Over the course of life a person gets asked for their birth certificate. Sometimes people have to apply to the courthouse in the county they were born in to get a duplicate. I’m not sure what the cost of that is now but I know it’s gone up over the years. I fortunately have not had to do that but I did misplace my birth certificate once when I needed it. However, I did have the hospital receipt for my birth thinking that should be good enough to show them I was paid for but they failed to see the humor in that. ‘Come back’, they said, ‘when you find your birth certificate or get a duplicate’. Well I did eventually find it again and all is well.
But as I looked at my receipt I marveled at how cheap I was by today’s standards. I will not go into all of that about inflation where 108 dollars and 83 cents in 1953 is actually 5 million dollars and 83 cents in today’s dollars. Let’s just look at it for what it is. At this price, it’s no wonder babies were booming after WWII. Can’t you just hear the radio ad in the late 40’s and early 50’s; ‘For only $108.83 you can get yourself a brand new baby.’ I think I’ve heard an old recording of Cedrick Adams on WCCO doing that exact ad.
I recently added my 7th grandchild to the family on March 29, 2022. I did not ask my son Isaac what the bill was for little Oliver Russell Kleven but if you google average cost of hospital births you get a range from $5000 to $11,000. I’m sure it only goes up from there depending on the amount of care needed. It’s interesting also to note my mom stayed 4 days in the hospital. Today, if mother and baby are doing fine, they get them out the door as soon as possible. I’m not sure but sometimes it’s right from the delivery room to the car as long as the dad remembers to put the new baby seat in the car. He also has to remember to pull up to the front of the hospital.
I’m pretty sure also that the nightly rate for a room at the Hospital Hilton is more than the $11 a night that my parents were charged. I was charged $11 for just looking in a room I was walking by in the hospital. On the receipt for me was a 23¢ charge for a phone. I know my mom got her money’s worth on that. In fact at that time, we had the party line where if one phone rang, it rang in all the neighbors houses up and down the road from the Wencl’s to the Montgomery’s. So she could and probably did talk to all of them in one call to share the good news.
The hospital in Faribault must have known I would be a member of the flower children of the 60’s so they offered to sell my parents some beads. One whole dollar for identification beads which by the way I still have. I don’t wear them anymore as they’re a bit tight around the wrist but they did fit when I first wore them.
When I go up or down highway 56 I comment to myself that if I had a dollar for every time I traveled on this highway, I would be a rich man. My first trip in life was southbound on 56 back to the farm which by the way my parents had just moved to a couple months before I was born. My mom always told me how cold the weather was the day I was born, the day we came home from the hospital and the day of my infant baptism at Hegre Lutheran Church in the middle of January 1954. It was well below zero all of those days I was told. Then my dad would chime in that he always said it’d be a cold day when we have a fourth child. He was right.
