Atheist Discussion
Hard times. - Printable Version

+- Atheist Discussion (https://atheistdiscussion.org/forums)
+-- Forum: Coffee House (https://atheistdiscussion.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=104)
+--- Forum: Getting to Know You (https://atheistdiscussion.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=148)
+--- Thread: Hard times. (/showthread.php?tid=5619)



Hard times. - Gawdzilla Sama - 07-25-2020

The Y-donor never finished the sixth grade. He wasn't exactly a great prospect as a father. Getting to hard times: When I was in the second grade he had a job working under the table for a local appliance company, installing gas lines mostly. For this he got $50 cash, no taxes, no benefits. That was feed, clothe, and house a family of five.

BUT I didn't know we were broke. I knew most kids lined up to buy their books at the local general store, but Mom went to the school to get ours.


RE: Hard times. - Thumpalumpacus - 07-25-2020

(07-25-2020, 10:27 PM)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: The Y-donor never finished the sixth grade. He wasn't exactly a great prospect as a father. Getting to hard times: When I was in the second grade he had a job working under the table for a local appliance company, installing gas lines mostly. For this he got $50 cash, no taxes, no benefits. That was feed, clothe, and house a family of five.

BUT I didn't know we were broke. I knew most kids lined up to buy their books at the local general store, but Mom went to the school to get ours.

Yabut, 274 years ago, fifty bucks was a king's ransom.


RE: Hard times. - julep - 07-25-2020

That sucks.  

My mom brought home our “new” clothes in trash bags...what she’d been able to find from donations from the rich, snooty christians who set my dad’s salary at a poverty level.  Donated, stale, near moldy bread in our freezer, donated car with holes in the floor so we could watch the road go by.   (But at least we had a car)

I didn’t know we were broke at first, but my classmates and Sunday schoolmates were only too happy to fill me in...

Annoying thing is my father gave up a job at Johns Hopkins so that his family could be dirt poor for a decade while he followed his dream of serving the lord.


RE: Hard times. - Thumpalumpacus - 07-26-2020

(07-25-2020, 11:12 PM)julep Wrote: Annoying thing is my father gave up a job at Johns Hopkins so that his family could be dirt poor for a decade while he followed his dream of serving the lord.

That's about as bad as "making it in music".


RE: Hard times. - mordant - 08-29-2020

My Dad was an aircraft mechanic so we were I guess comfortably middle class. My parents bought their first home when I was 3 years old. But they were also children of the Great Depression, so my mother hoarded stuff she "might need someday" because she never got over that mentality, and I don't recall my Dad ever having debt beyond a mortgage; he never had so much as a credit card. I was always a little bit confused about that. Never lacked for anything, but lived as if the wolves were at the door.

In retrospect it probably was not a bad way to be raised. I grew up very fiscally responsible and cautious without being some kind of miser.


RE: Hard times. - Little Lunch - 08-29-2020

Well, we had it tough.
We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick the road clean with our tongues.
We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty four hours a day at the mill for four pence every six years and when we got home our dad would slice us in two with a butter knife.


RE: Hard times. - Fireball - 08-29-2020

(08-29-2020, 03:16 AM)Little Lunch Wrote: Well, we had it tough.
We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick the road clean with our tongues.
We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty four hours a day at the mill for four pence every six years and when we got home our dad would slice us in two with a butter knife.

You had a butter knife!?

What swank!  Dance


RE: Hard times. - no one - 08-29-2020




RE: Hard times. - Dānu - 08-29-2020

My parents sold me to the Gypsies. The Gypsies came back two days later and demanded their money back.


RE: Hard times. - Cavebear - 08-29-2020

My Dad had a good job and we kids never lacked in general. But Mom and Dad went through The Great Depression as teens and were somewhere between "cheap" and "miserly". They were decent parents though sometimes weird. So we kids had birthday parties and Christmas presents. They gave me 2 years of college (I managed the other 2) and an old car when I turned 20.

As the eldest child, I adopted their values. I succeeded with investments, but I still can't spend money easily on myself. I still live (happily) with mostly hand-me down furniture (its functional and a few repairs over the years keeps it solid).

"House Beautiful", my house isn't. But is is "comfortable" and that is fine with me. I am far past worrying about the opinions of visitors.