Downward Mobility

My mother's parents grew up in the Appalachian mountains. Both had to leave school before completing 6th grade in order help their families with work. They married at age 15 and moved to a state north of theirs shortly afterward, and then began a family. Eventually they had four children. Their own parents did not have the financial means to help them buy a car or anything else.

This sounds like the beginning of a long, sad tale of generational poverty, but that’s not my grandparents’ story. My grandpa got a job on an assembly line at a Ford factory. My grandma grew vegetables and canned them for the long winters. She sewed her family’s clothes and made quilts. My grandpa hunted on weekends to supplement his wages. After awhile, they bought a modest little house. Eventually they added rooms, doing the construction work themselves. Then they built a detached garage. Finally, they bought their neighbors’ house and rented it for a number of years before selling it at a profit. Two of their four children went on to earn college degrees. Theirs was as story of steady upward mobility.

The fiction I hear about stories like my grandparents’ is that they simply worked harder and were more frugal than the following generations, and so anyone who is struggling today is simply lazy or refuses to budget and save.

But in fact my grandparents were part of a lucky generation that had a good chance of finding a job with a living wage and benefits, even if they had less than a high school diploma. They were able to afford a car, a house, health care, and annual vacations almost entirely on what my grandpa earned working on an assembly line. My grandparents, who did not even have the opportunity to attend middle school, lived to see a time when affordable college education was available for their own children. Even though my grandparents both experienced extended periods of illness due to cancer, they were able to afford quality health care. Far from going bankrupt due to medical debt, they were able to leave property and savings to their children when they passed away.

They lived their adult lives within the sweet spot when the United States was still building the world's greatest middle class economy.

Since the 1980s, wages have not kept up with the cost of living, and the costs of health care and higher education continue to rise. I wonder what my own grandchildren will write about how our lives affected theirs?

*Published previously as a column by Quest Lakes in the MVN in Sept. 2018.