Apologies for the images but my belt is long gone
It was one thing to work summers in a small town during college as a GS-5. With cheap park housing and a uniform allowance -- I made enough money to buy contact lenses. However, working full time for the NPS after college, at the Statue of Liberty, where there was no housing available....man, that was a whole new ball game.
Lunch was a can of tuna fish. I could get a week out of a can of Dinty Moore by stretching it with rice from the corner bodega. And beer, a $2 six - pack staple, turned into a luxury afforded only on the 1st and 15th of each month. My first night in NYC, I held up a six pack of Schlitz to the owner of the bodega and asked how much - - since nothing had a price. "Six dollars," he replied. I put it back and thought, "Welcome to Manhattan" and grabbed a quart of Blatz for two bucks.
Schlitz was my pay day beer then but Strohs was the beer of choice among most rangers. I'm not sure if that's because they all seemed to be from the Midwest or not. Last weekend, I was patrolling the beer isle in one of those football field NJ liquor stores and found Schlitz for $5 a 12 pack. When I thought back to the price in 1984...it just boggled my mind.
That other belt is an NPS western tooled sequoia pine cone belt. It was always the 'secret hand shake' among NPS employees. Telling a ranger at another park that you were a ranger was far too vulgar. Instead, you wore this belt (which is hard to miss) and a ranger was sure to ask if you worked for the park service. This would lead to a conversation about whether their park was hiring seasonals, had housing and what a 6 pack of Schlitz might set you back.
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