I don’t get it, I am only one year younger than you at 68 but I never worked all those hours without overtime pay, at least not after reaching adulthood. Growing up on the farm we didn’t know there was a difference between living and making a living, we just stayed busy and when I entered the Navy straight out of high school I was guaranteed sixty nine whole dollars a month starting pay and the Navy owned me for that.
I received my honorable discharge and entered the civilian work force in 1965 and I worked more than forty hours sometimes but I was always paid for the overtime hours. The longest hours I ever worked on an hourly paid job came after I had shut down the business I had run for twenty years and went back to work for a corporation in an effort to obtain medical insurance for my wife. I worked over sixty hours many weeks and once hit ninety hours. This was all within the past ten years.
Did you have an “exempt” job way back when? Is that why you didn’t get overtime?
Out here in flyover country we never heard of overtime. When I went to work for UPS in i971 was the first time I had ever heard of overtime.