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Posted

I really remember starting this thread before, but God is my witness, I can’t find it.  Mighta been the other board.  If you find it, I’ll request a merge and self-ban.

Anyway.  Here’s mine.

Dry Mac and Cheese w/o butter (margarine).  Mom never added margarine, just water.  My college roommate showed me the right way and wow I the difference. A few years later I was food secure and upgraded to the velveeta shells and cheese.  Big livin’ there.

Our farmhouse had no AC.  When it was especially hot we’d camp on the dining room floor with the ceiling fan cranked.  Nowadays they call that, “glamping” or some goddamn thing.  
 

When the motor died in our pickup Dad would go the junk yard, choose and worthy donor, and pull the engine.  IIRC it was $150 for a SBC, and they’d let you take all the accessories and even the rad.  Got to where I could do all that in a small day.

Barefoot in the hog barns.  This one wasn’t because of poverty but because we were feral children and our parents gave no shits.  Pretty sure that skin-to-manure contact revved our immune systems in a way no vax can (no CR.)

I can list out easily 20 more.  Some I am proud of but still don’t share with friends.  They’d think it’s weird. 

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Posted

My dad built our kitchen table using 2x4s.

Never had new clothes early on. Always hand me downs from my older cousin. My aunt would deliver a huge package of clothes from Irvine to Seattle. It wasn’t until we moved to South Africa that we had anything nice because the exchange rate was in our favor.

First time I saw a hundred dollar bill, I thought that was amazing. My dad only made $800/mo. This was in the late 70s / early 80s. 

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Posted
2 hours ago, Sabalo said:

Fried bologna or Underwoods deviled ham sandwiches for lunch.

We had "ham salad" from the local grocery store... Discovered later that it was ground bologna and mayo/relish. 

1 hour ago, Superhero said:

Never had new clothes early on. Always hand me downs from my older cousin

Mine were from older kids in our church... Can still remember the shame of wearing my nicest outfit for Easter Sunday only to remember who'd worn it the previous year 

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Posted

My first four years of life were spent in a fifty foot single wide trailer that was owned by my Grannie and Papa.  We were waiting to move into the house that was built by my dad and mom. Took them six years to build it, but my dad, who was from Germany and an auto mechanic by trade (Never will meet a better or more skilled mechanic), built the house using one of those yellow DIY books. My mom still has that. They built it as they got more money as they were also making payments on the 15 acres of land at the same time.
 

That trailer was awesome though. My Oma moved into it when we moved out so I had my three grandparents living right next to each other as a kid.

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Posted (edited)

People paying a shit ton of money for jeans with holes in em.

That shit will never set right in my head.  My wife owns a pair or two, and I just nod my head and ask, "Why? We used to get made fun of for that shit."

Edited by Iceman
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Posted

Mom and Dad both worked.  (And that was unusual for the early 1960s.)  Except when we were out of town, which was rare, we never ate out. 

My favorite food was fried chicken.  When Kentucky Fried Chicken came to town, I wanted to try it, but Mom said it was too expensive.

Never had pizzeria pizza until after I'd graduated high school.

I remember Mom making sauerkraut and weinies for lunch. Occasionally she'd take saltines and put a square of american cheese on them and melt the cheese in the oven.  That was quite a treat.

We relied on "swamp box" A/Cs.   Every spring Dad and I'd go buy new pads for them. These pads were mattresses of straw that fit next to the louvered sides of the A/C. Water would flow down these pads and a fan suck air through the damp pads and blow the "conditioned" air into the house.  Dad would adjust the float values so there would be enough water to pump over the pads.  As an 8-year-old boy, this is one of my cherished memories.

Posted
13 minutes ago, Bill Brasky said:

government cheese 

When someone refers to a proposal in the government as pork barrel spending, this is what immediately comes to mind:
5392839409_ba7a6cb563_b.jpg

Posted
2 hours ago, statsman said:

Buying tennis shoes from Kmart. They came out of a big bin, with no shoebox, just the laces tying them together. They were called “buddies”. 

Bought new shoes for vacation and left them at home so we stopped at a Kmart and I found a pair of Mcgregor on the cheap, best most comfortable pair of tennis shoes I ever owned. I called them Air Macs could never find another pair like them before Kmart closed up. 

Posted

Lots of hand me downs. But because I was the only boy & had 2 older sisters I was getting girls' clothing. It was pretty much limited to winter sweaters which also meant my sisters were forced to wear plain, drab shit (not easy to do in the '70s).

The worst part was not being able to have my own boy's bicycle w/ the top bar. I had to ride a girl's bike for the first few years which meant I was picked on constantly in my shitty, poor MN town. When my sisters moved up to 10-speeds, my dad took a bottom bar off of one of their bikes and had it welded upside down on another bike to make it a boy's bike. Except it still had the two bottom bars so yeah, I was still teased ruthlessly & got my ass kicked because of my hybrid boy/girl bike.

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Posted

When the flame sensor on the furnace gets fouled and we just get cold air blowing.  In my head, I know I just need to go grab some steel wool and clean the device; but the memories of cold as fuck house...

snape-take-these.gif

Posted

I made the 7th grade basketball team. I never had played bball for any team or league prior to that. I needed to buy basketball shoes. 

My parents took me to Target to get Roos (short for Kangaroos) basketball shoes. I remember wearing them to practice the first day and the other kids were like, what the fuck is that? I didn't know any better. I thought they looked cool since they were my first bball shoes. 

 

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Posted

I guess we fell on hard times when I was 5 or 6.  We moved from a nice house to a trailer house on some land with a horse barn.  We were in charge of taking care of the horses and we had our own horse too.  His name was Spot.  My brother and I had a lot of fun on that land and with the horses.  There was another trailer on the property that had kids our age to play with and get all kinds of country.

The poor part I remember was having to burn our trash.  It was kind of fun too.

About a year later, my dad got a job as manager of the Thunderbird Lodge in Abilene.  We moved into the "penthouse" to live there for a year.  That was super fun too.  We didn't have a full kitchen in the penthouse, so we ate every meal in the hotel restaurant.

A year later we moved into a nice house in the good school district (Wylie) and lived there the rest of growing up.  Business got better and we weren't poor anymore.

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Posted

I grew up in the small town of Louise in the 60s and 70s.  We were a low-end middle-class family (like many other families in town), Dad worked 6-1/2 days a week and Mom was a stay-at-home mom.  Budgets were tight but as a kid I never really comprehended that.  I remember that if we asked Mom for some chewing gum, she would tear a stick of Wrigley's in half and that was our portion.  I also could never understand why Santa only brought us low-cost gifts, while many of my friends got expensive gifts...it seemed like Santa did not distribute fairly.

Posted
56 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

I made the 7th grade basketball team. I never had played bball for any team or league prior to that. I needed to buy basketball shoes. 

My parents took me to Target to get Roos (short for Kangaroos) basketball shoes. I remember wearing them to practice the first day and the other kids were like, what the fuck is that? I didn't know any better. I thought they looked cool since they were my first bball shoes. 

 

Good enough for Sweetness...
images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTfDyruYzTS_I9tlpwwPP_

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Posted

There was some sort of a salvage grocery store in Justin that sold stuff regular grocery stores wouldn't sell.  I remember one time they had a "train wreck sale."  Some train had derailed and caught on fire and it burned the labels off the canned goods.  My dad loaded up on that shit to the point that I remember unlabeled cans of mystery shit in our pantry for years.

Posted

Burning trash out back behind the house.

Family vacations were by car to visit family in Beaumont. 

Never stayed in a hotel or a motel until I was in college, unless I went on vacation with friends. 

My dad remodeling our house in south Austin on a hillside and using cinder blocks to prop up the master bedroom and living room. 

Posted

I was digging through some old keepsakes that my parents gave me when they recently moved.  Found my first little league picture.  American Little League tee ball in Corpus Christi circa 1986.  I was the only gringo on the team.  We were the Yankees.  We had yellow and white shirts emblazoned with "Yankees" in script across the front and a yellow hat with "American" across the front.  This was complemented by blue jeans since we couldn't afford baseball pants.    Nothing about our uniform resembled the Bronx Bombers.  The league, my team, my family couldn't afford baseball pants let alone the full licensed apparel.  Kind of funny to show to my son after spending the last several years playing select ball with multiple uniforms for every team.

Posted

I didn't grow up poor, but my parents did and they acted like we were poor as fuck too. Dad gets offended when I look back and call him cheap, I guess "frugal" would be the right word. I get it though. His dad built one of their houses out of old railroad ties. No indoor plumbing.

Fried baloney was the first thing I ever learned to make by myself. We lived in military housing overseas, so no A/C at all and no central heat, just radiators. Eating out was a rare treat.

I got hand me downs as well, but from my older sister. I thought the Hardy Boys were cool but perhaps her old Parker Stevenson iron-on t-shirt was a poor choice for an 8 year old boy.

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Posted

Salmon croquettes from the canned salmon from Tom Thumb.

 

To this day, just the smell of that makes me throw up. My parents (very well off now) still eat them once a week.

Posted

No A/C in South Texas until I was 15.  Burned our trash.  Never ate Spam or Vienna sausages or bolonga or any of that shit; don't know why.  Santa was a cheap bastard too.

Posted
18 hours ago, crash_davis said:

Beating off to the bra section of a Montgomery Wards catalog.

I didn't grow up even remotely poor, so I can tell ya EVERYBODY did that.

 

11 hours ago, Underdog said:

While in Montgomery Wards. 

... but not that, though.

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Posted

Mom didn't work early in my childhood. Dad was a paint contractor. When work slowed for him in the winter months he had to find other ways to feed the family. We lived in a single wide trailer on 72 acres that belonged to my grandfather. My dad always had some hounds around the house and at night he would coon hunt with the hounds. On Saturday morning we would all go to town and sell the furs. My mom would go across the street to buy groceries for the week. She always bought a large bag of cornmeal with the groceries. When we got home she would cook the corn meal and the skinned coons in a pressure cooker this was the dog food for the week. What's funny is I grew up poor but I didn't know I was poor. I thought everyone lived that way.

Posted
1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

I didn't grow up even remotely poor, so I can tell ya EVERYBODY did that.

I don't even remember a Monkey Ward's catalogue.  I made do with Sears or National Geographic.

Posted
6 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

I don't even remember a Monkey Ward's catalogue.  I made do with Sears or National Geographic.

Those were the days.

And then we got a catalog from something called Mellow Mail.

Man, that filled the spank bank for years, until our deeply religious housekeeper spotted it and trashed it. 😡

But. Again. Off topic.

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