Compare Spencer Love's, Mickey Mantle's and Jim Tatum's pay with counterparts of today.
The average American can only dream of making $140,000 a year.
But considering that today's top corporate executives make that much and more in a week, not including bonuses and perks, it doesn't seem outlandish. Many middle managers make that much or more now.
Of course, $140,000 in the '50s would be worth far more today. But even so, the amount didn't provoke public outrage when the Southern Textile News revealed that Burlington Industries CEO J. Spencer Love's salary in 1955 was $140,000. Only one other executive made more than $100,000. Charles Myers Jr., who would succeed Love as Burlington's chief upon Love's death in 1962, made only $47,500. Ed Zone, one of Love's right hand men who would help mediate an end to the sit-ins in 1960s, made $57,250.
The public reaction to Love's pay was acceptance. While a tyrant as a boss, Love didn't resemble the robber barons of 50 years before, such as Andrew Carnegie. Those guys built large industries and racked in millions for themselves doing so and like like royalty.
Love was also unlike executives today who make millions regardless of performance. If fired, they walk away with "golden parachutes" worth millions.
Bonuses were paid in the 1950s, but no one with Burlington who had a lousy year got one. The executive most likely was fired, with no golden parachute.
The consensus in the 1950s was that Love probably deserved his pay and whatever perks. He founded Burlington in 1923 with a handful of employees and built it by the 1950s into the world's largest textile companies with 147 plants in the United States and abroad.
Burlington Industries spread money around Greensboro for good causes. Residents took pride, too, in a hometown company being a key sponsor of one of the most popular TV shows of the era, the Ed Sullivan Show.
Ed, his shoulders hunched was always promising "a mighty big shew'' tonight, probably made a mighty bit more than Love. Inflated pay always has been part of show biz.
But was Sullivan or Love more vauable that New York Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle, an American icon on the baseball field in the 1950s? The Mick balked at reporting to spring
training in 1956. He wanted more dough than the Yankees were offering.
He finally inked a deal paying him $30,000 for the season. Mediocre Major Leaguers now make that in one game.
Finally, there was Jim Tatum, the Maryland Terrapins coach who led the team to the Orange Bowl (there were only four or five bowls then) at the end of the '55 season.
Tatum had played football at UNC, and Tar Heel alumni began a campaign to lure him from College Park to Chapel Hill for the '56 season.
Articles appeared with the theme come home, big Jim.
He did. It surely took a pile of money as high as the Bell Tower to land him.
But when terms of his contract were revealed, his state salary amounted to $15,000 a year.
Current UNC coach John Bunting, with a lackluster record entering his sixth season, pulls in about $650,000 a year, with his base salary in the $200,000 plus range. The other moeny comes from shoe deals, a TV show and various sources.
Tatum may have had other income, but he also may have had to live on his state pay. Lucrative side deals weren't that plentiful for coaches back then. Nike was still years from being born.
But all things are relative. It's hard to compare eras. Still, mediocrity seems to have it rewards now in ways that would have been unacceptable in the 1950s.