I Grew Up Poor
Poor But Sophisticated? This Does Not Compute......
By the time my mother came into her inheritance, I was in my late 30s. My father had two degrees from a very famous university, but simply never got the hang of finding and keeping jobs that paid well. The year he retired was the year I started my career, and I made 30% more than he did. He grew up well off, but his father died when he was a teen. His mother did nothing for my father while she was alive and rich. She died after I had left home, and then left him in her will only 40% of what was rightfully his. (The consolation was that everything he didn't get went to my generation.) When it came to money, my father simply had no luck. About a decade after his death, I came to suspect that he had Asperger's.
My father was a pack rat, and when he died I had to clean out his huge filing cabinet. I found a lot of ridiculous things, going back to the 1940s. But I did not find income tax records going back more than 15 odd years. I now suspect that he never owed much tax, and maybe did not even have to file most years.
Even though I was the oldest child, I grew up wearing a lot of second hand clothes from other families. And new clothes my mother's mom would buy and send to us as care packages. There was always plenty to eat, but there were times when dinner was greasy and bad. I can recall going to the movies only 20 odd times. There was no TV set in the house until I was 12. My father loved classical music, but his records were all scratchy mono LPs from the early 1950s. I later learned that they too were hand me downs, from friends.
The street in front of my boyhood home was unpaved, and the neighbourhood was filled with white trash or people down on their luck. On the other hand, the mortgage cost only $83/month. Gas was 25-30 cents/gallon. My father bought a new car every 5 years or so, but also got told off by his boss that driving the sorts of makes and models he did, did not reflect well on his employer. Health care was OK, because my father's jobs came with health insurance for the entire family.
My parents were near poor alright. But they were also sophisticated, and that put people who were as poor as we were on edge. People around us talked like the Beverley Hillbillies. My father talked like a TV newscaster. People who were as sophisticated as we were, were polite but embarrassed, altho' my mother had good and loyal woman friends, starting with the ones who gave us hand me downs.
But I was privileged to have something that cannot be bought: my parents liked and respected me. That made up for the fact that many boys actively disliked and disrespected me. For having weird parents with weird tastes. For having no talent at team sports. For talking about things they could not follow. For being an immigrant to the USA and having a mother belonging to a despised nationality.
By the time my mother came into her inheritance, I was in my late 30s. My father had two degrees from a very famous university, but simply never got the hang of finding and keeping jobs that paid well. The year he retired was the year I started my career, and I made 30% more than he did. He grew up well off, but his father died when he was a teen. His mother did nothing for my father while she was alive and rich. She died after I had left home, and then left him in her will only 40% of what was rightfully his. (The consolation was that everything he didn't get went to my generation.) When it came to money, my father simply had no luck. About a decade after his death, I came to suspect that he had Asperger's.
My father was a pack rat, and when he died I had to clean out his huge filing cabinet. I found a lot of ridiculous things, going back to the 1940s. But I did not find income tax records going back more than 15 odd years. I now suspect that he never owed much tax, and maybe did not even have to file most years.
Even though I was the oldest child, I grew up wearing a lot of second hand clothes from other families. And new clothes my mother's mom would buy and send to us as care packages. There was always plenty to eat, but there were times when dinner was greasy and bad. I can recall going to the movies only 20 odd times. There was no TV set in the house until I was 12. My father loved classical music, but his records were all scratchy mono LPs from the early 1950s. I later learned that they too were hand me downs, from friends.
The street in front of my boyhood home was unpaved, and the neighbourhood was filled with white trash or people down on their luck. On the other hand, the mortgage cost only $83/month. Gas was 25-30 cents/gallon. My father bought a new car every 5 years or so, but also got told off by his boss that driving the sorts of makes and models he did, did not reflect well on his employer. Health care was OK, because my father's jobs came with health insurance for the entire family.
My parents were near poor alright. But they were also sophisticated, and that put people who were as poor as we were on edge. People around us talked like the Beverley Hillbillies. My father talked like a TV newscaster. People who were as sophisticated as we were, were polite but embarrassed, altho' my mother had good and loyal woman friends, starting with the ones who gave us hand me downs.
But I was privileged to have something that cannot be bought: my parents liked and respected me. That made up for the fact that many boys actively disliked and disrespected me. For having weird parents with weird tastes. For having no talent at team sports. For talking about things they could not follow. For being an immigrant to the USA and having a mother belonging to a despised nationality.
70-79, M