The Bad Old Days
By Steve_in_KC on December 1, 2008 at 1:14 PM in Age Discrimination, Current Affairs, Democratic Party, Economy, Health Care
And it serves to remind us that things could be a heck of a lot worse if not for certain federal programs brought to us by President Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” and President Johnson’s “Great Society.” The final installment will show how an inept President Bush nearly destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of elderly and disabled people by monkeying around with Medicare.
I grew up in Topeka, Kansas, infamous for Brown vs Board of Education, the famous Supreme Court case that forced integration of the school systems of America in 1954.
Schools were integrated by the time I started kindergarten in 1956. They hadn’t started busing yet, but all neighborhood schools accepted kids of all races by then. Before then, Linda Brown had to walk a mile to the “colored school” rather than go down the street to the white school. That’s why her father sued the Topeka Board of Education. They lived several miles away from my family, but that was the world I lived in as a kid.
I remember well, back in the 1950s, when our next-door neighbors lived in a tarpaper-covered, earthen-floored shack with their five kids. They still had an outhouse, even there in town.
The kids had rickets because they couldn’t afford milk. The mother would sometimes come to our house to beg my mom for a quart of milk, which she would then water down to make enough for all the kids she had to feed. We forget that kind of poverty still existed during our lifetimes. In 1956, the federal minimum wage was $1.00 an hour.
My father was a window cleaner. He quit school after 8th grade to go to work for his father, who owned the business. Our house was modern, with indoor plumbing and electricity. My mother was afraid of tornadoes, being from central Kansas, so my father and his friends hand dug a basement under the existing house.
Its walls were bare earth and floor, but it was a shelter, if needed. My dad worked hard all day, and worked janitorial jobs at night, to provide for his family. We had decent food and clothing. When we were sick, the doctor would come to our house at night. We were almost middle class compared to some of our neighbors.
By the time I got to high school age, we had moved up in the world. My dad had inherited the family business when his dad passed away, and he even had some employees. We moved to a better neighborhood. But when I started high school, I had to go outside the safe confines of our white-flight neighborhood. I was suddenly back in the mix with the poor kids. It was obvious even to me that many of them lived in real poverty. When I went to some of their homes, I was stunned. There were still some living in earthen-floored shacks with outhouses, even in the late 1960s.
I eventually did as my father had done; I quit high school to work for him, washing windows. There are no words to describe how deeply I have regretted that decision over the course of my life.
It denied me the opportunity for college, and working for one’s father has got to be one of the worst ways to make a living, no matter what the business. I quit working for him several times, trying to break away.
My first outside job was at a drive-in burger joint. I started out as a car-hop for 55 cents an hour, plus tips. I sometimes made a couple dollars a day in tips. I walked the mile to work every day, having no car. I was too cool by then to ride my bicycle. I worked my way up to night manager at that place by the time I was 16, and bought an old car with my earnings.
I had so many old cars back in those years, I barely remember them all. I could buy one for $50 and drive it till it quit. Sometimes I’d fix them, sometimes I’d just buy another cheapie. I think I could write a story just about my old cars! Why, I remember one time, lying on my back in the snow near Elko, Nevada, replacing a transmission in my ’53 Chevy Panel Truck…
I first got married shortly before I turned 19, and we were dirt poor. She worked as a checker at a grocery store, and I was back to working for dad part time. The apartment we lived in had an old toilet that was sitting on warped, rotting wood on the second floor, and every time you sat on it you hoped it wouldn’t fall through to the apartment below. We ate a lot of rice and macaroni.
We got divorced three years later, and I moved to an old farmhouse in the next county. At that time, my dad didn’t have much work for me, and it was a 30 minute drive into town, so I was pretty destitute. I applied for Welfare and food stamps and got accepted! I even got a Medicaid card for a while. I was finally able to go to a doctor when it wasn’t even a life-threatening emergency!
My life got better in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I somehow got to collaborate for most of a year with the comedy group Firesign Theatre. They recorded 12 albums for Columbia Records. I was around for their final year together, writing, editing, and publishing a fanzine for them. From that, I became a radio announcer, then a DJ personality, an award-winning producer, and Entertainment Manager for the hottest disco in Topeka! Woo. Hoo.
Then in 1985, my father became incapacitated with asthma, and I felt compelled to help him save what was left of his business. At the age of 35, I gave up the glamour life to go back to window cleaning. This time, though, I had learned enough about marketing and business to take a $15k a year job, to having 12 employees and billing $250k a year, running three different small businesses, within three years. Don’t let that billing amount fool you. I made maybe $30k most years, but this time I was doing it from a desk!
Flash forward to 2004. The recession that followed 9/11 had been crushing state government budgets for over two years. I had been a small business owner for almost 20 years, but the economy and my own weariness squeezed me out.
I figured that someone with my experience at running a business would be snapped up by a good employer in short order. Boy, was I mistaken! I found that at 52 years old, I was considered a last resort, if I even got an interview. I went through my meager savings in a few months, and found myself willing to take any job I could get. I put off medical care I needed, and stopped taking my prescriptions because I couldn’t afford them anymore.
Okay, so it’s not Angela’s Ashes, but let’s not forget that it wasn’t so long ago that America was a much different world than it is now, and the programs of LBJ’s Great Society changed our country for the better in more ways than most people seem to remember now.
We may still have people living in a type of poverty, but at least virtually everyone has indoor plumbing and electricity. When we grow old, we won’t be left to die alone in a one-room shack. We will at least have our Social Security and Medicare. Won’t we?
The problem with “entitlement” programs like these is that they are expensive and addictive. All these social programs have spoiled us. Once we establish these programs, we can’t roll them back. Once we set the bar higher for our standard of living, we can’t take it away from people.
The Great Society programs eliminated much of the crushing poverty that was everyday life to millions of people. The government gave us a taste of the good life, and made us accustomed to having luxuries like linoleum floors and hot water tanks. It gave us an expectation of never going back to those bad old days. You can’t pull people out of their shacks and put them in apartments, then change your mind and put them back!
Ironically, the very first job I got after closing my business, was working for Medicare for $12.00 an hour. The same federal program, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS, runs both Medicare and Medicaid. I worked only for Medicare. That story and more in my next exciting excruciating installment!
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
Pingback: The Bad Old Days : NO QUARTER at Hillary Clinton On Best Political Blogs