My Humble Story

There's a lot of angst currently floating around now that the housing bubble has begun to deflate. I have come to understand that this was not just a housing bubble, but a credit bubble. And that the roots of the problem were in the dotcom bubble just prior. And now that it appears that we have come to the end of the easy money economy, many people are worrying that life will become brutish and violent and very, very hard.

First, I'd like to point out that for the majority of the Earth's population, living standards are closer to Stone Age than Industrial Age. More people need plumbing and reliable energy than an upgrade to a plasma TV. Not being able to take a vacation, buy a new car, go out to eat, etc. does not constitute suffering. I know. I've been there before. Here is my story:

My parents were good people, born and raised during the Depression years. They were remarkable people. They both had learned Latin in high school. My mother had a BA. My dad had gone from high school to a good union job. But because of that Depression upbringing, they were frugal beyond frugal. They had met in their 30's, and were about 10 years older than most of my friend's parents, and this evidently made a huge difference in their attitudes toward debt and savings. My brother and I got new clothes every Fall when school was starting, and if we needed shoes or outgrew something we could get another, but otherwise not. My maternal grandmother was a great country cook, raised her own chickens and eggs, made her own noodles and breads and preserves, canned vegetables, etc. My mom carried on that tradition in the suburbs. We had a 1/4 acre lot, and the entire back portion was a huge garden. We had a huge freezer in the utility room, and we froze corn, beans, peas, broccoli and carrots. We pickled beets and cucumbers, and canned tomatoes (which are higher in acid and relatively safe to can).
My dad would buy a side of beef and have it cut up every six months or so, and my grandmother supplied chickens and her famous noodles. Once in a blue moon, we would go out to eat, and it was a major event. As I got older, I went with friends more often to burger joints. I remember when the Big Mac was introduced, and I remember when the first Long John Silver's came to Decatur, Illinois.
To make a very long and painful story short, I grew from a happy childhood into an angry adolescence, largely because of the Vietnam War. Every day the war was on the evening news, and the older brothers of nearly all my friends had been drafted. Some were killed. As we got nearer to adulthood, most of us began to feel that we could not escape the reality of the Draft. We were working and middle-class kids, and the boys we grew up with didn't really consider college as an option for the most part. We had grown up being supported by blue-collar fathers, in a blue-collar Midwest industrial city. When you thought "economic security", you thought UAW or AFL-CIO, and lucking into a job with Caterpillar Tractor or Firestone Tire or Staley's.
Our hormones were strong, and we were fearful of the future. When my first boyfriend enlisted in the Army in order to have better options than waiting until his draft number came up, I freaked out. The next boyfriend, I made sure I could keep a piece of. I got pregnant at age 16.
We had just been through the protests and civil disobedience of the sixties, and we were moving towards the Nixon resignation and the political upheaval of the post-War era. The economy sucked, but you didn't really think about it because somehow it was all just part of one big picture of social, political and economic distress.
My new husband and I were way too young to be parents at ages 16 and 18 . We struggled with the times and with one another. I was on the Pill when I became pregnant with baby #2, and we were living in a two room apartment. He decided to join the Army, and our life became manageable finally. We were not good together. He was volatile, and I was not one to be intimidated. By now we were living in Texas, and I got a job working as a utilities service worker for the City of Killeen. It was a good blue-collar job, and I earned a good wage and had good benefits but I didn't think about it. We always used the Army benefits instead. We now lived in a four room duplex with two kids.
When his 3 year enlistment was up, we moved to Austin so that he could attend UT. He had a part-time job at Motorola, and I worked part-time as a waitress. I was using a diaphragm and became pregnant with baby #3. This totally blew our shakey finances. Baby #1 had been paid for by my father's excellent health program under which I was still covered, Baby #2 had been paid for by the US Army. This one, we had no insurance. I was seriously considering home birth due to the financial burden. I was able to qualify for prenatal care through some program or other, but it didn't cover the hospital. I ended up needing a c-section, and I insisted on leaving the hospital about 3 days later, with strict orders not to lift anything heavier than the baby. I came home to a totally wrecked apartment. My husband had dropped me off at the hospital, and the older kids off at my best friend's apartment downstairs, and disappeared. He didn't know when his 3rd baby was born. He ended up having a motorcycle accident a few days later, and the police brought him home from the ER because his license had our address. He had a concussion, and I was supposed to watch him closely for 24 hours. We were now living in an upscale 2 bed/2 bath apartment in Austin, with a terrace! Woot!
We moved to a 3 bed, 2 bath rental house in the suburbs at this point. His motorcyle was repaired, and I drove the Subaru sedan. The house didn't have a refrigerator, and we couldn't afford to buy one, so we kept food in an ice chest and bought ice every day. He was still going to school, and I was working full time nights at a 24 hour restaurant called JoJo's . I came home, barricaded the crawling baby into the living room, and slept on the couch while she played. He worked and went to school during the day, and came home (hopefully...sometimes he didn't) in time for me to drive to work. This was the late 70's. We had gas lines. Inflation was crazy.
At some point in time I began seriously plotting how to kill my husband, who by now was not even spending holidays with us, because when he did show up he was abusive and frightening. It occurred to me that perhaps it was time to take the kids and move out. Using our tax refund, and carefully putting 50% of it into the account that he could access, I opened my own account and then saved up enough over the course of a couple months that I could rent my own 1 bedroom apartment. I took the kids, 3 plates, 3 cups, 2 saucepans, 1 dutch oven, and a flatware set for each of us, our clothes, one set of linens, and left. I did not leave a forwarding address, and I could not afford a phone. He eventually showed up at my job, of course, and his main concern was that I had taken 50% of "his" tax return money. He occasionally came to see the kids, or take them for a weekend. My friends were concerned that he would take off with them, but it never worried me. He did not really want to be a father, and as long as I didn't ask for support money he wouldn't bother me, and I knew it. I couldn't afford babysitting, and I was still working nights at JoJo's. The apartment manager lived next door, and she agreed to keep the baby at night for $20/week. The older kids had strict orders to stay inside, and to go to her apartment if there were any problems. I put them to bed at 9 pm and went to work at 10pm. I got home at 7 am, picked up the baby, woke up the older kids and sent them to school. I then barricaded the baby into the living room with me, set up her toys, and slept on the couch. Finally, she crawled over to the kitchenette area, and managed to pull up on a chair and then reach onto the table and break a cup. She cut her finger, the older kids came home to a bloody baby and immediately got the manager, who woke me up. That was it for me trying to support myself and the kids on my own. We took the baby to the ER, where she got 3 stitches in her little finger, and within two days I was on my way back to Illinois and my mother. I moved in with my mother (my father had died just after baby#2 was born) who was doing volunteer work for a social services agency. With their help, I got on AFDC and food stamps. I began taking classes at the community college. I eventually moved into a small 2 bedroom trailer with the kids, who all shared a bedroom. We had no TV. We still had the Subaru, which we had bought used years before. And about six months later, the second man I married moved into the trailer across the street. He was a pipefitter, and compared to me, he was wealthy. He was 27 years old, and I was 23. He wanted to be a family man, and I had the family. And best of all, he was from California. He was only working at the nuclear power plant in Clinton temporarily; it was what he did, traveling from industrial construction site to site across the country. He made enough in one paycheck (working 60 hours a week) to buy a good used Camaro from one of the poor shmucks who'd been laid off from Firestone (it was now 1981), and after dating me for about 2 months, he wanted to move me and the kids into a very nice 3 bedroom townhouse with a loft playroom. He bought me a fur coat. He bought the kids toys and clothes. My estranged husband showed up as soon as he was served with divorce papers, and he was soon on the road back to Texas driving the Subaru. The kids spent a weekend with him before he left, and that was the last they heard from him for about 5 years.
The second husband was a hard worker and a decent father. He had very different views than I did on several subjects, but I always rationalized that his views on other people weren't important. His views on family were important. During this time, we "bought" two houses contract-for-deed because the interest rates were so high that we couldn't qualify for a home any other way. We moved back to Texas when he took a job in Houston for a couple years, and let the house go back to the owner on the first place. I had just had baby #4, for which we thankfully had insurance. He started a business in Houston when his industrial construction job ended, and we were doing well, and then I discovered that he was not paying any taxes and that he in fact had not paid income taxes for years. This absolutely floored me. I realized that we could not have any kind of secure life with this hanging over us, and I insisted we talk to an attorney, who helped us to arrange to pay off a massive 50K tax debt to the IRS. My second husband was terribly upset that I had insisted on this, and never forgave me for it. We ended up moving to a property that his mother and step-dad owned in Sebastopol. When we arrived in California the first time, we had less than $5 left. His dad was an engineer at Bechtel in San Francisco, and was able to get him a job working construction for them. He made $30/hour and most of it went to the IRS. We lived in a converted warehouse (I'd love it, now! But I'd have to do some serious remodeling). We had electricity and cold running water. We heated the water on the stove, and poured it into a big round galvinized bin for baths. We pulled it out to the loading dock and dumped it afterwards. There was an outhouse behind the warehouse. At night, we had a cat named "Killer" that hunted the mice in the warehouse. We hung sheets to make "rooms". But we lived in the middle of an orchard that was no longer being used commercially, and there was a fruit stand that my mother-in-law rented out at the bottom of the hill. We could eat all the peaches and Gravenstein apples that we were able to, and we made a lot of pies and jams. The kids would go down to the fruit stand and buy grapes and berries as a treat. And our weekly trip hauling our household garbage to the dump would have been considered a scenic drive in Illinois, through Redwood forest and up mountain roads. We lived directly behind the first commune that had any notoriety in the sixties; I think it was called Morningstar Ranch. It was not a commune when we were there, though. During this time, my mother became ill and six months later the kids and I were on a Grayhound bus back to Illinois. My husband packed up our meager belongings and followed, and we "bought" another house contract for deed and moved my mother into the bottom bedroom. It was a huge Victorian, with entry foyer that could have been a living room, dining room, bath, kitchen and bedroom on first floor and two large bedrooms upstairs with another hall that we used as a third bedroom, and another bath.
It was in a working class neighborhood, and I think we agreed to pay 18K for it. This was 1984 or so. My husband got a job with one of his old construction buddies, and we bought a used boat.
My mom died a few months later, and we moved into her house, let the CFD house go back to the owner and inherited her remaining mortgage. Our house payment was $140/month. We stayed in Illinois for the next 12 years, and amazingly enough it never even occurred to us to pay off the loan, which would have been relatively easy. I borrowed money to finish college. I worked for a year after college, and when we wanted to buy a bigger, newer home we were told that because my husband was a construction worker they could not count his income and that my income alone was not enough for the homes we were looking at. We were devastated. My oldest son was in high school by then, and my oldest daughter (after a period of angst that made my own adolescence seem normal) married HER boyfriend right out of high school, he joined the Navy, and they were in Florida. One was in middle school, and the youngest was in grade school. Decatur was by this time a post-industrial nightmare, ravaged by the high inflation and unemployment of the 70's and 80's. The union jobs had dried up. The drop out rate was around 50%, as I recall. It was just flat depressing, and it felt like a trap that we would never get out of.
We started looking at jobs back in California. We had vowed never to return until we could afford the lifestyle, and with my new career we could afford the lifestyle. I took a job out here making exactly 3 times what I made in Decatur, and we already knew what our housing, food and energy bills would be thanks to careful research for six months. The only surprise was the much higher cost to license our vehicles, but that was a minor concern. My husband was 39 and I was 35, and within six months of moving to Sacramento we had purchased our first conventional mortgage. We sold the house in Illinois that we had inherited for the remainder of the loan, which was 12k. Our first purchased house was 120k, a fortune to us. My ex still lives there. I supported the entire family for a couple years, and my husband grew a small business which now supports him and provides work for some of the kids and several employees. Eventually, as the kids got older, our very different views on some pretty important issues led to our divorce. He views it as "not making enough money", I view it as him not being able to stop spending money, but we're pretty amicable. We had a good 20 year run, and we both came out of it better than we entered it, and everyone survived, and that is the point to this whole thing: in the long run, you do what you can and what you must to take care of your own.
There are times when I miss Houston, or Illinois, or Sebastopol. There were wondrous things in each of those places, and I don't think the kids suffered for us having struggled, and I wouldn't change any of it.
I don't see how any future times could be worse than the times I've lived through, or the stories my parents told of their childhood in the Depression. All that trite stuff about tough times not lasting, but tough people always lasting, is true. Not everyone survives, but a lot of it is attitude.
Our needs are actually few. It is our wants that cause us to get into trouble, and it is very hard to extricate yourself from trouble once you start down that path. Success is a very relative thing, and it is very subjective. Being poor is not a failure, and without having been very poor I would not have learned some lessons that I needed to learn about culture, power, stereotypes and integrity.
Who knows what tomorrow may bring? Enjoy today.