Talking to my mom about the 'good' old days. growing up poor

My mom was one of 13 kids (12 lived, one died at about age 4). Her parents were both immigrants who met and married here in the U.S. They lived in a decent sized house in a small town, my grandma had a huge garden. I remember my mom telling us that “hobos” would come into town on the trains and would knock on their back door looking for food. Grandma would often give them something even though they typically didn’t have a lot themselves. My mom and her twin would be sent with a pail to the creamery in town to get milk, and sometimes they would also get a bucket of tapioca which my mom hated. They didn’t often have candy or sweets, but occasionally my mom and her sisters would sneak some stuff to make penuche which they would share with their siblings.

My dad was a war baby, born in 1942. They lived in a country town near the river on the border between VIC and NSW. My dad has very fond memories of his childhood, but they were not well off financially. When they moved down to Melbourne, and dad started his first job, his income supplemented the family income, and even bought the first family car. There is a photo of dad with his parents and two older sisters. My nanna would have been about 34yo, but she looks over 50yo in the photo. I commented to dad one day about how old nanna looked, and he pointed out that they had a very hard life - they lived through the Great Depression, and then WW2, not to mention having to do all the clothes washing by hand etc etc. No wonder they looked old. They didn't have a fridge or washing machine or oven etc, but that was just as much to do with the era rather as well as being poor. 


My mum grew up on a dairy farm. They weren't particularly poor, but certainly not well off. They had an outdoor dunny (toilet) up until sometime in the 70s. I remember having to go outside to use the toilet when I was a kid. That thing stunk! It was just a hole in the ground, with timber box and toilet seat on top. And my poppa had to empty it regularly. It was just another in a long list of farm chores. I remember how exciting it was when they finally put in an indoor toilet. My brother, who is 5 years younger than me, has no recollection of using the outdoor dunny. And again, the outdoor dunny was more to do with the era than financial status.


(Ha! My MacBook does not like the work "dunny" - it has tried to autocorrect it to sunny, funny, runny and bunny!)

my father grew up ok during the depression because my grandfather was a bookie.
my mother grew up same time period poor. they moved often and she had to quit school in 8th grade to work.

My mom grew up poor. The youngest of 4. Her dad was a rum runner and worked in the mills. There was a time where they lived in a shed with no indoor plumbing or running water. Her aunt was a nurse and offered all of the children private education. My mom was the only one that took her up on it and was the only one to graduate high school. Her aunt also paid for college and my mom became a teacher. My mom has good memories of growing up, ice skating and being on a roller skating club. My dad had a better life. My grandmother was also a teacher and my grandfather a machinist. My dad went to college, Annapolis, and my aunt became a teacher. Surprised, surprise. Both myself and daughter are also teachers.

My mother was born in 1918. Her father died when she was a teenager and she had to drop out of school to help with the farming so the family could survive. She was one of 11 children but most were married and out of the house when he died. She later earned a GED and became a LVN.
My father came to America when he was 9. His mother died when he was 16. When my parents married she was treated well because she was the adult female in a family of 5 boys an 1 girl. I don't have to say they were poor, do I? They had outhouses and little running water. Cold water in the kitchen, but no toilets or hot water.

I am 79 now and grew up poor. My father became disabled when I was 10 and Mom had to provide for her 9 children. At that time she had a son in college and a 2 and 3 year old. Daddy supervised them while the rest of us did the farm work. He died when I was in my freshman year in college. Mom sold the dairy then and went to school to become a LVN. My family got electricity the year I was born but we didn't have indoor plumbing until we moved into my grandfather's home (he died) when I was in 3rd grade. We had a wringer washing machine in a little room away from the house (the wash house). My oldest brother bought mom an automatic washing machine when I was about 15. We never had a dryer when I was growing up, but she got one much later.

I can't imagine sending that many children to school in the 1950s when clothing had to be starched and ironed...but she did.

My parents both grew up poor during the depression. Daddy talked about how there were gaps in the floorboards and they could see the chickens running around under the house. They talked about walking to school, how cold it was in the winter, the various jobs one of my grandfather's had trying to keep food on the table. They didn't talk much about the war. Daddy was in Korea along with his brother. My mother's sister went to Baltimore to work in the factories during the summers in high school. Can you imagine your teenage daughter going off with a friend to work like that when she's never been anywhere? It was a different time. She did meet her future husband that way. He came for her after the war.

One of my dad's sister's actually told me more about how things were when the children were small. She was one of the oldest children so she helped out a lot in the house and had a better feel for how difficult it really was. I used to take her to doctor appointments in Charlotte and she would tell me stories on our drives to and from. She talked more about WWII. She and her husband married right after Pearl Harbor. Eventually she joined him when he was stationed in California after the war.

My mom did something similar. She recalled working at a hunting camp for a season when she was maybe 17-18 or so, not sure what time of year it was, but she and one of her sisters were there to clean and I think cook dinner for the guys that went there to hunt. The guys would only be there on weekends and would basically only be there for dinner and to sleep. She said the work was easy and didn’t take long to do so when there was no one else there during the week she and her sister could smoke cigarettes and play cards, LOL.

After she and her twin graduated high school, the moved from the small town they grew up in to the Twin Cities to live with one of their older sisters who had a job at 3M. That sister got them jobs at 3M too, my mom worked in the cafeteria in the kitchen and her twin would take sandwiches and other stuff on a cart through the building. My mom’s twin thought my mom had the better job. My mom met my dad there, he knew her older sister and asked my mom out a bunch of times but she kept saying no, LOL. Eventually he prevailed and she went out on a date with him, then they ultimately married and had nine kids (the first one was stillborn).

My mom had this same experience!  During the Depression they had one chicken for 8 people (if they were lucky). As the youngest, she always got the neck, too. She hated that one of her siblings teased her about liking to eat chicken necks. 

I grew up with hippy parents- my dad’s family had a farm on Vashon and my mom had privileged parents from back east. I neverhad pop until junior high- my parents said it was poison. Crunchy before crunchy was a thing, or maybe the OG crunchy. My dad was born with a heart condition that was not fixable then, so things got hard for us. He couldn’t work. We lost our house. Compared to many poor people we were fine, but it was a thing for me then mid 80s. He had heart surgery when I was a junior in high school- it’s now quite routine but then involved bypass and very scary.

We were quite poor but never really knew it. I so admire my parents struggling to keep us in the school district and such. I had no idea. When I look at my ex compared to my father, he never ever could have done half of what my dad did. Just a wholly inferior man all the way around.

What a great topic, and what amazing stories. Thank you, everyone, for sharing them.

My father was born in London in 1919. His mother was Irish and his father* was a WWI soldier who lived in Massachusetts and was of Portuguese descent. The thought was that he was an immigrant who was born in Portugal, maybe the Azores, and settled in the US with his family as a child. This young man joined the Canadian army somehow and was shipped over to England. That is how he met my grandmother. Shortly after my father's birth, the three of them traveled to the United States and settled in the Boston area. My father spent pretty much his entire life in the US, other than the years when his military career stationed him overseas, and believed he was the child of immigrants.

My grandfather* abandoned the family after it grew to include two little girls. When my father was six years old, in 1925, his mother died of typhoid. She was employed as a domestic worker and apparently took care of a lawyer's son, who survived the disease. She did not. As the story goes, she took a tumble down the steep stairs in the tenement apartment where they lived. Somehow, the spout of a teapot got embedded into her forehead, I suppose as a result of the fall. She died in the hospital, leaving my father and his two sisters orphans, and wards of the state.

My father was separated from his sisters and thus began his terrible odyssey as an orphan boy as the Depression awaited in a dismal future. He was raised partially in an orphanage, I believe, and then at times by foster parents. Few people were kind to him and he spent a lot of his childhood hungry. The example that stands out above all the others for me is that my father was a lifelong philatelist--more than a hobby for him, he ultimately was quite famous in the philatelic world. Even as a boy, he would manage to amass a small, basic stamp collection using people's discarded envelopes to soak off the stamps and make a little collection that would grow over time. Several times as soon as he had a nice collection going, his foster parents would take it from him and give it to their own children.

So the foster child thing didn't work out well. My father described a childhood where he lived in the barns and sheds of his classmates for long stretches, or in the woods, to escape the cruelty to which the system subjected him. Consequently, his education ended around 8th grade or so, with most of the four or five years before that spotty at best.

Although his childhood functionally ended when he was six, it formally ended when he lied about his age and signed on to be part of the crew of a ship when he was maybe 15 or 16 years old. After that, he joined the US Army and was sent to Panama. The one advantage my father did have is that he happened to be a genius. This served him well in his military career, as he was made an officer without a college education--they then tested him prior to assigning him to complete a degree. Despite having very little education past the 6th grade and none at all after 8th grade, he tested out of the first two years of an undergraduate degree. He then completed his four-year degree with a perfect 4.0 and graduated #1 in the worldwide U of M system that year.

The shadows of my father's cruel childhood overlaid my own from time to time. For example, my father refused to eat margarine, which my mother called "oleo." This was because of something that he experienced as a child. So in our house we had a margarine tub and then there was butter for my dad (told you he was a genius). Other things like that peppered my childhood from time to time and my father sometimes had a general lack of knowledge, or made odd choices, that stemmed either from how he grew up or his extremely unusual intellect--or both.

*so the asterisk part of this story is that the scoundrel that my entire family had always believed was my father's father....was not his biological father. I found my real grandfather after I got my DNA results from Ancestry.com and chased him back through time over a weekend in September several years ago. It has been one of the most stunning, exhilarating, wonderful surprises--and privileges--of my life to be the person who discovered this and found my grandfather, though he died before I was born. It did not, and still does not, feel as though 100 years separated me from the events of my father's birth and the stories of my grandparents. It very much feels like breadcrumbs were left for me to find, and every so often I go back and revisit and find more of them. My actual grandfather, who likely did not know about my father, was an American soldier during WWI. He was extremely tall and was a rancher out west. By all accounts, he was a wonderful, kind man who did his best to help everyone he could. Later during my Ancestry wanderings, the Ancestry people told me that I am a descendant of someone from the Mayflower. Yup. They hooked their own genealogical research to the family tree I compiled of my father's real father. I had only gone up maybe two generations, so it's very solid. The Ancestry genealogists have apparently traced Mayflower descendants from the original Pilgrims. So my father, who thought he was the child of immigrants for his entire life, was a descendant of a pretty well-known Mayflower Pilgrim.

My grandfather was also a "rabid" philatelist, according to two of his other grandchildren.

My stepfather, the man who raised me, was a child of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. His family lost their farm, and he grew up living out of a Model T, picking crops like cotton and tobacco. He often went without food when his father, a mean drunk, drank what little bit of money they had away.

They often had to make the journey between jobs last a month or more with nowhere to stay, so they would travel a few miles, set up camp, make their meager meal, then pack up the next morning and do it again. Every town had a rule they could only camp one night. The locals called them cruel names and looked down on them.

If they saw a river they stopped to swim to get clean and wash some clothes. As a boy he did back breaking work in the elements instead of going to school, and was ashamed of his ignorance the rest of his life.

My grandfather was born on a farm in 1925, on the west coast of Norway. When he was 8, his mother died of tuberculosis. That left his father with two young sons (8&6) and the farm. It wasn’t realistic to manage a farm and two boys by himself in the 1930’s, so he married a new woman very soon after. Mostly for practical reasons, but they did have 6 children together, and stayed married until old age.
As the eldest, my grandfather had a lot of responsibility. They had a barter system in the local area with other farmers and fishermen, so they had access to different foods they didn’t produce on their own farm.
Then the Germans invaded our country when he was 15 years old. He spoke of it often. He remembered it clear as day, even 75 years later.
He always used to say that he was lucky to live on a farm. They had food. The people living in the cities were struggling during the war.
The farm kept them alive, but it wasn’t turning much of a profit. After he married my grandmother and moved out, he was still expected to contribute financially to his father and stepmother.

Living on a farm made life easier, but he told us about the times they had to eat their pet bunnies. The only animals they kept for ‘fun’. It must have been hard, but they had dinner for a few days.
Things like that is just unfathomable to me.
He once told me that I had no idea how good of a life I had. And my first thought was that I grew up with ONE tv-channel! 😂
He was absolutely right, I had NO idea of how cushy my life really was!