The War on Poverty - Growing Up Poor

We hear a lot about helping the poor; the War on Poverty, helping those who are less fortunate than ourselves, making allowance for someone because he grew up poor. Well, I grew up poor and I can tell you about it. Don't misunderstand me, please. I didn't know I was poor. I didn't miss the things I didn't have and my parents did the best that they could for us; my sister, my brothers and I. I never had to go to bed hungry. I never had reason to doubt that my parents loved me. Our family was not the poorest of the poor, but we were still poor.

I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks; literally. There was a set of railroad tracks that we had to cross to get to school, or go to the doctor, or buy groceries. Those tracks separated us from just about everything that was something, except for church. We didn't have to cross the tracks to get to church. And we didn't have to cross the tracks to learn about neighborliness, or security, or love.

My father was born just before the Great Depression started, and just missed having to go serve in World War II, but our country had a place for him a few years later; he went to Korea instead. He always took a great deal of pride for having done so, but he seldom told us anything that happened while he was there. The life lessons that he learned by being a part of that generation served him well. That was what some people refer to as, the Generation of Plenty. There were plenty of jobs to go around and plenty of housing, schools and lots of many other things that people need. That didn't mean that all of that generation ended up being wealthy, but the wartime shortages were behind us. Industry was booming, housing was booming, and babies were booming, too.

I was first among my siblings and I was born smack-dab in the middle of the Baby Boom; 1955. There was never enough of anything for us. Hospitals were overflowing with babies, and I had to be born in what was called an infirmary, something I've always taken to be somewhat less than a hospital. When it came time to go to school, there weren't enough schools, and I went to half-day classes in the first grade while they built a new school. When I went to the doctor it was an all day affair because the waiting rooms were so full of other kids who needed to go to the doctor. When I got out of school there weren't enough jobs. Well, let me qualify that one. There were lots of jobs that nobody wanted. OK, enough of that, let's go back to what it is to be poor.

My father came home from the war, married his childhood sweetheart, and built a house for them, so they could start a family. I remember the house having two bedrooms; the summer bedroom and the winter bedroom. In the summer, we slept in a large room at the back of the house, but in the winter the bedroom moved to a smaller room at the front of the house, because that was where the chimney stood. In the winter, my father would put together a pot-bellied stove, I'm not making this up, and he or my mother would build a fire in the morning to keep us warm all day. At night, while we slept, the fire would burn out and it would get very cold, so we slept under piles of blankets and quilts. The heat didn't travel very well into the rest of the house, so the very back was hung with thick curtains to retain the heat in the first room and the kitchen and bath that were in the middle. To me, this was just the natural order of things, not a hardship. We migrated according to the seasons of the year. In summer, the front room was the living room and the back room was the bedroom and in winter the roles were reversed. All of my neighborhood friends had similar arrangements.

Lest you think that he must have been well-off, for having property to build a house on, or the means to build it with, I'd better tell you this. He built the house, one room at a time, out of scrap lumber and other materials that someone else was throwing away, or otherwise had no use for, and he built it in the back yard of my grandparents' home. I grew up refering to this as "the little house", and my grandparents lived in "the big house". The little house had the advantage of having an indoor bathroom, but it was exactly that. It contained a bathtub and a sink, with the water pipes running around the walls, but no commode. For that function, we still had to go to the other house on the property, the outhouse, until I was ten years old. Of course, you don't run a water heater on coal, or coal-oil, so you could mostly fill the tub with cold water, but you had to heat water on a stove to add to this before it was warm enough to take a bath in. At the time, this was still an advantage, because the big house only had one water faucet, and it was in the kitchen; no bathroom at all. There was not even a sink in the kitchen, just a faucet. To wash dishes you had to put a pan on the counter under the faucet to catch the cold water and add some water that you had boiled on the cookstove. Even this was a bit more than most our neighbors had because most of them got water out of a hand pump and carried water in buckets for washing and cooking and drinking. There is still one room of that little house standing on the property, where my mother still lives, but it's now used for storage and should probably be torn down.

Later, we got a coal-oil fired space heater with a built-in fan. For those who don't know what coal-oil is, think of kerosene, it's much the same thing. It was much more efficient that burning wood or coal in the pot-bellied stove, but if we ran out of fuel we couldn't just go chop on a tree or something; we had to go across the tracks to the service station with a can to get some more fuel oil. Those tracks were a mile away, and I can remember at least once that my father had to walk in the snow with a five-gallon can to get fuel. I'm sure he had to do that more than once, but this one is a distinct memory for me. See, that's one part of being poor. Sometimes you have to make difficult choices. We had a car, but sometimes the best answer was to walk, even through the snow. Do I drive out for fuel to keep my family warm and then figure out how to get to work tomorrow, or do I walk more than a mile each way and drive to work so I can get paid? For my father, it was not even a question; his family needed and he had no guarantee that he could get to work without the car, so he walked.

It's just occurred to me that some people might not know what a service station is. Up until about 25 - 30 years ago, service stations were plentiful. It was the place where you went to get gasoline for your car, but it was so much more. When you drove into a service station, you would pull up to the gas pump (often, there was only one) and someone, or even a team of people, would come out to put gas in your tank for you. While you waited, he would wash your windows, check the air pressure in your tires, check to see if you had enough oil and water, and sometimes, brake fluid, then he would collect your money and send you away with a smile. While he was doing that, you could go inside and buy snacks, pick up a map if you needed one, go to the restroom, pick up small supplies for your car if you needed them; such things as bulbs for your brake lights and things to hang from your rear-view mirror. This was also the place where you would bring your car if it was in need of repairs that you couldn't make yourself, or buy tires or fanbelts or other such things. In the 1960s it was popular with them to give you a number of "trading stamps" related to the amount of your purchase. These trading stamps were collected in books by you, the customer, and you could trade a certain amount of full books for real items that you could use. I got my first baseball bat and glove this way, when I was about twelve years old. Towards the end of the 1970s they started calling these "full service stations" and now, they are almost, if not in fact, non-existant

My father had what most people in our neighborhood considered to be a good job. He had a dream once, of becoming an over-the-road truck driver, but he gave that up for us. He worked in a factory for more than thirty years and retired, because that meant that he would always have a paycheck. The family would always have food, and heat, and the things that really matter. I didn't even know about the truck driver thing until after I grew up and left home. He never made us carry the burden of his abandoned dreams.

The family grew, and grew, and grew, and we ended up being a family of six children with loving parents. When times got a little better for us, my mother would buy snack cakes to put in my father's lunchbox every day. I don't know of a single time that he actually ate one of them though. When he came home from work we kids would rush to him, and his lunchbox, and there would be that cake inside. My mother divided it amongst us, as near as possible, into equal shares and we would devour them. There weren't always cakes in the lunchbox, because there weren't always cakes to put in it to begin with, but as often as not there was something inside. I've often wondered how many times my father may have traded one of his precious sandwiches for a piece of fruit that someone else had brought for lunch. I say "precious" because sometimes he came home without a lunchbox, meaning that he had worked all day without having a lunch to look forward to. As time went on, those little treats got smaller and smaller, as they had to be divided into smaller pieces in order to have enough to go around.

The word "treats" makes me think of gifts. I can't remember a single Christmas or Easter or a birthday, when we didn't have gifts. Easter gifts came, of course, in the form of a basket of candy and colored eggs, but we always had a new suit of clothes at Easter, to wear to church on easter Sunday. On birthdays, there was always a cake that my mother had baked and frosted herself, and gifts. Often, those gifts came wrapped in brown paper, probably the very paper sack that it had been placed in by the bagger at the store where it was purchased. Once, I remember that a neighbor friend of mine came to my birthday and brought my gift inside a potato sack; it was a triple-layered, brown paper bag with a net window in it. I didn't care about that; it was still a gift and I got to open it. Christmas was the big one. We always had gifts "From Santa" and gifts from "Mom & Dad" and a stocking (usually one of my father's socks) full of fruit and nuts for each of us. In later years, I found out that my parents had ordered these gifts from one of the many mail-order companies, months in advance, and that they struggled through the rest of the next year to pay for them; then it was time to order again. Gifts for other occasions were unheard of. I didn't get gifts at my baptism, or for good report cards, or when I moved from grade school to high school, or when I got my driver's license, or any of the many things that kids today get. (There's that thing again. My mother went from grade school to Junior high school, but by the time I got that far all of the junior high schools had been converted to serve as either a grade school or a high school. They still called it junior high when I got there, but it was the same building from 7th to 12th grade, with no separation between the two. I was a junior high student in the 7th and 8th grades and then, with no noticable difference, I was a high school student.) But I didn't miss them either. None of my friends got those things and I didn't get those things, and if someone at school happened to say something about what they got on one of those occasions I just thought that their parents were weird; throwing gifts at him or her at the smallest excuse.

Still, it may sound like I had a lot of toys, and I guess I did really, but I also remember playing games with my cousins. For "Cops & Robbers" we often used sticks for guns and pretended to have a badge and handcuffs. Our swing set, sliding board, sandbox and teeter-totter were all built by hand, out of whatever materials were available. I remember that my cousin rode her tricycle until the tire wore out. At first, it had a small hole in it and then the hole got bigger, until there was a groove all the way around the hard-rubber tire. I remember playing Monopoly with a set that was so worn that you could only tell the denominations of the money by the color of the paper. I remember going out at Halloween with a paper sack and a ten-cent plastic mask. I remember being excited if someone came visiting with a soft drink in hand; the bottle was worth two cents and, if that person left it, I could trade it in for two cents worth of candy. My uncle once gave me a nickle and I thought I had the world in my hand because there was still two-for-a-penny candies; more than I could eat without getting sick.

My mother had a sewing machine and she used it a lot when I was growing up. Many of my shirts, at least, and my sister's dresses came off of that machine. It was one of those that had a big, wide peddle at the bottom. She had to keep that peddle going with her foot to make the neddle go up and down. Years later, she got an electric sewing machine with a button-hole attachment. There were only two times during the year that we got new clothes. Our Easter suits and our school clothes; we each got three new outfits at the beginning of the school year, and a pair of new shoes, and I didn't start school until I was six years old. Well, sometimes we got a new suit of clothes in our Christmas gifts as well, but these weren't always store-bought either. Sometimes, they came off of that sewing machine. My mother made her own curtains and pillow cases and, yes, dresses and skirts and blouses.

We were one of a few families that had a television in our home before 1960. It was a big piece of furniture, probably near two feet square on top and almost four feet high. Still, it had a picture tube that was likely a 27-inch, or there about, so think roughly the size of four laptop screens put together. It was black & white, and had only two channels to choose from. Sometimes, my father had to fiddle with the "rabbit-ears" antenna for several minutes to get a picture. I didn't see my first color television until I was about ten years old, in a friend's house. The historians among you will say, "There were color TVs long before 1965," and that's true, but I hadn't seen one. I knew about them, in theory, because my mother told me that, "A color TV shows things the way they are; if a man is wearing a blue suit, it looks blue." There was not a color set in my parents' home until some years after I moved out, and not in my own home until about 1975, when I got one second-hand from a friend for doing some work for him.

There were a lot of things that came to you back then. You could have bread and milk delivered to your house. On the bread truck there were also pastries and pies and cakes and such, and on the milk truck there was icecream, but we hardly ever bought any of that stuff. We usually only got the bread and milk. My mother washed our diapers herself (no Pampers back then) until my brother next-to-last came along, then she had a diaper service pick them up and drop off clean, fresh ones. There was the TV repairman, the insurance man, the door-to-door salesman (Many of these; the Fuller Brush man, the Hoover salesman, the photographer, the guy who had drink mixes, the one who sold magazine subscriptions,...). All of these had a service or product to offer and many of them would allow you to put a dollar down and pay a dollar a week. Of course, every week they would be offering to show the new thing that had just come out and, "Would you like to buy one? It's only a dollar now and an additional dollar each week..." Well, it didn't take long for those dollars to add up to more than my family could afford each week and my father put a stop to it, or most of it. Sometime before that I can remember a day when someone was knocking on the door and my mother and I hid from whoever it was, being very quiet. This person was very persistant and didn't stop knocking for what seemed to be a long time. I know now that it was someone coming to collect a weekly payment and that my father wasn't due to be paid for another day or two. We were out of money and she didn't want to have to face this man and tell him so. Of course it was a man; all of these people were men. Avon was in business back then, and their sales people were women, but my mother didn't throw away money on such things as makeup. The most I ever saw her wear was some lipstick, and then only on rare and special occasions.

When my grandmother died, (grandfather preceded her a couple of years before) we moved into the big house. It had all of three rooms and still had only the one water faucet in the kitchen. I was six years old. I went to school one day and when I came home I found an empty house. My father built that up, one room at a time, into a pretty amazing structure with all of the modern conveniences. By the time I left home and started my own family it had everything you could want except central air, and it has that now, too.

In all of those years I never knew that I was poor. I had everything I could want and more. It was only later that I looked back and saw the truth for what it was. I guess that's because I never lacked for the things that matter. I was never really hungry, I never felt unloved or uncared for, and I had an abundance of playmates, my siblings if no one else. We learned to share and to care about each other. Even to this day, and even if we are at odds with each other, if one of us needs something there is always someone to turn to. I guess my parents did something right along the way, because not one of us is an alcoholic or a drug adict or in prison or the grave. We all have families of our own now, and most of us have grandchildren that we care about very much. I guess, being poor is not the definition of a person or the depth of that person's character. I think it has more to do with the guidence received and whether that guidence was founded in love.