PAID A DIME — Sharon Mark Cohen

If you, like me, were raised in the Northeast, in the 1950s and ‘60s, surely you remember the refrain…”Here I sit broken hearted…” If not, ask me about it.

I can still picture my parents scrambling for a dime to pay the 10-cent fee to use most public toilets. Although that fee was for use by one person only, somehow, my mother kept the door open so I could use it too.

That thought about paying to use the toilet, came to my mind when I went to a lab and paid $.25 for half an hour parking. That beats my daughter paying $20.00 to park by doctor offices in Los Angeles.

While in the waiting room babbling with the others there about the obnoxiousness of being required to pay for parking, one man responded by saying he just returned from a trip to Mexico where you have to pay to use the public toilets. The man looked to be in his forties.

I asked the friendly chap how much he paid and he said he couldn’t recall exactly since it was in pesos but he thought it amounted to maybe $.20. With that, I went on about the memory from my youth of paying a dime for the use of public toilets here in the States.

In the Northeast, I went on, because I don’t know if they had pay toilets in other parts of the country, for when I was a child, we never left the tri-state area. In my case, that meant New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

That was until we drove to Washington, D.C. for a few days one summer and west to Kansas another year. Ahhh, the memories. In Kansas, I was 16 and on a learner’s permit to drive. Oh, that was a scene.

There were five of us in my brother Al’s manual drive car with as many seats. Our eldest brother was not in tow, and my second oldest brother, Al, decided to take me out one morning for a practice drive.

Two of my “big” brothers escorted me on that drive from the modest hotel chain building to the neighboring farmland. Almost plowing into the neatly lined corn fields ended my desire to learn how to drive a stick shift. After that scare, I probably would remember if I had to look for a dime for a toilet that time.

After visiting 45 states in the United States, and throughout our travels with my husband and children, I can’t recall paying for public toilets anywhere. The couple of times we were in Mexico for a few hours, only to cross the border into Tijuana to experience the change in the terrain, we did not use the bathrooms.

On a visit to France in 2000, celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary, I seem to recall seeing people putting coins in the door to use public bathrooms. Are the other countries learning from us, or will we be following them and reverting to paying to use public toilets?

An update from the internet shows I was correct in my thoughts about the year 2000 in Paris, however, today, “Most public toilets are free since 2006, but the ones in train stations and shopping malls like the Carrousel du Louvre may require a small fee to use. Some brasseries still require a coin to unlock the door (if you don’t have one ask the server for a token, or jeton), but these are far fewer than ten years ago because no one carries coins anymore.”

From plastic to paper bags, back to plastic, the trends keep us on our toes. And, if we can’t find the coins to use the toilet, we’ll surely be dancing on our toes!