When I entered the eight grade, my mother found a
job. Most mothers in our neighborhood
didn’t work in the 1950s. For the
generation before my parents, married women were practically not allowed to
work. In
the 1920's my spinster aunt was told by her employer at age 25 the company
wanted to provide jobs for married men so they could support their
families. She should get married, she
was told, or quit her job to make room for a man with dependents. Without an income she would have been destitute. She couldn’t depend upon her family because
in fact they really were poor. She was the only breadwinner at the time and
took care of the needs of her younger brothers and sisters. Her employer magnanimously offered her an
alternative to unemployment … less pay for the same work as an office
clerk. Less pay than the already diminished wages normally
paid to a woman of that era solely because of her sex.
Her boss explained that reducing her pay would make more money available
to pay a married man. She had no choice
but to take less. Her five brothers and
one sister went without what was already a meager lunch, nothing but an apple.
At age 16 my father found a job at the local
newspaper, eventually became a pressman and was paid trade wages, which were
considered an adequate living in that day. He had a steady income from it after
the union gained some footing at the newspaper in the 1930's. Before workers organized Dad was compensated
fair wages one week and less the next for the same work. It varied by as much as 50%. The company paid
their non-management employees based on how much profit the business made each
week. Workers had no idea if they were
told the truth about the newspaper's finances and anyway had no control over
profits, since the balance sheet was mostly influenced by advertising sales and
newsprint costs. The company's owners, whether stockholders or management,
smoothed out their own incomes and made up for their corporate mistakes by
short changing the employees.
My father had seen money troubles at a young age,
but through no fault of his own. In my case, a very short bout of being broke
was clearly my fault.
When I went
to live in New York City at age 20, I had little experience managing my
money. I was living away from home for
the first time, not watching my cash and spending too much on beer and items I
did not need. At one point I ran out of
funds and realized there was nothing left in my checking account. A paycheck was a couple of days away and I
remember that evening as I sat around watching a snowy picture on TV while
hunger gnawed at my insides. I’d had
nothing to eat since lunch.
The next day I asked a fellow worker if he would buy
me lunch at the cafeteria. Embarrassed, I
chose an older man in his forties because he was rather fatherly and always
free with advice to us young guys. I got
advice rather than a meal. He derisively
told me I should grow up and become responsible. My starvation continued until
the next morning and was probably the best lesson I ever received.
On that morning he came up to me and asked if I'd
found any money or food. Annoyed, I told
him to mind his own business and began to walk away. He grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me
around, the only time in my entire career when someone put a hand on me. He shoved a ten dollar bill in my hand and
said, "Don't be a shithead. Go
eat. I'll cover for you." I won't mention it, but I still remember his
name fifty years later. And that's the
only time in my life I remember being hungry.
There were times when a simple greed for a richer
life drove us to get educated, keep up an income to feed self and family, play
the game of life. It seems ... I don't know how true it is, but it SEEMS ... we
did a lot more for ourselves than some in the current generation of young
people. My young wife and I lived in a
house trailer while I attended college and she worked in a shopping center. The
trailer measured 10 by 32 feet and had no interior doors. When the west wind
whipped up across the hill today known as Fairmont, NY, the rear wall of the
trailer popped like the top of a tin can. Water seeped into the closet during
the winter and froze our shoes to the floor. I had two part- time jobs, one
with my former employer and the other nights and weekends at a drug store. I
learned to fix my car because I couldn't afford to take it to a garage. I
remember going to a dentist with a toothache two weeks after our son was born
while I was still a student and trying to pay him, but he fixed my tooth for
free. And when we had to move, our 15 pounds of hamburger got misplaced and
spoiled and we had to go without meat until I told the story to a fellow
employee as a joke on myself. He informed our manager and the boss insisted I borrow $20
from him to buy food for my family.
And absolutely none of that seemed like the end of
the world. Not when we were young. Except for the time the main drain in the
trailer stopped up and I had no idea how to fix it/ After trying various plumbing snakes, I
finally gave up. I had no money I would
need a small loan to hire Roto Rooter. When I called them to ask how much they
would charge, they told me they did not work on trailers because the T's in the
drains often ruined their equipment. I remember sitting there in the kitchen,
my pregnant wife at work that evening, feeling the full weight of facing a
problem I could not solve. Tears of frustration may have begun to wet my eyes
as I kept trying to think of a solution. The phone rang and it happened to be
my brother in law in Atlanta calling to say hello. He had a solution. A longer, thinner snake I didn't know about
existed, and he knew where I could rent one cheap.
We knew we'd get through it, that someday I'd have a
good job and we'd have two cars, a dog, two kids, a house and all that stuff.
We just needed to keep ourselves from going into debt.
That's what saved us. Never taking on any debt.
Driving a car with the fenders falling off, suffering the looks of people we
parked next to in parking lots, stretching our clothes till they were
threadbare and finding our furniture at garage sales. So that when the money
began to come in we could apply it to items we needed rather than use it to pay
off loans taken out on things we didn't need. That was called basic money sense
by our parents and those before them.
Things could have turned out differently for me. Life is a game of chance and I was lucky
enough to win some of its prizes. Yes,
of course, I worked hard, took advice, made what turned out to be smart choices
and struggled on when the going got rough.
But I've known others who did the same and wound up broke.
I never knew the awful feeling of realizing there was
not enough money to buy food for my children, or clothes or school
supplies. Or had to tell a landlord or a
bank that I could not make a rent or mortgage payment this month. Or be forced
to start selling household items or the furniture or keepsakes out the back door to get enough for
groceries. Or to stand on a corner waiting for a bus because my car was
re-possessed or my insurance cancelled.
But I've known men and women who suffered those consequences. I've tried to help them in my volunteer
work. It bothers me when the luckier
members of our society paint poverty with a broad brush and demean anyone who
is down on his or her luck. Some of the
downtrodden in America are there through no fault of their own. Many are probably complicit to some degree
... poor work habits, a worse attitude, no clue how to manage money, graduated
from a school that cared more for itself than the students, or caught in a
deceptive race baiting dance orchestrated by their politicians.
I would rather encourage someone than scold
them. There will always be those who
game the system and will sneer up their sleeve at your fine words of
encouragement. Let them. I suppose they
have some cause when they view what I have and what they don't. And I can't know all the circumstances that
sunk their boat and left them stranded on the shore. I really don't know why the worse-off are in
their predicaments. I only know I've
been very lucky.
When an old yellow school bus
pulls up in front of me filled with needy
people from south of the border, it’s
time to put away my opinions on national immigration policy, shaped for the
most part by the news media, and to simply help a brother and sister and child in
distress. We can quibble over federal
programs later.
Late one afternoon not long ago I drove through the
neighborhood where I grew up in the upstate New York city of Utica. The section of town is called Cornhill and I
keep the car doors locked when I visit and never come to a full stop at the
stop signs. The streets have decayed and the homes
are dilapidated. Many of the burned out shells were once the homes
of friends whose parents spent their money and weekends keeping the properties
looking nice. Today many are crack houses It’s not unusual to hear shots in the
distance, which is better than nearby.
The same sidewalks that once were filled with kids at that time of
day and fathers returning home from work were dark and empty.
I drove by street corners
on James Street, the main thoroughfare, where I had waited as a teenager for
the bus to take me downtown to meet friends for a movie and French fries and a
Coke. Today young men menace each other on
these same corners and fights are frequent. I think the buses no longer run to
this part of town. I passed the remains
of a school and playground where a kind hearted janitor repairing a window put
a Band-Aid on my elbow when I fell off my bike almost sixty five years ago.
Graffiti covers the walls of the building now and almost all of the windows
have been bashed in. Down the street the
church my family attended was closed up, having spent its declining days as a
neighborhood drop-in center where no one dropped in because they were too busy
dropping out.
An anger rose in me toward
the people who had turned a living neighborhood into a diseased and dying
quarter of the city where the inhabitants mostly depended upon the government
to survive.
I am from a
Cornhill working family, none of whom were educated. With grants, part time work, multiple jobs,
and while starting a family, I was able to progress through undergraduate and
graduate school. I am an accomplished professional and I am proud of myself, in
case you can't tell. My parents did not value education very much, but they had
strong beliefs and a strong ethic. Mostly, they loved each other and their
children very much.
After my
main career, I worked with crack addicts and some of the people in this world
who are "underprivileged."
As angry as
I get when I drive through Cornhill, I cannot fix the blame on any particular
group.. There are too many villains to
indict. From the businessmen whose
capitalism turned from enterprise to opportunism to pure greed at the expense
of the people, to the politicians who survive on the misery of those they swore
to help, to today’s Cornhill residents themselves, there is plenty of blame to go around.
You can
give the impoverished all the grants in the world, but you cannot give them the
caring that was often missing in their families. Nor can you give them the
positive experiences many of us benefited from. You cannot take away a child's crippling
sense of misplaced guilt because he could not find all of his mother's teeth as
he crawled around the floor looking for them, hoping they could be put back in
after her boyfriend’s fist blasted them fromher mouth.
You cannot
quiet the seething anger when a young out-of-work black man turns on the TV and
sees smiling, happy families on their way to Sears to buy a $1500 color TV. And
you cannot convince him, as he walks the streets of a Cornhill he didn't
create, that James Street could be a home, a cherished place to take care of
and to build upon.
Neither he
nor I was born to wealth. But I am lucky
beyond imagining to have come from a loving family and supportive
environment. In that more important sense
I was never poor.
David Griffin Copyright 2013
The
Windswept Press
Murrells
Inlet, South Carolina
www.windsweptpress.com.
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