Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire I Guess We Were Poor...

But I didn't know it. Depression era parents.

Looking back, I realize there were times where we ate certain foods but as a kid, I never equated it with tight budget. I just thought it was variety. It mostly involved beans or cheap meats and cabbage or kraut. I liked it! Dad hated it....

As I got older, things got better and dad climbed the ladder and the food changed. So did the houses.

They're gone now. But if I never achieve half of that which my parents wished for me, it will not have been their fault...

Fugging A!

I was the oldest of 5. It was a bit of a struggle for my parents. I still like peanut butter and jelly.

Same here. If only more people could realize what heir parents went through to make their children safe and secure.

At least the lucky ones like us, who had good parents.

Yup. We killed, caught, or grew a lot of what we ate. It got better as we got older but we were upper class poor as my mother used to say.

We were joke as a broke, but I never knew it. I remember dad saying, 'Being poor doesn't mean you have to be dirty'

He never understood the 'trashy' folks, nor do I.

Good post, Dan, I absolutely agree! Shopping at the Salvation Army and thrift stores when I was in Elementary School simply seemed normal. I didn't even realize we were 'poor' until middle school but I never resented it or felt less because of it. My parents were and are amazing people and I'm extremely appreciative of them.

My mother's assertion was just because we were not rich didn't mean we couldn't have class. Hence upper class poor.

Which is the reminder, good parent/s trump all. I can hardly remember any damned thing I got for my birthday or Christmas, but I sure remember all the times spent with dad.

My Grandpa tore down an old motel, he took some of the walls out hole. I remember pulling nails out of old lumber when I was about 5. They built our house that my parents still have by standing those walls up and scabbing them together. Most of the house has 7’ ceilings. I know they had enough money for some Pabst... or Gpa did..

Living big was a tv dinner growing up on dads payday, when things were tough we at least had butter sandwiches and potato soup. We canned our own food, so there was always something, peaches, pears, beans. We never starved, so no complaints. As I got older, I started to can and process my own food because I realized how much better it was. Besides that I like the idea I can live on very little aside from some work. After traveling to a bunch of third world places in my life, trust me when I say we weren't poor.

Back then, grocery stores were very small with very few products/choices on the shelf because we grew or raised so much and ate venison until we sprouted horns.

My Swede grandpa would weave his own gillnets between clothesline poles and we'd go to the river......I still prefer fish over whitetail. We went through the war years
in great shape but my folks had married very young the same week of the stock market crash in 29........My mother just died a few years ago and before that I had asked her about the
the depression and she said they never knew the difference as she and 10 siblings were born of immigrant parents that had escaped poverty. Neither parent had options beyond 8th
grade in a log school but they would be very learned folks to today's millennials .......I still have some of the letters they wrote to me while in the "service".....sure wish I could write cursive
like that.

Yes. My parents were kids during the depression with my dad's side being sent to farms during the summer months for room, board, and few cents. Four kids and grandma raised them alone, as her husband died young of lock jaw. I know now my parents struggled too, but us kids were not much aware. Once drove my mom to tears in the mid-50's because I was pleading for some rubber boots, so I could get out and play in the snow. Still a day I regret 65 years later. At the time, my older sister was being put through school, and dad would take on anything for a buck. About every two summers or so, mom and dad would pack us all in the car and we would vacation on the shore for a week to 10 days. Mostly camping and sometimes a really low end rental running nothing but cold water. Still the best of times in my memory banks.

Had a rich uncle from dad's side, an engineer for then Esso. He mostly took overseas assignments for the bucks and left his kids in boarding schools stateside. He'd come back for a month each summer and they would do things like Disneyland vacations. Prayed many a time that I'd get invited, but never did. With essentially little parenting, those cousins never amounted to much.

Cookie talks of times when a meal was a mustard or maybe a mayo sandwich on home made bread. She is from western Maryland, and had never even seem the Atlantic Ocean when we met. Forty seven years together, and she is still low maintenance.

I too regularly put down some PB&J, but I absolutely detest oatmeal. Thankfully, I know I've had it 10 times better than our folks, as Cookie and I have done and are still doing things we never even dreamed of as kids. I'm worrying though, that we have seen the best of times.

I was in elementary to 5 grade in the mid-late 80’s. Wore clothes my mom sewed to school.

What she did buy was from layaway.

Santa was spread out all year long on the Christmas club at the bank.

I’m the youngest of three, grew up “frugal.”

My mom added mashed taters to the ground beef for making tacos. I didn’t know until I was full grown that she did it to extend the meat.

My folks ended up pretty darn well. Us kids, too.




P

Beans and corn bread.

Haha!

Whats this "was" schit????


I still have patches on all my clothes.





There aint no "post" poor here. This schit is current.

Lol. Jim, you could probably sell all that equipment and farm and move to Bora Bora..

Well, ,my schitty education did not inform me of what in the hell a bora bora is....


I might have to go look that up.

My mother worked in the cotton fields as a kid growing up during the depression. It didn't matter what color you were in the fields according to her.

When WW2 broke out she and my grandmother worked in an ammunition plant during the summer. They lied about her age (she was 13 in 1942) for her to work.

Her father was the town drunk and spent a lot of time in jail. I only met him once when I was a kid.

My father had it a little better but he lost his father when he was 16 and as the oldest everything fell to him to sort out.