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Posted
9 hours ago, CatManDo said:

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.

Louise TX?

Posted (edited)

I don’t know that we were that poor, but we sure as fuck couldn’t afford braces. 
 
Also, I found the old FAFSA from when I was applying to UT- it was workable because of my National Merit Scholarship. My folks had $550 in savings, in 1981. Shit, I almost had that much, from working at Gatti’s. 
 
I remember realizing that almost all of my classmates grew up knowing they were going to go to college, and that it really wasn’t a big deal to them or their families. It was expected. 

Edited by statsman
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Posted
We’d go for family “drives” on the weekend, supposedly as something for us all to do together. But we always ended up by some remote cornfield and dad would go into it and come back with an armful of corn. 
 
I think the family was with him for cover. 
I helped my dad steal dirt. We'd drive a few miles to the neighboring town which was mostly farm land. On the side of one backroad was probably a 10' bluff of good top soil. We'd shovel the dirt I to plastic tubs then throw them in the back of the '73 Plymouth station wagon & take back home to level out a section of our backyard. Probably made twenty trips one summer weekend. People would drive by occasionally but nobody said anything. The land nearby was clearly fenced and there was a driveway about 100 yards past where we'd dig. The closest we came to being caught was when I noticed so.e teenagers looking back down at us from top of the bluff, but they were just a young couple out smoking & poking.
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Posted

Damn. The lunch ticket/free lunch pass hits home. We had a similar setup in MN when I was a kid. We were fortunate enough not to qualify for the free lunch, but my friends who did suffered teasing from classmates & even scorn from the lunch lady we bought our tickets from each week. That just brought back a painful memory from 45 years ago.

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Posted
8 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:
17 hours ago, statsman said:
We’d go for family “drives” on the weekend, supposedly as something for us all to do together. But we always ended up by some remote cornfield and dad would go into it and come back with an armful of corn. 
 
I think the family was with him for cover. 

I helped my dad steal dirt. We'd drive a few miles to the neighboring town which was mostly farm land. On the side of one backroad was probably a 10' bluff of good top soil. We'd shovel the dirt I to plastic tubs then throw them in the back of the '73 Plymouth station wagon & take back home to level out a section of our backyard. Probably made twenty trips one summer weekend. People would drive by occasionally but nobody said anything. The land nearby was clearly fenced and there was a driveway about 100 yards past where we'd dig. The closest we came to being caught was when I noticed so.e teenagers looking back down at us from top of the bluff, but they were just a young couple out smoking & poking.

Dirt burglar?

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Posted
5 hours ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

I'd still get down with a govt cheese grilled cheese sandwich. 

 When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria didn't take cash. I guess it was an effort to keep kids from having to carry lunch money every day. If your kid was going to eat from the cafeteria, you had to buy "meal tickets". These were punch cards you'd hand the cashier, and she'd punch a hole in a square and hand them back to your teacher. I remember there were different colors for different value cards. The blue ones were the smallest denomination, and the white ones were the most expensive/longest lasting. The kids like me on free lunch got these big orange laminated cards that said FREE in big block letters. The teachers kept track of all the cards, and before lunch every day they would walk around and hand out the meal tickets, and you had to carry them in your hand so the teacher could see them as you walked single file to the cafeteria. Even at an early age I was embarrassed as fuck having to carry the big orange "I'm poor" card. 

Yea.  I remember that.  Of course now everyone at my daughters school gets free lunch

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Posted
5 hours ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

I'd still get down with a govt cheese grilled cheese sandwich. 

 When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria didn't take cash. I guess it was an effort to keep kids from having to carry lunch money every day. If your kid was going to eat from the cafeteria, you had to buy "meal tickets". These were punch cards you'd hand the cashier, and she'd punch a hole in a square and hand them back to your teacher. I remember there were different colors for different value cards. The blue ones were the smallest denomination, and the white ones were the most expensive/longest lasting. The kids like me on free lunch got these big orange laminated cards that said FREE in big block letters. The teachers kept track of all the cards, and before lunch every day they would walk around and hand out the meal tickets, and you had to carry them in your hand so the teacher could see them as you walked single file to the cafeteria. Even at an early age I was embarrassed as fuck having to carry the big orange "I'm poor" card. 

At our school you hadta pay cash.  Could do every day or prepay iirc. Kids on reduced cost lunch you knew when the teacher made them pay less.

And if they had a negative balance that got called out as well.  As if a 7 yo kid has more money than their parents.

Posted
9 minutes ago, Im_smarter_then_you said:

Yea.  I remember that.  Of course now everyone at my daughters school gets free lunch

 

I could be wrong, but this may not be an attempt to avoid shaming anybody, but rather its just easier for the school to give everybody a free lunch than to go through the paperwork about who has to pay however much. 

 

Posted (edited)

School meals should always be free.  Growing up we had the option of cash or doing the prepaid card, folks just gave me money sometimes a little extra if I wanted a shake in Jr high. 

Edited by Underdog
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Posted (edited)

My family was solid lower middle class but my parents both grew up not as well off. The stories of my dad's father - building his own car, building his own house, made his kids dig a swimming pool, with dynamite. Both of them instilled a frugal-ness in me and my siblings and some of that stuff sticks even to today (though I am breaking it slowly)

Some of the stuff that stands out to me:

  • Squeezing every last living drop out of every thing - toothpaste, condiments, etc. We weren't allowed to open new stuff until the other one was bone dry. To this day I still flatten my toothpaste out and get every damn drop of toothpaste out of the tube
  • Rarely getting name brand anything, when I did it was from one of the discount stores, usually irregular.
  • Always buying the cheapest car possible - I think I graduated high school before my parents got a car with power windows.
  • Buying the cheapest everything - it wasn't just cars, my parents wouldn't spend any more than the bare minimum on anything and my dad would fix it to keep it going as long as possible (I actually don't mind having this skill now)
  • My mom making our birthday cake every year instead of those cool ones from the store (now that said - I never realized how much better I really was getting on this).

Those are the first that come off the top of my head.

 

Oh and this

When Beer Was BEER: The Forgotten, Generic Brands That Ruled ...

Edited by Captain Ron
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Posted
45 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

I could be wrong, but this may not be an attempt to avoid shaming anybody, but rather its just easier for the school to give everybody a free lunch than to go through the paperwork about who has to pay however much. 

 

It got tied to technology grants. The more students you had on free lunch, the more grant money you can get. It's changed a bit now, but it was huge money for big tech for much of the 90s-2010s. Cisco, Dell, et al made billions from those grants.

Posted
14 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:
23 hours ago, statsman said:
We’d go for family “drives” on the weekend, supposedly as something for us all to do together. But we always ended up by some remote cornfield and dad would go into it and come back with an armful of corn. 
 
I think the family was with him for cover. 

I helped my dad steal dirt. We'd drive a few miles to the neighboring town which was mostly farm land. On the side of one backroad was probably a 10' bluff of good top soil. We'd shovel the dirt I to plastic tubs then throw them in the back of the '73 Plymouth station wagon & take back home to level out a section of our backyard. Probably made twenty trips one summer weekend. People would drive by occasionally but nobody said anything. The land nearby was clearly fenced and there was a driveway about 100 yards past where we'd dig. The closest we came to being caught was when I noticed so.e teenagers looking back down at us from top of the bluff, but they were just a young couple out smoking & poking.

Man, that's something. You weren't even "dirt poor." You were so poor you had to steal the dirt you had.

 

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Posted
11 hours ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

I'd still get down with a govt cheese grilled cheese sandwich. 

 When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria didn't take cash. I guess it was an effort to keep kids from having to carry lunch money every day. If your kid was going to eat from the cafeteria, you had to buy "meal tickets". These were punch cards you'd hand the cashier, and she'd punch a hole in a square and hand them back to your teacher. I remember there were different colors for different value cards. The blue ones were the smallest denomination, and the white ones were the most expensive/longest lasting. The kids like me on free lunch got these big orange laminated cards that said FREE in big block letters. The teachers kept track of all the cards, and before lunch every day they would walk around and hand out the meal tickets, and you had to carry them in your hand so the teacher could see them as you walked single file to the cafeteria. Even at an early age I was embarrassed as fuck having to carry the big orange "I'm poor" card. 

 

11 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

Damn. The lunch ticket/free lunch pass hits home. We had a similar setup in MN when I was a kid. We were fortunate enough not to qualify for the free lunch, but my friends who did suffered teasing from classmates & even scorn from the lunch lady we bought our tickets from each week. That just brought back a painful memory from 45 years ago.

That shit pisses me off today.

Shouldn't be ashamed of being poor. Should be ashamed to be an asshole. ESPECIALLY a rich asshole. Those fuckers should be feeling shame.

*glares vaguely just beyond the northeastern edge of Virginia*

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Posted (edited)

My folks were dirt poor as kids in the depression, in Texas. My mom’s dad hopped a train to Oregon to pick fruit- it was work, and it was easier for other people to give them stuff if he was away. 
 
Neither family owned property. My dad’s dad made things worse by being a drunk, too. Grandma used to buy “sweet meat” (the internal organs that would otherwise be thrown away) from the butcher, because they were cheap. Dad, his two sisters, brother, parents and Grandpa Otto all lived in a two bedroom home, without running water. They kept chickens, of course, and when they killed a pig, they ate all of it (including the head cheese). 
 
Flour came in big bags, with floral patterns on the sides. Moms would pick them out for the pattern, because they would make clothes from the bag material. 
 
Dad said that whenever a drifter knocked on the door asking to work for food, Grandma would give him some (chore and meal). The food wouldn’t be any better than what the family ate, so it might just be bread drug through refried beans. 
 
The war made things a lot better. Grandpa enlisted in the Navy and they taught him to make x-rays in the Seabees. My mom’s dad moved them all to L.A. and got work in the shipyard. 

Edited by statsman
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Posted
On 4/7/2025 at 11:15 AM, CatManDo said:

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.

Go Hornets!

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Posted
15 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

Squeezing every last living drop out of every thing - toothpaste, condiments, etc. We weren't allowed to open new stuff until the other one was bone dry. To this day I still flatten my toothpaste out and get every damn drop of toothpaste out of the tube

then cutting it open and the whole damn house got a scrape with their toothbrush to get it all out.  

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Posted
On 4/7/2025 at 11:33 AM, Beau Vine said:

s-l1600.webp

Green jeans, required uniform 1st through 8th grade at the Catholic school.  Also served as church cloths on Sunday. Haven’t worn green pants since May of 1981. 

Posted
Just now, Al Czervik said:

Green jeans, required uniform 1st through 8th grade at the Catholic school.  Also served as church cloths on Sunday. Haven’t worn green pants since May of 1981. 

We had two acceptable uniform combos at my Catholic school.  You could wear dark blue Toughskins w/ a baby blue button-down or polo-style shirt.  Or green Toughskins w/ a yellow button-down or polo pullover. 

Posted
40 minutes ago, Underdog said:

Acceptable Catholic School Uniforms… 

 

th?id=OIP.n7FYVD_ZiSatCyXdTBbApQHaEo&pid=Api&P=0&w=300&h=300

Catholic school girls. The uniform's what does it for me. I wish I had've went with more Catholic school girls when I was a kid. As it stands, I have no "And then she unzipped her jumper" stories.

Posted
17 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

Rarely getting name brand anything, when I did it was from one of the discount stores, usually irregular

Man, this takes me back. My mom would go to the local western wear store to get me irregular jeans. Levi's made sure you had the "IRR" stamped on the back tag, too. And we had to get Levi's because the super cheap-o brands didn't have a long enough inseam for my gangly ass.

Posted

Packing half a dozen potted meat sandwiches on a single slice of bread folded over to drive out with my dad on Saturdays for him to make AC service calls. The ranch owners would let me fish the stock tanks and keep what I caight. Then they would gift us a deer leg and back straps from their freezer.

Mom would save bacon grease in a cardboard milk carton to make refried beans later. Best fucking beans ever!

Sometimes I would take my pellet gun out into the open lane behind our house and shoot a couple of cottontails. I would clean and skin them before leaving for school. Mom would fry those up for my supper when I got home.

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Posted (edited)
On 4/7/2025 at 11:04 AM, Spaulding Smails said:

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.

You had shirts?

We got trucker caps with iron on letters and that was it. We all played good defense tho because there was not a blade of grass within 5 miles of our home baseball diamond. Just sand and gravel and bad hop after bad hop.

 

edit: boy scouts was the same. I got a cap and a tie. And a guide book full of impossible things I was never going to see the materials to build.

Edited by GringoSalado
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Posted
On 4/8/2025 at 3:36 PM, T’Boo Ted Marshall said:

I was beyond embarrassed when my Mom bought those.  You absolutely could not tear them.  I tried.  

 

My entry....powdered milk

Yeah, my Dad would mix a gallon of powdered milk with a gallon of whole milk in a two-gallon pitcher.  Three of us brothers, though, so we went through a lot of milk. 

The worst was when you'd get the milk just after he mixed and it wasn't cold yet.  Tepid watered down milk with cereal, hmmm. 

Also, bag n save and we had envelopes stuffed full coupons organized by food type, many of which had the expiration dates cut off.  Hated it when he'd have the stare down with the cashier over those.  He still tips 10% to this day so we have to leave extra when we all go out to dinner. 

Sent me and my brother to Texas as out-of-staters, though, so coupon clipping served a purpose 🤘

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Posted
On 4/8/2025 at 6:10 PM, Bevo&Pevo said:

Well, we were poor.  All our money went to pay for 2 JD7720II combines, that we only used about 5 weeks a year.  Times were tough, but we ate good.

Bro, do even Gleaner F?

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Posted
18 hours ago, Parliament said:

Bro, do even Gleaner F?

 

1 hour ago, Kennythetiger said:

We had two- one with a swamp cooler and a newer one with freon air. There were fistfights over who drove which. 

Never did mind cutting rice, but milo and corn and the dust created.  Misery.   My favorite farm activity was breaking ground/discing.  I still love the smell of good black dirt.  

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Posted
13 hours ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

 

Never did mind cutting rice, but milo and corn and the dust created.  Misery.   My favorite farm activity was breaking ground/discing.  I still love the smell of good black dirt.  

Yeah but when the rice had that black smut in it, it got pretty nasty.  Blowing black snot and boogers at the end of the day.

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Posted
Yeah but when the rice had that black smut in it, it got pretty nasty.  Blowing black snot and boogers at the end of the day.

In the early-mid ‘80s (SETX) my Uncle would have my cousin and me “flag” during heavy crop dusting season. That was back before GPS and the cockpit got computerized. Depending on what they were spaying dictated how far we’d walk before waving the flags.

I’m 55 now so I guess that shit wasn’t toxic? I remember on a summer day, we were both 8th and 9th graders going into the next school year. We got a 6-pack of Coca-Cola to start the day at (5:30-6:00 AM) and that shit was gone before 10:00. All we had to drink out in the rice fields was the other “workers” Miller Lite. All Uncle said while refueling was time to man-up boys and let’s get this job done! We were both lit by 2:00.

Hook’em!!!
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Posted

Uncle Jeff would strap us both down with Ruger .22 pistols while flagging. The Fng Nutria rats were aggressive back then and the “black birds” that liked to eat the rice feed. He’d just say if you see them, shoot them! We’d then throw the carcasses into the canals for the gators.

Hook’em!!!

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