I was raised by a generation that went through the Depression, by parents who worried that I would get polio and were fearful our days were numbered by a nuclear blast from Moscow. When my great-grandmother spotted a safety pin on the floor, she would pick it up and add it to the string of pins already attached to her dress. She rolled string into a ball for future recycling.
As a 12-year-old, I wondered if I could shoot someone trying to break into our fallout shelter (if, indeed, we ever built one). During the moon landing, my grandmother insisted she saw the moon turn blood red. There were winter months when my father, a construction worker, could not find work and I overheard my parents worrying about paying the mortgage on our $12,000 post-war prefab in Detroit. There was some minimal unemployment compensation back then, but no food stamps, and I don't ever recall my dad mentioning health insurance.
Mostly, though, I was oblivious to their concerns and challenges. Kmart was new and amazing, and I had bright dresses for school. My lunch box always had treats, and I was an all-A student who actually loved learning. My dad and I created a beautiful garden in the backyard, with tomatoes that had a flavor I haven't tasted in decades. He built a garage from wood left over from the jobs he was on and refinished the attic so I could have my own room.
On the weekends, we took picnics to parks with lakes for swimming or ventured to a spot of curiosity. Yates cider mill was about the most fascinating place I'd ever seen. Thousands of bees swarmed around the rotting apple mash, piled high in a pit you could look into. Dozens of apple trees of many varieties were there for the picking (even if we could only afford half a bushel). But the grandest moment was the free glass of ice cold cider coupled with a 5-cent donut lifted from a vat of hot lard and sugared.
Thrift stores like the Salvation Army were magical back then, although there was a stigma attached to going to them. We had our own code name for them - "Sallie's" (from "Salvation"). The main Sallie's in the heart of Detroit was a three-story warehouse. I always headed for the book section after a tour of the furniture (so many curved glass, heavy dark pieces that nobody wanted) but fascinating to me, aging oil paintings of obscure topics and bulky, fascinating jewelry so out of fashion. I always came home with a box of books, mostly Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but often books from obscure series about girls like the Bobsey twins who were young when my mother was young. The books were a dime apiece, and my father bartered with the old clerk to give him a deal. He was determined that I would go to college and I don't think I ever spent a dollar that I received as a gift - it all went into the bank for college.
I seldom think of these years. I did get two college degrees. Art, theater and literature were the focus of my studies, so money or the lack thereof remained part of my lifestyle, but it was one that I chose, not one that I was forced to struggle within. In 2006, however, I began having a deja vu experience from my childhood. I was a news copy editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, which was purchased by Hearst a couple of years earlier. The managers, who had paid a whopping $66 million to the Fang family to take the Examiner off their hands and who had merged the Chronicle and Examiner staffs into one humongous newsroom, started complaining about huge losses - a million dollars a month or some such unbelievable figure! They needed to trim the staff and offered handome buyouts to anyone who would volunteer to leave. I was 59 at the time and could take an early pension, along with the buyout. I decided to return to the house I owned in Pensacola, Fla.
I had a pretty nice 401(k) and transferred it to a Treasury money market, deciding to forego all the quick profits I was getting from the high-risk stocks I'd been purchasing, now favoring of preservation. I suppose it was the Depression-era influence kicking in, and in view of the stock market today, I'm glad I thought that way a few years ago. I still get very meager returns, but I still have my principal.
Last week, the Chronicle email staff basket (which I still belong to) started perking again. Hearst is insisting that it needs to lay off 175 of the 225 Newspaper Guild staff members, and if the union doesn't agree to it, the paper will lay off all 225 members. Imagine a newspaper that's been around since 1865 and the heart of the heart that everyone leaves in San Francisco (according to the song) not having any newsroom or copy editors or photographers? These are not people 3 years from early Social Security. These are young people with kids who may soon find themselves in mortgages they cannot pay looking for jobs that don't exist. Unlike my dad, they will have good unemployment compensation for a year, continued medical insurance, job training and food stamps if they need it. But their houses in the Bay Area are $300,000, their gas is at times $4.00 (not 25 cents) a gallon and their car payments can run $300 (my dad's new Ford cost $2,000 total). We didn't have credit cards to max out.
My first early Social Security check will arrive in July. I told the application taker that every check that comes in will be like winning the lottery. I don't know if it will be there for the rest of my life, but I plan to use what comes in as wisely as I can.
There is an old blues singer that laments, "If I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all." Today's blues singer might complain, "If we didn't have hard times, we wouldn't have any times at all."
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