We were so poor growing up that ......

[zzzippper]

For Christmas we got to look at pictures of the neighbors' presents.

 

[Bill_inBouse]

We wuz sooooo poor....the dog had to call for a fair catch when granny threw a chicken bone out the back door.

 

[Onomea]

When we were kids, I think wearing hand-me-downs was just normal for just about everyone. We weren't poor. My dad was a federal government bureaucrat, and a fairly senior one. But in my case boy clothes would start with my big brother, move to my older cousin, come back to me, and then on to my younger cousin if they were still serviceable.

Mom and all the moms of my friends had a basket of clothes, including socks, that needed mending. When they'd get a chance to take a break and sit down, they'd do the mending. Fixing socks was called "darning."

So kids and adults would wear clothes with obvious mends and no one thought it odd. On the other hand, we all had our "Sunday best" to wear to church, too. And dad wore nice suits to the office.

(I workd in NYC , when I was 19, with a Japanese war bride in a retail store. She must have been in her forties by then. She told me the story of how early in her marriage she was mending her husband's torn shirt and he asked her what she was doing. When she explained, he laughed, and said to throw it away, that they'd just buy a new one. Made quite an impression on her. It just seemed such an amazing practice to her.)

 

[CaptRon956]

.... we were so poor that we couldn't even afford the letter R in "POOR", we were... and it was pronouced.... "Po"

 

[Smith357]

 

[BigBill]

My toys were made from shirt cardboard, tape and glue. I was a kid and grew up being creative because of it. Learning to fabricate and weld helped me use my design capabilities. My cnc machine building and mechanic experiences worked out great as a lead tech in the engineering group.
I could listen to the engineers at a meeting and picture in my mind what I needed to build to support there new product to test it. I was one step ahead of them. I'm just a high school drop out what do I know.

 

[bigolddave]

We were so poor, my brother and I lived in a garret. For dinner, we had shoe string soup. My mother liked my brother best, so he got the shoe string and all I got was broth.

(I have since made up for the malnutrition of my youth. Now that Feralmerrill is gone, I may be the undisputed heavyweight champion of the forum.)

 

[walkin jack]

We were so poor that cockroach moved out to avoid starvation.

 

[rburg]

Y'all are laughing, but there's truth in a lot of the claims. Yeah, I walked to an from school. How else would I get there? And laugh all you want, there was uphill both ways. Funny how I never remembered the downhills that had been up when going. If you want to remember it, go back to the old homestead and walk the route to school and back. They didn't arrest me, even though they didn't like riff-raff walking in their neighborhood.

Its not really all that funny. I grew up convinced we were the poorest family in the school system. It kind of eats at you when you're young. Convinced also that all the other kids are better off than you. Make no mistake, the other kids made sure you knew how rich they were compared to you. But it later became apparent they weren't smarter, nor did they work as hard. I was half way through college before I realized we weren't that poor, dad was just cheap. He had a better job than most if not many. He just wouldn't spend it. All a result of his depression era upbringing. The great depression caused a lot of pain for decades after.

 

[soFlaNative]

I paid off our first-born when he was three...

 

[shouldazagged]

The great depression caused a lot of pain for decades after.

Dick, I was born in '37, and for years thought I had caused the second, devastating wave of the Depression. I was raised on good old-fashioned guilt.

But you're right, people who lived through that terrible time were marked by it one way or another. No one escaped completely unscarred.

 

[RobertJ.]

We tied string to a slice of bacon and took turns eating it!

 

[Mr Pokeyman]

I never knew we were poor. I thought everybody lived in WWII surplus Quanset huts with no inside walls, just sheets hung up around the toilet for privacy. Thought everybody slept on the floor next to the kerosene space heater in the winter. At night in the summer I'd sneak out to raid the neighbors gardens and eat tomatoes and even raw corn. Maybe that's why I'm obsessed with keeping my refrigerator and pantry full.

 

[BigCityChief]

We thought "Hand-me-downs" was a brand name!

You mean, it isn't?!![emoji2]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Dezfan]

White bread, mayo, and store brand "Ruffles" potato chips where a regular around my house as a kid in the 70's.

I think we were poor growing up, but I sure as hell didn't know it.

My brothers and I have discussed it many times since the passing of our parents, and we all agree that we had great childhoods.

Just goes to show that money doesn't buy happiness.

 

[Mike McLellan]

...Our servants had to car-pool.

 

[Johnmuratore]

Doctors were an expensive luxury for us. When my nose got broken in a dumb fight, my Mom grabbed my face and pushed my nose around until it looked about right to her. Still pretty crooked.
Only time I remember seeing a doctor was for a polio shot.
Of course we had the patches in our clothes and cardboard in our shoes. Everyone I knew did.

 

[Onomea]

Coat of Many Colors, Dolly Parton, seems to fit in here:

http://youtu.be/c1zJzr-kWsI

 

[BigBill]

During the war my grandfather was the black market. He could get anything. He helped a lot of people in the neighborhood eat. One neighbors kid I met in the 70's he had a coffee truck. My mom told me to tell him who I was when he came to serve my shop. People don't forget who helped them survive. I got free pepperoni and egg sandwiches.

 

[radar1972]

We didn't have much, but what I did have was a mother & father that loved me enough to keep me, my brother & my sister on the straight & narrow.

Some of our best meals were collard greens & cornbread.