How wealthy was your family?

[SteveDallas]

Mom was a teacher for 35+ years, mostly first grade and kindergarten, but she taught everything up to 8th grade at one time or another. Dad sold fishing tackle most of the time. (He's still doing the janitor job--I think he's going to hang it up after Christmas, but I wouldn't be surprised if he stays on a while longer.)

I would say we were solidly middle middle class. Nothing much fancy, and there were times money was tight, especially the early 1980s. Mom worked nights & weekends at Sears for a time during this period. It very straightforward--I'm sure things were very tight for it to get to that point, but of course they never confided their money concerns with the kids. We certainly didn't get everything we wanted, but there were usually nice Christmas gifts and such. (Santa Claus always managed to omit some gifts... looking back with a parent's eye, I see that they were the ones with lots of "extras" to be bought later--more action figures, more expansion units, etc.) While my mom also perpetrated the powdered milk on us (yum!), there was never any perception on my part that we were skimping on groceries.

Getting through those lean times was surely helped by the house--a 3 bedroom ranch, they bought it new in 1964 I believe, for $20,000, and paid for it with a 6% 20-year mortgage. I'm sure by 1980 the payments seemed relatively modest.