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

[Maddog 521]

My mom made my shirts and my sister's dress's from feed sacks. She and her mother went to the feed mill and picked out the ones that they wanted and then dickered on the price. We got to wear those feed sack clothes until 5th grade. By then my dad had a better job so we got store bought clothes. Wow what a treat. I was about 10 years old before I found out that there were other parts of a chicken than the back. Wow what a treat. I'm still cheap and I don't throw anything away until I move it 4 or 5 times.

 

[Wyatt Burp]

Rodney Dangerfield said he was so poor as a kid, the rainbows in his neighborhood were in black & white.

 

[Lt JL]

We were so poor, we got dressed up on Sundays to go visit White Trash
We were so poor, that until I was 15, I didn't know my name wasnt "git wood"
We were so poor we didn't have hardly any clothes at aii. When I was 12, my Daddy bought me a hat so I could look out the window.

 

[revho]

I was talking to my neighbors after bringing them their mail, they are both very late into their eighties. We were talking about how cold it was and paying to keep the house warm. She said she was 2nd to the last of 11 kids and her Pa died when she was two. They had less than no money growing up. Her Ma leased their farm land for cattle. It was the kids job to pick up dried cow chips the three warmer seasons and stack them like cord wood in the garage, they would then burn them in the wood stove to keep warm in the winter.

 

[model70hunter]

Litenlarry, slices of bread? We had cornbread, quit cher braggin.
Kraynky, corn cobs. Now we understand the reason for your name.

Rusty, drying TP is funny.

My Dad hada 200 acre farm, us kids thought we were poor, we too traded clothes with cousins. Some were really poor and they never made it back to my little bro.

My parents were farm kids of the great depression. We had truck patch gardens and mom canned veggies, fruit and every thing that initially appeared edible. We raised our own livestock. We butchered hogs and cured them in a smoke house. We had 20 gazillion chickens and ate lots of chickens and always had eggs. In the spring Mom would take me to pick water cress and wild things to make salads.

We deer hunted and got our years worth of beef replacement, Dad never butchered a beef, said it was too expensive to eat. I brought home more ducks, squirrels, rabbits and frogs than a tractor trailer could haul in one load. We ate every one of them, money not spent at the grocery store and was a nice change of pace from deer, hog and chickens.

Dad was a college graduate engineer and worked for the DOD. We just were treated poor by Dad, he made money from our efforts and duly banked it for his retirement. All the chores probably kept us out of trouble too.

My sister hated the farm life. A couple of years ago she told me she had been thinking about our youth, the farm, chores etc.

She said in hindsight it probably was the best years of our lives. We had a good family, we were tight and she may be right.

 

[deadin]

Rodney Dangerfield said he was so poor as a kid, the rainbows in his neighborhood were in black & white.

Another Rodney was that he was glad he was born as a boy......
(I won't say why as it might get me a ding )

 

[nicky4968]

Ace Reid, the "Cowpokes" cartoonist, said he was 20 years old the first time he saw a fat cow.

 

[leswad]

I did realize how poor I was until reading these post and seeing how well off everyone is

 

[leswad]

Ace Reid, the "Cowpokes" cartoonist, said he was 20 years old the first time he saw a fat cow.

My father used to work for Ace Reid as a sales rep. He was an artist and would reproduce an "original" Cowpoke cartoon to help sell the book in the retail outlet he was pitching

 

[hangnoose]

HOW POOR WERE YOU?

For our birthday mom would cut the pockets out of our pants so we would have something to play with.

 

[rwsmith]

I hope it was....

What, you didn't use a Sears catalog.

I hope it was in the days of 'pulp' catalogs rather than 'slick'.

 

[Kinman]

We didn't seem to ever have any "spending money" when I was living at home. My dad was a salesman primarily and struggled through the fifties, we traveled from Fairbanks to San Diego and as far east as Iowa. It seems to me the poorest we were was about 1956, we lived in a tenement shack was was built onto the roof of a large house. The floors were so sloped that I had to stand all my little toys so that they were either going uphill or downhill, learned to play marbles and later when starting school back home I had to shoot at a moving target, once the marble stopped I couldn't hit it. Rats living in the walls kept me awake at night, dad caught one in a huge rat trap and the *** screamed like a baby waking the whole family up. I remember dad bringing home a pound of hamburger a week and mom frying it with an onion then putting a big ole can of pork and beans in with it and some spices, that was our once a week meat meal. Ate alot of fried taters and pancakes. They kicked me out of kindergarten because I wouldn't take a nap, I told them I was five my baby brother takes naps. Mom had to come in with me the next day, it was cold and she had my brother with her, she was not happy. She asked them what the problem was they told her I wouldn't take a nap, she said "For C's-sake he five years old, he doesn't take naps, his baby brother takes naps." Never went back to school til the following year back home. I have good memories of being poor, I only had one outside toy. It was the tenements owner's old hound "Comanche", we were best of pals. I used to tie a big ole rope to his collar, then sit down into an old turtle shell, he would drag me around the dirt in the back lot, often really getting up some good speed. Dad stuck us out on an old farm house in Iowa, on a pitch dark night you could barely make out the lights from the nearest neighbor's place. I remember being so bored that I played with a dead cat for two or three days, I finally decided to jump on him for whatever reason and he let out a groaning, moaning, kinda growly sound as the air in his bloated carcass passed through his vocal chords, scared the bejasus out of me.

 

[rwsmith]

We had no luxuries....

We had a house and car. My Dad worked about 60+ hours a week and when he wasn't working at work he worked at home. In spite of being poor our Mother stayed home because that was what mothers did. We always ate well. I wore old clothes. We didn't get anything during the year but we had nice Christmases. We were much better off than many of the kids I went to school with. One came to our cracker box house and thought it was a mansion. I was NEVER resentful and was always glad for what we did have. As soon as I was old enough to work, I did.

 

[Vanilla Gorilla]

I'm considerably younger than most here. We weren't dirt poor, but extra money was tough to come by. I trapped, skinned and sold coons and possums as a kid to get money, and during the season I picked catawba worms and sold them to the bait shop. Started my first part time job at 13, and I was working 40 hours a week at 15 years old.

Still, I had it much better than my father, who was born in '42. Poor south GA sharecroppers don't keep much in the way of family records, but Daddy made sure his momma and 5 brothers and sisters didn't do without. His father wasn't much of nothing, and tried to force Dad to quit school at 14 to work for him. Dad left home and walked from Florida to Opelika, AL to stay with his uncle, so he could finish school and work also.

 

[rwsmith]

That's not....

I'm considerably younger than most here.

I wish I could say that.

 

[williamlayton]

During WWII my grandfather leased a dairy. The REA got electricity to the barn for the cows and milk---we had no electricity in the house .
It was fun though---I remember his old truck was a car with the back cut out---I would go with him on milk runs.
Boys---kids don't survive on things---they survive on love.
Blessings

 

[CajunBass]

I guess I thought we were "poor" growing up, but we had a car, and a TV set, couple of radio's. The house was always warm, and there was always something to eat. Might not have been what I wanted, but there was something. If I made the mistake of turning my nose up at something my mother fixed, she'd tell me to "Go to the hotel John Marshall if you don't like it." It was a long time before I realized there really WAS a "Hotel John Marshall." During the summer we did eat many a 'mater samich' but that was because we wanted a fresh tomato sandwich (with DUKE's mayonaise).

I suppose I had it good really. I was the only boy. I had the freedom of the woods, fields, and waters growing up. I don't know who's woods, waters and fields they were, but nobody seemed to care really. My four sisters were pretty well stuck at home helping my mother. Nobody expected me to cook, clean, and can. I might have to mow the grass once in a while, but it was darn seldom my days with no school didn't involve a shotgun or a fishing rod. I had a room all to myself. It was small, but it was "mine." My sisters shared a room, with two in each room.

We never walked any further to school than the end of the driveway. A bus picked us up. Of course the school was twenty-five miles away.

When I got older, I got hand me downs from my grandfather, uncles, and father, but being the only boy, I didn't have any older kids to get handed down from. My sisters all wore hand me downs, and played with hand me down toys. I know I wore worn out shoes, and pants with holes in the knees, but I don't remember ever being cold in the winter, so I must have had new shoes and a coat when needed. I remember my mother putting iron on patches on my pants. They'd stick for a while, but after a few washes, they'd start to come off, then she'd sew them on again.

But even though I though we were "poor." I knew there were others in the area who were worse off than we were. Some of those people probably looked at us as the rich folks up the road.

How poor were we? Why we were so poor we got an orange for Christmas. ONE ORANGE...and there were five of us!."

My kids didn't believe it either.

 

[CAJUNLAWYER]

We were so poor I had to go to night school so my little brother could wear my uniform to school during the day. We also hot bunked......

 

[Muley Gil]

We wuz so po' we couldn't even afford shoes. Mama would dye our feet black and lace up our toes.

 

[TTSH]

I did realize how poor I was until reading these post and seeing how well off everyone is

Man, ain't that the truth! Bunch of damn whiners and complainers.

By my ultra-dirt-poor family's standards, most of the folks in this thread would be considered rich!