Culturally we came from the upper middle class, due to my father’s background and his influence upon us, yet from a strictly economic standpoint we were lower middle class. We grew up primary in the company of my step-mother’s family, who were blue collar and working class folk, and because there were so many of us in the house our budget was limited and tight. I wouldn’t say that we were poor, since we never went without food, shelter or clothing, and none of that was ever in any serious jeopardy.
We steadily climbed up through the social classes. There were two reasons for that. One was that my father steadily climbed the career ladder and thus earned more each year in salary, and the second was because each year there was one less mouth to feed as one by one my various siblings and I moved out of the house following our high school graduations. It was only the last four kids who stayed in the house for any length of time after earning their high school diplomas, while the first four got out as soon as we hit age eighteen.
Growing up we were limited in the portions of food we could eat and the amounts of beverages we could drink at mealtimes (except water, which was what was usually on the menu unless there was orange juice available for breakfast). Popcorn, ice cream, soda pop, candy and those kinds of things were special treats for us. There were times when we had to improvise a meal in order to have something to eat, but there was always food on the table. When there was nothing else, we loved the adventure of cobbling together submarine sandwiches from sliced American cheese and cold cuts on hot dog buns, and constructing personal pizzas from hamburger buns with a bit of tomato sauce and parmesan cheese on top. On the other hand, I hated it when my step-mother bought cheap ground lamb to stretch the hamburger meat out – which she then lied about, of course, as if we were too stupid to know the difference – and when she cooked liver. The very smell of liver still makes me nauseated, and to this day I don’t like lamb.
Shopping malls were foreign wonderlands. My parents generally did not have money to spend on toys, and we got new clothes only when hand-me-downs and second-hands were not available and we truly needed something. Other than the few clothes I got at Christmas and at the start of the school year and those I bought myself, I wore hand-me-downs and rummage sale clothes. When we did go shopping for new clothes, we went to department stores where clothes were invariably cheaper than in the malls (even before the days of Walmart). We had very little discretionary income, and less still that could be spent frivolously. Big ticket items required months if not years of planning and saving. Nevertheless, my step-mother was a budgetary whiz and, between their income and mine, I did not feel deprived.
We didn’t have foster children in the home strictly out of the goodness of our hearts. It was also a way for my step-mother to contribute to the household bottom line. Doing daycare for neighborhood working moms was another way for her to make a contribution. We benefited handsomely from her management of the annual church rummage sale, and I’m sure she had other tricks up her sleeve, the details of which escape me at the moment. In short, she did whatever she could to make money here and there and to stretch our funds as far as humanly possible. Fortunately, she did it incredibly well.
She came from simple, working class folk. Along with her parents and siblings, many of my cousins on that side of the family didn’t finish high school either, because they got pregnant and got married or dropped out or because they didn’t feel like it and went straight to work: blue collar jobs, of course. There was a rudimentary yet pleasant resort area for the working class about an hour from where we lived. My step-mother’s family had a history of going up there to camp and while away the summers, and we entered into that tradition. At some point we moved to a suburb of the state capital about another hour away, but it remained within easy driving distance.
At first we would go out into the boondocks with a tent, no electricity and no running water, and build our own outhouse for the excursion. Those were the days of using lanterns for light after dark, kerosene stoves and campfires for cooking, carrying in our own drinking water, bathing in the river, and huddling around the campfire for conversation and camaraderie during the cool Midwestern summer evenings. We would be two or three or four families, in our own little woodsy world.
After a few years my parents and aunts and uncles decided to make it a more structured thing. There was a campground nearby where one could rent campsites by the week, and the rent was cheap, maybe $5.00 per week. We took the big tent we had and moved it over there. I don’t know how everyone fit in the tent, really. Do ten-person tents exist? I know that each time we bought something new, we kept the old accommodations as a separate bedroom. We shortly added a pup-tent to the mix. Then we upgraded to a rudimentary camper consisting of a metal shell, plywood boards that folded out to become the wings, and a canvas top to cover it. Then we upgraded to a fancier camper, and so on, while always hanging on to the “spare bedrooms”.
Eventually we had several options for sleeping which easily accommodated us. To a pre-pubescent or pubescent teenager, some were more desirable than others. For example, the camper was more comfortable but one would have to sleep in the same room as Mom and Dad, and would probably not be able to sleep in late. The pup-tent afforded more privacy, but was small. In short, each option had its advantages and disadvantages. Henry, referred to by my father as “my Golden Boy”, always slept in the main quarters, the fanciest, with Mom and Dad.
We each had a beer box in which to pack our belongings for the weekend. These were the slightly rectangular boxes in which a case of bottled beer was sold in those days. They were sturdy and compact and readily stackable, so they were perfect for our weekend jaunts. Virtually every Friday afternoon of every summer, we boys would pack the van that was the family car, back before mini-vans and before many people thought of using vans in this manner, though we had no choice. We timed our departure from the house so that we arrived at my father’s office just as he walked out the door, and then we continued the drive northward. Depending upon where we lived and traffic and weather conditions, our final destination was between an hour or two and a half hours away.
At some point on the journey, someone would call his or her space, and our weekly ritual began. There were no rules for when the process should start, except that it couldn’t begin before we were in the car and on the way. Another rule was that whoever was in the process of staking their claim could not be interrupted, so we would gear up to jump in with our preference as soon as the words were out of the speaker’s mouth. Otherwise it was completely spontaneous, with different kids starting it different weeks and everyone claiming a different space each week, depending on what else had already been called.
It was in relation to this ritual, on a summer Friday evening after our eventual arrival “Up North”, that my brother got what was for me his most memorable beating.
