The current difficult times in our nation’s economy prompts me to reflect on my own youth during the 1930s. I was born in the first full year of the Great Depression. This fact has influenced my life to this day.
Dad was a blue-collar worker. His company cut back his work week to three or four days with a comparable cut in income. Our stay-at-home mother started a day care for kids. She picked and canned fruit and vegetables for our dinner table. Dad caught salmon, which mom also canned. My elementary school trousers at the knees had patches on top of patches, as did the other schoolboys.
I never received an allowance and knew better than to ask for one. But my parents opened a bank savings account for me at age four. Any cash gifts from relatives or friends went directly into that account. I grew up with the idea that one saves first; pays cash for an item later. Credit and debt were not in my family’s vocabulary.
I had been hearing for years during dinner table conversations how dad and mom, while still pre-teens themselves, had found ways to find temporary jobs to bring in pocket money. I believed that if I did not emulate their example I was not doing my share, nor learning what they had to teach.
At age 12, I started hawking newspapers on the city streets. At age 13, I took an adult laborer job at a local railroad company. I continued this work full-time for five consecutive summers and on weekends during the school year. This enabled me to pay for all of my clothes, school books and dates while in high school and to begin saving for college. Subsequent jobs in electric power line construction and in a brewery got me through college with no debt.
It was not all-serious stuff. One swing shift at the brewery we accidentally canned more than 1,000 cans of hot soapy water when someone forgot to switch holding vats before starting to clean out the depleted vat. A factor may have been that free beer consumption was an on-the-job work benefit. And nobody was checking IDs.
Upon bringing home my first railroad paycheck at age 13, my father gave me a talk I had not expected.
“Now that you are earning income, you have to give some money to your mother every month for family support,” he said. Of course, I complied. I never felt it a burden. Making a small contribution caused me to feel more family involved, and proud.
My parents, besides being providers, worked to improve their community by volunteering at the local hospital, helping military personnel at the USO, driving older citizens to medical appointments and more. Often they invited a down-and-out relative or family friend to use our spare bedroom, sometimes for years. This was not lost on me.
These early influences on work and savings carried over into my later life. I delayed marriage until I could afford a family, a time that would allow my wife to be a full-time homemaker and a stay-at-home mom. We delayed house-furnishing purchases until we could pay cash. Our very first new car was, at the same time, my 50th birthday present. Our two children were put through college without debt. We always pay off credit card balances. Our long-term care financing to provide for us in old age is in the bank. During 47 years of marriage we borrowed only to purchase our first home.
Admittedly, there are more finance-related temptations nowadays than before. Self-discipline is perhaps harder. I like to remember what H. A. Dorfman wrote in his book, The Mental Game of Baseball: “Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and being sluggish, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear and doubt, freedom from ego.”
Even though I grew up in the Great Depression, in retrospect I never felt deprived of anything, anytime. I could see that my schoolmates were in the same boat. What I had learned from my parents, and what I early on practiced, were the nobility of work, of saving, delayed gratification, higher education, independence, personal responsibility, and giving back. It seems that young people nowadays are learning those same values. The future may be good.
John Barnett is president of AARP Washington State, the author of “How to Feel Good As You Age: A Voice of Experience,” and lives with his wife, Yoko, in Kirkland.
