at the airport.

​When we opened our suitcases, we had a few more surprises. The alabaster statue gifts for our mothers were smashed to dust, the painting was smeared, and later our new puppy destroyed the carvings and ashtrays, but we had a lifetime of memories, and Pete got two six-packs of Dutch beer.

Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.