My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I remember I made $22 a week doing dinner theater in Norfolk, Virginia. Back then, in the '70s, that was pretty good for a teenager, for a part-time job.
I was making $150 a week in workshop. It was a rough year. I had trouble paying the rent. But I had evenings free to spend with my wife, Olive, and our baby daughter. In terms of family-building, it was one of the most blessed years of my life.
By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over.
My mother taught us to sell food in the market so we could pay for school. I would get up at 4:30 A.M. and start selling bread and cheese before going to class. School cost $65. The average salary was $125 a year, and with 10 kids, how are you going to pay for that?
When my mother had to get dinner for 8 she'd just make enough for 16 and only serve half.
It's very difficult when you have $1.50 per day to spend on food and drink, but for people who live this reality, that money also has to cover medical expenses and education, fuel and shelter - sometimes for an entire family.
I can remember at college, living on 30-cent meals.
I remember once in junior high school, on a Friday, my mom came home from work and said to my brother and I, 'You know, between us, we have only 27 cents, but we have food in the refrigerator, we have our little garden out back, and we're happy, so we are rich.'
I got a job immediately after leaving high school; I was lucky - three dollars a week and all I could eat, working on a vegetable truck.
My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.