A parking meter that didn’t take pennies? It was an outrage, 50 years ago

In the fall of 1967, a city council committee voted to remove orange-colored parking meters from some downtown street corners in La Crosse, because the smallest coin those meters would take was a nickel.  One council member said five-cent meters were a “stab in the back” for La Crosse merchants.  But the head of the meter department said a nickel meter was designed as a way to assure quick turnover in those parking stalls.  
 
Lots of things were much cheaper in ’67, including soda pop.  The Pop Doc store was close to the river, on Division Street.  At the Pop Doc, you could buy a case of two dozen 16-ounce bottles of soda for $1.35.  You could buy cola or several other flavors including strawberry and chocolate pop.
 
Medical history was made in December of ’67, when South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant.  Grocer Louis Washkansky received the heart of a younger woman who had been killed in a traffic accident, and he lived for 18 days.  Today, more than three thousand heart transplants are done around the world in a typical year…but the first one happened 50 years ago, 1967, yesterday in La Crosse.