Let’s Talk About Money

(Gasp!) You know - money – who has it, who doesn’t . Who has more, who has less.

It’s confusing, and often taboo to talk about money. On the one hand there is the myth that the U.S. is a classless society. You know, “all men (snic) are created equal”. And yet we can plainly see inequality all around us.

Now specifically regarding 828. Back in the 1950s, during the Kerber expansion period, our family’s appearance, if you didn’t look too closely, would have been considered middle class. Lower middle, but definitely middle class. Dad worked full time as a baker. Mom did the kids and the house. We presented ourselves as middle class. We had a clean car, clean clothes. We attended school regularly and got good grades; we had bikes and paper routes.

We were only peripherally aware of the “other two” classes. The upper (we called them the rich) lived in north Sidney. Or they had large houses outside of town. The “rich” kids had nicer clothes than us, newer bikes, and seemed to have more confidence in themselves.

The lower class we called “the poor”. They mostly lived in the west side of town and had fewer nice things than us. There weren’t many obviously poor kids at my school, which was a Catholic school. There was a stigma about the west side of Sidney. Poor Caucasians  lived there. We called them hics. And most African-Americans. We called them Negro and colored. Dad (not Mom) called them colored and “coons” on rare occasions would call them worse things, but not with any real emotion behind it. A child of the Depression, Dad grew up in Sidney, a small manufacturing town. Mom grew up in German-Catholic farm country where there were few, if any, African-Americans.

Back to 828. What were we? Certainly not upper. We looked middle, but financially we were lower. Just considering Dad’s paycheck we would have been classified as “poor”. We looked middle class because Dad, and especially Mom, decided that’s who we were. Not that they made any actual decision. That’s just who they were. In this regard they were, on a micro scale, financial geniuses. Their ability to make Dad’s paycheck cover the necessities and a few of the small luxuries for up to fourteen people was (and is) inspiring.

Mom augmented Dad’s paycheck in various ways. There was the garden and hand-me-down clothes, of course. And the neighbors fruit trees. Mom cultivated the benefice of our older neighbors by sending us kids over to sweep their sidewalks in summer and shovel them after a snowfall. And they repaid with fruit. U-pick. Mom’s genius was that she would have sent us to clean their sidewalks even if they didn’t reciprocate with fruit. That’s just who she was. A “globalist” before the word originated. You know, “We’re all in this together.” People recognized that in Mom and Dad, and probably Mom and Dad recognized that in people.

Utilizing other resources, our parents tapped us kids for additional income. When things occasionally got tight we paperboys had to throw a small amount of our collection money into the common fund. When we graduated to a paycheck, she sometimes took a small percentage.

Another part of our parent’s genius was that I don’t remember resenting getting dunned. Or even thinking that it was unfair. Mom kept her “nickel and dime” money in a jar in a kitchen cupboard. I never stole from it, I always had enough change for my daily candy/ice cream fix. I don't think I even thought about stealing from it. 

Earllier I said we really could have been classified as belonging to the economic “lower class”, the poor. Back then I felt poor. I knew that our being part of the middle class was false, that we were faking it. (Of course I didn’t think any of my classmates were faking it.) But that feeling only lasted until I turned 16 when I got a part-time job packing groceries. Then I was a “working guy”.

This was Dad’s and Mom’s genius – teaching us (usually not verbally) that money need not be the central focus of our life’s pursuit. And for teaching us that we did indeed belong to the middle class back then. This has helped me to realize that now I belong to no class - unclassified.