I grew up in a home with a family that was, I thought, just like any other family. I didn't know any better. My friends in the neighborhood all lived in similar circumstances. The houses were all old like ours and kids were plentiful. Our house was built in 1904 and this picture was taken in 1960. Until I studied this picture I had never realized how poor we were. Looking at it, I see worn out highchairs, my brother and sister in what amounts to raggedy clothes and them needing baths. Look closely at the kitchen stove on the right. It is an apartment sized stove for people who rarely cook. It had 4 small burners and a very small oven, and yet mom cooked for 8 people on it every day and on holidays the the group she fed was at least 2-3 times that many. The stove was not even big enough to have 2 large pots on it side by side. The kitchen was so small the table was pushed against the wall most of the time so traffic could pass through, leaving seating for 4 people in a family of 8. The highchairs seated the 2 littlest and at times there was 1 on mom's lap. The house originally had a beautiful formal dining room with a hardwood floor, but that turned into a bedroom in the late fifties as the family continued to grow. The heat was an old coal furnace that heated large brass radiators in 5 rooms. There was an old chicken house in back of the yard. It was torn down when I was a kid and burned on site. The house was just 12 feet from the street, but the lot was 100 or so feet deep. It had a detached garage on one side, but the other side had an exact duplicate of our house, but reversed, like 2 apartments side by side. It was close enough that a grown man could almost stretch his arms and touch both homes. There was a window in each house in the upstairs hall facing each other, close enough that if I could have ever found a wooden plank to place across the gap I would have walked back and forth between them. I had a strange affinity for heights back then. I was always climbing things just to be up high. We had the 2 story house at the near top of the hill and I would climb out the bedroom window at night and climb to the peak of the roof and sit there looking at everything below. It was high enough that I could see lights on businesses and houses several blocks away.
My father never aspired to anything beyond taking care of his family. I was raised that way and that was my thinking until about 1980 when I began to see how much better other people lived and with Joyce's encouragement we started thinking on a different level. It was the first time we ever had any money to save. But while I had my goals set, I still thought family was more important than anything else and I was never taught any different. The people I knew in the eighties had nicer homes and more income, but they still did not have that idea that money was above all other things.
Back in the seventies, when I repaired TV sets I met some very well off people and I was always surprised at how unhappy they all seemed to be. They would sit and watch me fixing their sets and tell me about how bad everything was. All the while they were living in a beautiful lakeside home with nice furnishings, boat docks for fancy boats, and driving expensive cars. I never understood how things were so bad for them.
I am not claiming that anything I've done in my life, or failed to do, is anyone's fault but my own. I probably could have done better than I did, could have made less mistakes, could have found jobs/careers that paid more, but I always felt I liked what I was doing and did the best I could at something I wanted to do and took care of my family. That was always more important than anything to me.
I think that is still what is important to anyone I know now, but maybe we are just different than a lot of other people these days.
My father never aspired to anything beyond taking care of his family. I was raised that way and that was my thinking until about 1980 when I began to see how much better other people lived and with Joyce's encouragement we started thinking on a different level. It was the first time we ever had any money to save. But while I had my goals set, I still thought family was more important than anything else and I was never taught any different. The people I knew in the eighties had nicer homes and more income, but they still did not have that idea that money was above all other things.
Back in the seventies, when I repaired TV sets I met some very well off people and I was always surprised at how unhappy they all seemed to be. They would sit and watch me fixing their sets and tell me about how bad everything was. All the while they were living in a beautiful lakeside home with nice furnishings, boat docks for fancy boats, and driving expensive cars. I never understood how things were so bad for them.
I am not claiming that anything I've done in my life, or failed to do, is anyone's fault but my own. I probably could have done better than I did, could have made less mistakes, could have found jobs/careers that paid more, but I always felt I liked what I was doing and did the best I could at something I wanted to do and took care of my family. That was always more important than anything to me.
I think that is still what is important to anyone I know now, but maybe we are just different than a lot of other people these days.
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