When I was young, we were so poor...

What did you do without you wish you had had?

I hated having to clean my own room.

We had neither strippers nor a hot tub.

I was so depreaved....I mean deprived.

I only had underwear section of the Sears catalog. It was rough I tell you!

:-)

a second bathroom...My father needed one all for himself. Trust me on this.

it's like she's hearing a horror story.

so I could get drunk and forget I was poor!!! :beer:

:toast:

for the grandchildren either.

Me too.

(just checked my posts!)

My parents treated us like it was our fault we were born.

Assholes.

We had to heat our water on a stove and bath in about 3 inches of water, girls first, then boys, same water.

We got one pair for school, one for play - once a year. And sometimes we got flip flops in the summer to wear to the pool.

My parents were divorced and I remember being in the car when it happened to them separately. My friend said that it was because they were middle class kids who didn't realize that they could have written a check at the gas station before returning to cash their checks.
We also had the embarassment of having to "charge" our school lunches because my parent shad run out of money and packable food.
As far as things that I wanted, jeans without holes in them and shoes that weren't worn through the tread. We didn't have "old clothes" as kids, we wore them until they didn't fit. My mother was a middle class kid though so we always did have name brand food and our clothes were new when we bought them.
When I moved in with my dad in high school though, my step mother did save money by buying cheap food. I really wanted real Kool aid, Kraft salad dressing, and Kellog's cereal.

My dad was a UPS driver when he went blind. My mom worked while he went back to school and got a masters in economics. We did OK on his VA benefits and social security, just no extras and some frugal living for those hard years. Wonder what will happen to people who end up like us in the future when SS is cut back.

my parents kept us in clothes and Mom knew how to make hamburger a 1000 different ways.Some of my favorite recipes come from when I was a kid. And they are still inexpensive to cook today We had one car and Dad had it at work....so where ever we needed to go we walked. If it was to far, we probably didn't need to go. And I didn't know we we poor until much later on. We got new shoes once a year and a couple of things for Christmas each (5 of us Kids) but we didn't do with out if we really needed it. My folks always found a way.

Going to bed and waking up in a bedroom which wasn't much warmer than outside. Man, that sucked.

wearing my mom's clothes when I wanted to looked stylish in high school.

No air conditioner in Texas, even during the Texas heatwave of 1980. I remember the temp was well over a hundred for something like two weeks in June? We used to wet down the sheets in the bathtub, and lay them over us with the attic fan sucking the air from outside onto the sheets to stay cool. So my vote is the a/c.

I was the last of 5 and always wore hand me downs until high school (both my brother's, who was 5 years older than me, and my middle sister's, who was 7 years older).

And more mental health professionals. My father went through a deep depression, had electro shock therapy and was never quite the same after.

We had all the neccesities. My mother made (sewed and knitted) most of our clothes until I was 12 or so. When I grew too tall for a pair of pants, she'd sew rick-rack or ribbon on the bottom to make them last longer.

I remember very few times going to a restaurant. That was considered a BIG treat. Even just to McDonald's was a rare and exciting event. My father would never order anything there, he'd always say he wasn't hungry. Later, I knew it was so my brother and I could get our hamburgers and french fries.

Looking back, I don't see how my parents raised us on their income. People's priorities seem so different now. No one wants to start out at the bottom. They feel they've got to go into huge debt, buy the big house right away, the new car etc..instead of working and saving for things.

A friend of mine was recently bemoaning his consistent lack of grocery money. He was reduced to eating Ramen noodles most of the time. However, he has Dish Network, DSL internet service, cell phone service, etc. You should have seen the look of horror on his face when I suggested letting some of those "frills" go. It was unthinkable to him.

:-)

highly touted years ago. I've never known anyone who was right after it.

I didn't know Marcia Brady had blond hair until I visited a friend. :)

:-)

or my fave when such topics arise:

FOUR YORKSHIREMEN SKETCH (MP)

Four well-dressed men are sitting together at a vacation resort. 'Farewell to Thee' is played in the background on Hawaiian guitar.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: (M.P.) Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: (G.C.) Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: (T.J.) You're right there, Obadiah.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: (E.I.) Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: A cup o' cold tea.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Without milk or sugar.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Or tea.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In a cracked cup, an' all.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, 'e was right.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, 'e was.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Cardboard box?

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Aye.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

ALL: They won't!

part of the reason we were poor was because our parents wouldn't let us go to public school-- we had to go to catholic school. so instead of 'maybe' turning out fucked up by going to public school, they subjected us to elitism (from gradeschoolers) from day one until I left that place.

so we just had them loosened

:hi:

I was 12 before we had indoor plumbing. We had to heat pots of water on stove to pour into one of those metal tubs for a bath and of course we had the old 'outhouse'.