Man, that snake bite must have hurt, but it sure has made for a great intro shot!

That is really cool those two things have lasted for so long, but also that your parents have treated their items well which has contributed to them lasting so long. What's crazy is that the products they bought back then probably didn't cost much more than they do today, but because of the purchasing power that has been lost to inflation over the last 45 years, the quality has had to decrease to keep up with the prices. Something has to give, and since the inflation is happening, if the price is the same... the quality or quantity is decreased.

EDIT:
I looked at the purchasing power chart of a dollar over time since 1913 and in 1973 (45 years ago) the dollar still had around $0.25 of purchasing power per dollar. Now we're at less than $0.04 of purchasing power per dollar. That means the purchasing power of a dollar then was approximately 6.25 time greater than now. Not difficult to see why the prices have gone up and the quality has gone down.