Poverty is Relative by Karl

What the government now categorizes as poverty would have put my family of seven in the upper income bracket, in my mind, even in todays dollars. It's hard for kids today to even imagine what poor really is and I'm glad they don't have the struggle we had as children. I'm not talking about the tall tales we sometimes jokingly tell about walking 5 miles to school, up hill both ways, in a driven snow storm even if there is some truth in some of those tales. I did walk over a mile to grammar school from the first grade on, rain or snow, and never had the proper cloths or shoes. When our shoes got holes in the sole we relied on cardboard inside the shoe to make them last a little longer till dad could afford to buy us new ones and of course our socks didn't last long. Underwear was out of the question for the youngest" because no one could see it anyhow". We took our lunch, which consisted of a sandwich and apple or banana, wrapped in newspaper because we couldn't afford paper sacks. We didn't know how poor we were because most of my friends were almost as bad off and we had fun doing things that cost nothing. My best friends' aunt would let us clean and wax her floors every Saturday morning and it took the whole morning to finish and she would pay us each a half dollar and we thought we were rich. We would then walk over 2 miles to the Eastlake" Picture show" and pay our dime to get in and stop at the candy counter to get a coke and big bag of popcorn and there went another dime. There would always be a grade B movie and a western and an exciting serial that continued for about 3 or 4 months and we had to see how the hero would always get out of a sure death jam. Sometime during the movie we would go back to the candy counter for a candy bar of some type and it would usually be something that lasted a while, another nickel spent . We still had a quarter left to last the rest of the week or maybe to splurge it all on something special. When I got in high school things got better but I still had to walk a ways to the streetcar stop and then transfer to another to get there but things began to look up. ......Karl