Middle Class

I grew up in what was generously called a middle class neighborhood. My three older sisters and one younger brother always had clothes to wear and food to eat and that meant we were middle class. Even to this day the name middle class has a certain comforting ring to it. During the depression it was commonly said that we were poor but we didn’t know it because everyone was poor. This seemingly odd way of looking at things is still prevalent today but in a slightly different context. Today the way the well to do distinguish them is to have something that no one in their circle has. A good example is a diamond ring. Most women would like to have a perfect one carat diamond, mostly so they could show it off to their friends, who hopefully have smaller less than perfect stones. If they succeed in the labs at making these kinds of diamonds and mass produce them so they can be purchased for ten bucks then the mystic surrounding these chunks of carbon will be dispersed like smoke in the wind. The intrinsic value associated with these stones has to do with the fact that your friends don’t have one, so when they become available to the masses then no one will want one. This is the way it is with many things that we value in today’s world. No sense in having a million dollar home if all your friends have one so let us build a 5 million dollar home and so on. Diamonds and home aside for me it is hard to beat an early morning walk on a nice day and it is most gratifying when you are blessed with good health. Good thing that many people do not feel as I do about material possessions, as our whole economy would come tumbling down. I am not complaining about a consumer based economy but it doesn’t fit my life style. I am grateful for this wonderful country and fully realize that the profits from these consumed articles provide livelihoods for millions and the R&D financed by these same profits have given us super products like the Polio vaccine.
We lived about two miles from our grammar school and all of us walked each day starting in first grade. There were no school buses for people who lived in town. There was a group of five of us who walked together and parents did not have to worry about kids being kidnapped although that may not have been the case with rich kids, of whom I knew nothing about. To be honest the only reason I suspected there might be rich kids is that we saw them in movies. Movies are where we got outside of our world. While the thought of going out to a restaurant never entered our minds we knew they existed because we saw them in movies.
When I got into high school it too was about two miles away albeit in a different direction but we all walked together as before. There were only a few kids who had cars and no one in our group. I recall my dad always told me that I could buy a car whenever I wanted but I shouldn’t ask him to sign any papers. In those days you had to be 21 to have an official signature so I didn’t own a car until I was 21. Interesting difference in the high schools in my day versus the present is that while we did not have a parking lot for students we did have a smoking room for upper classmen. I used to smoke in those days and if you went into the smoke room at recess you didn’t need to have any cigarettes, you could just inhale the air.
No one had air conditioning but a few people got window fans and these were considered a status symbol. We were one of the first in our neighborhood to get a refrigerator. Before that we had an ice box and two or three times a week the ice man would come and we would purchase a 25 pound block of ice and that would keep things from spoiling