Old neighborhood joke, from Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle: “People on the Main Line are very nice to those below their station . . . unless the station is below Overbrook.”
[Overbrook was the dividing-line town between the Main Line and “the city,” and where my father grew up–oh, the shame!]
Working class. My father used to drink his wage (he was a truck driver) and my mother worked (unheard of in the '50s) as a process worker. Her wage - and the fact that I was an only child - was the reason we had food on the table and the bills got paid sort of on time.
So, we weren’t poor but we never had a holiday and we certainly never had any extras.
I think lower middle class comes closest. My mother didn’t finish HS and my father may have (it was always left ambiguous). We lived in a small 3 BR row house in West Philly. My father had a decent job, but every month my father struggled over which bills to pay. We got our first car (a 13 year old wreck) my senior year in HS and when it came to college, the till was empty. There were no need-based scholarships in those days and I was not quite up to the level required for merit-based ones. So for three years, I worked and went to night school. Did very well and got a half scholarship/half loan for the fourth year and got a TA-ship (and taught calculus) for the fifth. Yes, I was an undergraduate, but I was as old as the new grad students and had a stronger math background than most of them.
I was incredibly lucky. The job was in a lab at the school and they allowed me to take advanced math courses that were not taught in night school in the day. Also the job came with a half tuition waver.
Poor. Father was a house painter and a gambler. Mom worked in the cotton mill. We always rented dumpy houses, has POS cars, utilities off at times but never hungry. My folks did the best they could with what they had.
About right in the middle of middle class. My father had a white-collar job that gave us a pretty good life even if it wasn’t anything fancy. Road trip at least once a year, usually to Six Flags over Texas in Dallas-Fort Worth and/or my grandmother’s house in Arkansas. The requisite new car every four years or so. Owned our three-bedroom house, which we had built and moved into when I was 7.
Upper middle class I guess. Dad was a Colonel in the military and retired as CO of his particular unit. Mom was in a middle management role at the local University.
5 bedroom, 5 bathroom house, 5 cars (there were 3 of us living there), boat, RV, yearly vacations, horse lessons, finishing school.
I had a trust fund until I was 30 (not a huge trust fund, but I received a yearly payment to supplement my income).
My mom grew up poor (they probably started off working class, but her father died when the kids were young, and her mother had some mental health issues), my dad grew up working class. My parents were working class when I was born, and managed claw their way into middle class at some point in my childhood. It made for some weird habits, though. As a family, we continued to do things that were out of place in our middle class neighborhood, and I didn’t realize until I was older that they were class-related things.
Ha, we also ate a version of that sugar thing – only ours was Saltines with margarine sprinkled with sugar. We loved it! I was surprised in my freshman writing class when we were sharing personal story essays, I didn’t realize that not everyone knew what government cheese tasted like. We always had it at my grandmother’s, I thought it was one of those things like where everyone’s grandma baked cookies and had government cheese.
Started life in middle class, then my Dad died at 42 when I was 7. We hit poor really quick. Lived in a shack with no running water and an outhouse. I worked the tobacco fields to pay for that shack when I was 8 it was $20 a month. I got paid $2 a day, hell I was 8 and couldn’t do much. Yeah we went hungry a few times. If we ate meat it because I shot something or went fishing.
We used free gov food, then food stamps, welfare and any other gov program we could get.
At 16 I got a full time job and we moved to a house with plumbing. I didn’t hit lower middle class until I was 22, then things started to get better.
Gummint cheese, summer lunch program that served gummint cheese sammiches. Also gummint ham and gummint beans. All gummint food was frontloaded with salt.
Middle class. My parents were trying to live a higher middle class life style than they could afford, so we lived in nice houses in nice neighborhoods, but did without a lot of niceties. They had that depression era mentality also, but didn’t have any extra money to waste anyway. Eventually their house was worth a lot and my mother was making good money in a government job and my father had a decent military pension on top of his retirement savings, so they lived well in the end. We never lacked material necessities.
I’d say we moved from very slightly lower middle class to very slightly upper middle class over the course of my childhood. On the lower end of things was the tiny apartment with one bathroom for six people, the inability to afford cable TV, the constant worry about running the A/C. (Even before that was the time my mom stole a shopping cart to use as a baby stroller, since she didn’t have one of her own.) Over time that eased up, we were able to travel more, eat out more, etc.
Of course, definitions of “middle class” vary wildly. I know a girl whose parents owned a vacation home in Florida and were paying her rent, but who considered herself middle class. I got into a minor argument with another person who insisted that owning a second vacation home was the very hallmark of being middle class! Not in my book - if you own a house in the Adirondacks or a condo in Clearwater, you’re at least upper-middle.
My father was a college professor, so I guess that made us educated middle-class, with a comfortable home in the suburbs. Then my parents got divorced and my dad never paid child-support, so we moved to a crummy apartment and lived a lower-middle-class lifestyle for a while. While my mom went through job training, we had watered-down powdered-milk and clothes from a thrift store for a few years. Then she got a job as a lab-tech and we became more middle class. She bought a fixer-upper house with a badly cracked slab, and she sweated it when the bills came, but we managed all right. Then she remarried and he was a doctor who made a very comfortable living, and we moved to the realm of upper-middle class.
So I think from age 0-5 I was middle class
From age 5-8 I was lower-middle class
From age 8-12 I was middle class
From age 12-18 I was upper middle class.
I’d say that it’s a pretty good benchmark. I don’t know of anyone who bought an extra house, or even condo, for use as a vacation/summer home who I would not consider upper-middle at least. There might be exceptions such as if both of the houses were really crappy and they were poor otherwise, but I have never run into that.
There are exceptional cases such as myself who technically has two residences but that’s because I haven’t sold the other one yet. I’m not sure where I rank, monetarily or culturally because I, and nearly everyone I know, has an income between firm middle and upper middle class, and could afford nearly all the accoutrements of upper middle class lifestyle (second home, nice car, multiple big vacations a year), but some choose to save their money instead like myself. All I know is we’re not upper class 'cause we do have to worry about saving even if some of us choose to do less of it than others.
I’d have to say working class. Dad worked at a shipyard in the early 70s, then in a grocery warehouse; my mother would babysit or cut and perm hair and we would sometimes take in boarders, who would sleep on the floor in my sister’s room. Once my sister and I were old enough, she started working menial jobs outside the home, like housekeeping in a local hotel, or cleaning peoples’ homes. We lived in a small slab ranch home in a working class subdivision of a working class small city. We had times when we were in a bad state monetarily; there was a Xmas for example where we had no money, and neighbors and friends brought us kids presents, but for the most part we were fine.
We went on a vacation to Florida once, but we stayed in a mobile home for a week (got free use of it to close it up for the owners) and at the home of some friends. Other road trips to NH, NY, and NJ we’d get a room at the cheapest motel we could find; I remember one in (I believe) NH called the White Owl – the smell of cedar in the cabin is still with me.
The only new car we ever bought was when I was a junior in HS; a black Ford Tempo, the very first year it came out.
We never really wanted for anything significant though. We had what we needed, and for the most part, what we wanted.
We were lower middle class, frequently what I think of as middle class broke. By which I mean, the mortgage was paid, the lights were on, and there was food in the fridge and clothes in the closets - but any other expenses had to be budgeted for, and unexpected expenses like a car repair, even a small one, would screw up those plans royally. Not poor, just often broke.
Middle class. My father did sales for a living and it could be feast or famine depending on where we were in the quarter or how the quarter went. We didn’t do a lot of vacations, and my mother drove beater cars for most of my childhood. With very good timing, he got a better paying job around my senior year in high school and managed to get three girls through State schools, staggered trout loans (but with a few lucky breaks, I got a free ride my last year, my sister had a legal settlement from an accident that paid for hers.)
They were upper middle class for quite a few years with his good job, no kids at home, and no debt. They are busy adjusting now to a fixed income retirement lifestyle.
Growing up, I was probably as poor as you could be in America. My father died when I was only a toddler and it was up to my mother to raise us; she was in her early twenties at the time, and should not have been responsible for raising children. She spent most of my childhood sowing her wild oats, so to speak.
Spent (cumulatively) close to 12-13 months living in homeless shelters, and I’ve slept in vehicles more times than I can count. Clothes and food came via donations, most of the time. So yeah, pretty poor.
Somewhere between working class ( when my father was working) and poor (when my father was laid off and the only work my mother could get was part time as a crossing guard). We were insulated from some of the effects, because we lived in an apartment in my grandparents’ two- family house, and didn’t have to worry about being evicted or having no heat - but the only vacation we ever had was one my grandparents took us on, until I was old enough (at 12) to get a job my clothes were hand-me-downs from my mother’s cousins’ kids, we spent time on food stamps and got government surplus food.
Poor. My family was already at the lower end of the working class, and my dad lost his health and ended up on disability. Which, certainly, was a better outcome than ending up homeless and starving, but still pretty much sucked all the way.