Okay.......

We were okay for a couple years after my father was killed on the job. Then the insurance money, such as it was, ran out.

We ate duck, rabbit, and squirrel that my uncles might shoot hunting. We ate catfish and carp that we might catch. We found some aspargus growing wild and transplanted it; it fed us for years in the spring. Many times we ate chickens that my grandmother raised and we helped to kill for dinner and the chicks and ducklings we might get for Easter would eventually "run away." We grew much of our vegetables, in our garden, that we dug each year on the "filled land" our house was on (read "old dump'). Occassionally people gave us food, including leftovers from the nuns at the local parish.

I say "our house". It was about the only thing my father left and it was never without at least two mortgages on it. We paid "rent", not the mortgage. We had no phone until my grandmother moved in with us after my grandfather died -- she brought some money from the sale of her house and a lot they'd owned, but we lost her garden, chicken coop, and garden. I still have no idea how my mother made it on Social Security survivors' benefits and VA payments because my father had been in WW2: I know for a fact that there was never more than $120 per MONTH in the house from those sources -- for my mother, 4 kids, my grandmother, and my great-great-aunt. We gave almost all the money we might make picking strawberries or delivering papers into the common pot.

We wore hand-me-down clothes and shoes, sometimes from one brother to another or other times from a friend of my mother's. I was supposed to get an allowance of a dime a week, but only rarely got anything.

We didn't know we were poor; we did know that we didn't have a lot of money.