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My dad characterized his family as poor. My mom’s dad was an engineer on the railroad, and likely an alcoholic. Neither of my parents hit the inheritance lottery, so when they married in 1940, they started out with a blank financial slate.
They met while working at the Hostess Bakery, then owned a small restaurant for a while, with my dad finally getting a job at The Overland, AKA Jeep. After owning a duplex for several years, it was quite an achievement when in 1950, they bought the “big” two story house that I grew up in. My parents paid $12K for the house and paid it off in 1959. They wouldn’t borrow money again until I talked dad into financing his 1999 Ford Taurus, with a .9% interest rate incentive. “Big”, incidentally, is the way my mom always described our house. They would own the “big” house until health issues forced them out in 2003.
The aunts, uncles, and cousins would gather at the “big” house for Christmas, and in the summer for parties around the ceeement pond, (that’s the Beverly Hillbilly term for a built-in pool for those too young to remember the show). My brother and I truly believed that we lived in a “big” house.
Exactly how big was our “big” house? Per the county auditors website, a whopping 1348 square feet! It sat on about a tenth of an acre lot. I suppose you could say the house was big if you compare it to the single story homes around it, which weighed in at 686. We had three bedrooms, one the size of a modest walk-in closet, and one bathroom, shared by five people. There was also a toilet in a corner of the basement that included a multi-generation family of spiders that lived way too close to my butt.
The moral of this story is that being mortgage free for 44 years enabled my parents to be very generous when it came to family and church. They helped my brother and me pay for private schools for our kids, and their sizable cash gifts at Christmas jump started my IRA investments.
I learned many things about love, and family, and money growing up in a “big” house.
Dan, I loved this piece. It’s amazing how relative scale is when you’re a kid—your parents built a wonderful life and legacy in that house. It reminds me of the “three up, two down” I grew up in over here, with five rooms packed into just 600 square feet. Our only heat was a single portable kerosene heater that burned a pink fuel, and one of my favorite winter pastimes was scraping frozen condensation off the inside of the window frames—only learning years later that the heater itself caused it.
We were always grateful for families like yours whose hand-me-downs ended up in the local charity shops. That said, someday we really need to have a serious chat about your childhood fashion choices… not your finest work! 😉