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| Preserved on the fly: Pickled peppers & frozen veggies. |
I am not old enough to remember the Great Depression, but I
am old enough to have survived Reaganomics. In the 1980's, my husband worked in the library (and, later, the computer center) of a four-year college. He also served as organist and choir director for a local church. While I was never able to find a full-time position during the '80s, I did my part to bring income in to the household by taking on freelance work as an editor, writer, and book indexer. I also became a master of frugality, learning to make everything from scratch and fixing things rather than replacing them. I did most of our home repairs, from wiring and plumbing to fence-building and upholstery. Nonetheless, every month we struggled to pay the mortgage of $350, which was almost half of all our combined income.
“The working poor” was the phrase bandied about by media pundits, but Bruce and I preferred to call ourselves “the trickled-on.” Most jobs were minimum wage or non-unionized, near-minimum wage jobs, even the ones requiring a college education. And minimum wage was frozen at $3.35/hr. throughout the 1980's, which meant that by 1989, the buying power of one hour of labor had decreased in value by almost $1 (in 1996 valuation; see http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html for the hard statistics). Bruce and I eventually had to let go of our dream of home ownership and move away.
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| Oh my! Too many peppers! What's a cook to do?! |
[This blog entry continues.]
