WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Moving Forward
My father married my mother right after he graduated from high school.
She was only 15 and in ninth grade. She had me at age 16. My father had taken
agriculture and “mechanical shop” in high school and been taught welding,
but there were few to no jobs for welders in small-town Nebraska in the ’30s,
so he and my mother were forced to move in with his parents. My parents
compensated by pitching in with the work of the farm. Living in this extended
family no doubt eased my parents’ financial burdens somewhat, and it also
meant that as a very young child I felt secure. In upcoming years, my parents
would leave several times to try and establish a life of their own, only to return
to the family farm when they could not make it work. It was a sanctuary from
economic vicissitudes, and it made it possible to think of themselves as not
poor—just temporarily unemployed or between “changing life situations.”
My education began in one of those legendary one-room country schools. I
was 5 years old but was put in first grade because kindergarten was a not yet part
of the educational system in rural Nebraska. Although I was young and did not
understand class differences, I do remember being very much aware that some of
my classmates wore ragged clothes, looked incredibly dirty, and were barefoot.
I was fascinated by their appearance and particularly by the boys’ habit of
“parking” their chewing gum behind their ears so they could chew it again later.
OFF TO CALIFORNIA
By the time I completed first grade, my father decided he had had enough
of extended family farming. He had heard there were jobs in California so he
moved us to Los Angeles. I know we did not have a car, and it seems improbable
we had money to take a train, so I do not know how we got there; but somehow
they made it happen. Shortly thereafter, World War II broke out. My father
landed a job as a sheet metal worker with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation that
would last until 1948.
From 1941 to 1946, we lived in a comfortable bungalow-style suburban
home not far from downtown Los Angeles. We led a typical middle-class
existence (but one that seemed “high class” to me after the farm). When the
war ended in 1945 and millions of veterans returned to the United States, rent
and price controls abruptly ended and costs went through the roof. My father,
who still had his job, found he could not afford the sharp increase in rent—and
suddenly we were without a home. We had no car and would not have one for
many years. We got around Los Angeles on the extensive streetcar system that
existed before being replaced by the city’s now infamous freeways. The only
solution was to rent a trailer near the Lockheed plant in Burbank. One needs to
understand that a trailer then was not the same as mobile homes are today. The
construction was of significantly poorer quality, and the trailer was much smaller.
Nevertheless, the trailer park was populated by a variety of people who because
of the housing shortage were unable to find a home anywhere else. They ranged
from lower-middle to decidedly lower-class families.
Journal of Public Affairs Education 89