The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  When Mother moved to California her wardrobe became more stylish, but she didn’t abandon her South Dakota thriftiness. (Photo Credit 6.1)

  The Conley family lost the farm to the banks in 1931, forcing them to move to town, where my grandfather’s new job at a local granary owned by a friend paid a dime an hour. Mother, a high school graduate at sixteen, gave up her dream of college and a career in journalism. She went to work as a postal clerk for a dollar a day, working nights as a waitress for fifty cents and her evening meal, called “supper” in rural America. She was invited by an aunt and uncle to live with them and try her luck in Minneapolis, where she found a job as a clerk for Fanny Farmer, the popular candy company with stores as ubiquitous in the Twin Cities as Starbucks outlets are now.

  Fanny Farmer paid fifteen dollars a week, a tidy jump up from her South Dakota wages, and she had the added advantage of living with generous relatives. When I asked if she felt like the poor little country mouse in the big city, she said, “No, I felt rich. I had a job.” Even with the job, however, she longed to return to northern South Dakota and her enterprising suitor, Anthony “Red” Brokaw, a third-grade dropout who nonetheless became a master operator of heavy construction machinery.

  He could find work by racing hundreds of miles across the Midwest from highway jobs in Minnesota to new airports under construction in Kansas during the summer months. After they were married, he took Mother with him in a tiny homemade camping trailer. Occasionally they would rent rooms at boardinghouses. Like almost everyone else of their age they were thrifty by nature and by necessity. They didn’t spend what they didn’t have, and they saved something every week.

  Now if I bring Mother the smallest gift during a visit to her comfortable retirement apartment—say, fresh-squeezed orange juice or roasted almonds—she asks how much it cost and then recites the price of every item she serves me for lunch. “Aren’t those tomatoes nice? I got them for just a dollar ninety a pound, can you believe it?”

  In an evocative memoir of life in Iowa during the Great Depression, author Mildred Armstrong Kalish writes in Little Heathens of the many ways of preparing basic farm food, or what I would call the Great Leftover School of Cooking.

  Kalish asks, “What can you do with leftover mashed potatoes? Add beaten eggs, grated onions, and salt, form into patties like thick hamburgers, and fry them in bacon fat or oil until they are crispy and golden brown.”

  That was a staple at our family Monday night suppers, the mashed potatoes having been left over from the big Sunday noon dinner. My brothers and I liked to tease my mother by saying, “Oh, we’re getting used potatoes again.” It never failed to touch her off. “They’re not used!” she’d exclaim. “They’re as good as new.”

  Used potatoes didn’t stay on my palate in my grown-up years, but I still have leftover guilt. I cannot easily discard still-edible food at the end of a meal, and as a result our refrigerator is a jumble of small containers of odds and ends. Leftovers were really a metaphor for the larger issues of money management and the ever-present fear that another Great Depression was just around the corner.

  In our South Dakota hometown newspaper in the spring of 2009 there appeared an obituary for a woman born the same year as Mother. Blanche Horton worked in the Idaho potato fields for $1.50 a day during the thirties but, as the obituary noted, “one of her proudest achievements was saving enough money to buy a new ironing board which she used for the next 67 years.”

  I don’t think Mother knew Blanche, but they shared more than an age. They were soul sisters in the church of thrift.

  That instinct hasn’t disappeared from our landscape. Recently in Montana I was fishing on a stream running close to a modest ranch. The proprietor is a widow in her seventies who lives in a small, plain house, surrounded by weathered corrals and a sagging machine shed. On the Sunday I was there she was busy with her brother and sister-in-law putting down new flooring in the kitchen. She’d gotten a good buy on some ready-to-install material at a local big-box supply store.

  It was such a familiar scene for me, recalling those days and nights when I’d come home and my father would enlist me in some wiring, carpentry, painting, or roofing project. The idea of hiring outside help didn’t cross his mind. Household appliances we now take for granted were cared for as if they were family jewels.

  My New York son-in-law, Charles Simon, had a grandfather who could only afford an apartment so tiny that anyone leaning back in his or her chair at the kitchen table risked scratching the refrigerator door, and so the kids learned to always sit up straight rather than endure a shouted command to “Watch out for the refrigerator!” The entire apartment was three rooms. Charles’s mother, Arlene, and her sister slept in the living room, and fifty years later she says those days of shared deprivation with so few material goods gave her a helpful perspective on life that remains with her to this day.

  Charlie’s father, Bruce, a prominent labor lawyer, grew up in the Coney Island environs, spending part of his childhood working for an uncle who was a popular fumigator. Bruce laughed when upscale Manhattan zip codes were hit with an infestation of bedbugs in 2010. “Too bad my uncle is not around; he had a homemade formula that really worked. I got twenty-five cents a mattress for applying it and I was probably just ten years old at the time.” Bruce helped finance his law school education by working in a clam bar, and a half century later he’s still a whiz at swiftly opening the tasty bivalves at our annual Thanksgiving gathering.

  Allen Fry, my San Francisco son-in-law, grew up in small-town Oklahoma with grandparents who lived lives of self-reliance. His maternal grandfather, with only an eighth-grade education, went to work as a farmhand as a teenager and saved enough money to buy a thirteen-acre peach orchard that he converted into a small farm for himself, building a house and a barn from scratch without benefit of blueprints.

  When Allen’s grandmother graduated from high school she couldn’t afford a class ring much less a college education, yet she found work as an insurance company secretary in nearby Tulsa, complementing her household chores with a passion for books.

  Allen’s great-grandfather was a Cherokee who landed in Oklahoma after traveling the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson’s misguided attempt to solve the so-called Indian problem. Through marriage and births the family Cherokee lineage was reduced, but Allen’s father retained his heritage as he became a celebrated Oklahoma schoolboy athlete and later a successful high school football coach and prominent citizen of Claremore, Oklahoma, the hometown of Will Rogers.

  These lives, however differently they began and evolved, had a common theme: They were calibrated by prudent proportion. All of these men and women lived within their means, and they either intuitively or actively arranged their affairs so they could weather the unexpected.

  They were also united by twin goals: that their children would have more prosperity than they did, and that they would achieve that by getting a college education. When the time came for their offspring to go to college, there would be money saved to pay the way or to help.

  THE PRESENT

  As a result, my generation on the family tree were the lucky branches when it came to realizing the American Dream: higher education, the economic opportunity that came with it, a more just society, and the advances of medicine and technology. Those are still the dreams today, but fewer of us are realizing the promise.

  We came of age in the fifties when America was an unchallenged colossus economically. If you were a man, jobs were plentiful and many of them came with a generous package of benefits, including health care and pension plans. Women were still the victims of workplace discrimination, relegated to lower-paying jobs and constantly bumping against the now-famous glass ceiling. But they persisted and a combination of their skills, drive, and accomplishments opened the door wider for their daughters and other female members of the next generation.

  We were the bridge generation, in a way, coming along as we did before the baby boomers. We were still cond
itioned by the penurious culture of our parents but a little giddy by what we were earning and all the new opportunities to spend. Dining out became routine. A second car? Why not? Let’s fly, not drive, for vacation this year.

  An all-purpose credit card was a major change in our lives. Meredith and I were in our late twenties before we got our first American Express card, which was the only one we carried. The idea of not paying cash for everything was uneasily liberating. It wasn’t how I was raised.

  There were some amusing moments as we drifted away from our parents’ sensibilities.

  My father went shopping with me at an upscale California food market and I thought I’d impress him by passing on the fresh-squeezed orange juice, noting that it was more expensive than the carton variety. He laughed, reached down into the shopping cart, and picked up three pricey bottles of California wine I’d selected without hesitation and said, “I guess the few cents you’ll save on orange juice will pay for these.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Survivors

  FACT: Between January 2007 and January 2011, an estimated nine million workers lost their jobs. An untold number of others took pay cuts, were furloughed, or started working only part-time.

  QUESTION: Do you have a contingency plan if you lose your job? Have you developed other skills or enrolled in some form of formal education that will prepare you for the demands of the rapidly changing workplace?

  Dan and April Looper of New Vienna, in southern Ohio, were caught in the pincers of the economic downturn and the changing circumstances of their grandparents. The Loopers live in a rural area, in a four-bedroom house on two and a half acres with their four children not yet in their teens. In a way they would never have chosen for themselves, they became a poster family for the travails of America in the first great recession of the twenty-first century. (There will be others, for it is the inherent nature of large, complex economies to expand and then contract, whether from ill-advised free-market practices, misguided government policies, or natural disasters.)

  THE PAST

  Dan was one of eight thousand employees at Airborne Express, a branch of the shipping giant DHL, in Wilmington, Ohio. He went to work there right out of high school in 1998 and met April not long after. He had a good job as a trainer of new hires at Airborne, and so when they married she decided to become a stay-at-home mother, looking after the four children who followed in rapid succession.

  The eldest, Alexis, has cerebral palsy and requires regular and expensive therapy. Dan and April were grateful for Dan’s on-the-job health insurance, and they assumed it would be around as long as Dan’s job, which, as he told me, he expected to last as long as he wanted it. “Airborne,” he said, “was the one place that if anybody needed a job they could always go there. I honestly never thought I would see the day when such a big company would go under so quick.”

  He was stunned when in the summer of 2008 Airborne announced it would be shutting its Ohio plant within a year. Workers were offered early buyouts, severance pay, and some benefits to tide them over until they could find other jobs. As a young father with a daughter who required extensive medical treatment, Dan didn’t have that option.

  Other, older men in his department, their families grown and on their own, stepped up and took early retirement so Dan could stay on the payroll for a year, a generous act that made a big impression on the Loopers. “They watched me grow as a dad and a husband,” Dan said, “and they were watchin’ out for me.”

  As grateful as they were for the temporary reprieve, Dan and April knew his day of reckoning would come within a year, and so they set out on a painful crash course in survival, their dreams of achieving middle-class standing deferred, maybe forever.

  Dan spent his off-hours training as an EMT—emergency medical technician—and searching the Internet, looking for opportunities in what was an increasingly barren landscape for American workers with high school educations and few technology skills.

  The Loopers cut up their credit cards. April says that was the smartest thing they ever did after what she admits was a reckless start with the easy credit they offered. “We were dumb when we first got them,” she said. “Really dumb, but we got smart and paid them off.”

  They started a regular savings schedule and trimmed their spending. But life intervenes, even when you have the best intentions. April sighs, “Then something will take us two steps back—the van breaks down or we gotta buy something for Alexis’s therapy and the money we’ve been saving, well, now we have to use it.”

  THE PRESENT

  April, a feisty redhead, shook her head and laughed as she described her new favorite shopping companion: coupons.

  “Coupons are my favorite things,” she said. “I used to see all those crazy ladies pushing shopping carts, flipping through the coupon books. Now I’m one of those crazy ladies, going down the aisle, flipping through the coupons.

  The Looper family when their future was uncertain (Photo Credit 7.1)

  “I used to buy the twelve-pack of batteries for kids’ toys. Now when the toys go dead, they stay dead. I don’t buy batteries.”

  April’s and Dan’s parents and grandparents have stepped up. “My grandma reminds me not to get down. She says, ‘April, you just can’t sit and sob because it will only get worse,’ but then something will pop up with Alexis and we don’t have money for groceries so I call my mom and say, ‘Can you help us out?’ Dan’s mom has put gas in our car.”

  It’s exhausting. “Wears me out is an understatement,” April confessed with a tight smile. “Some mornings I don’t want to get out of bed … because I have to face the fact of him losing his job and Alexis’s health.”

  But she did keep getting up, and so did Dan. When Airborne moved its operations to Erlanger, Kentucky, a ninety-mile drive from their home, Dan was offered a job at the new location. Despite the long commute, he accepted.

  After a year on the job in the new location, the future is looking a little brighter for the Loopers. “I worked my butt off and it paid off,” Dan told me when I followed up with him nine months after our initial interview. “I got promoted to ramp supervisor in the loading operations, and in the winter I help supervise the deicing of the cargo planes.”

  THE PROMISE

  On the phone, Dan had a new energy as he described how he and April were continuing to manage carefully. They’ve paid off both cars and refinanced their home so the payments are more manageable. “And April now buys two Sunday papers so she can get more coupons,” he said.

  Dan is making around fifty thousand dollars a year, which allows them to save more, and they’re continuing to live by the rules that the recession first imposed on them.

  When I asked about family entertainment these days, they jointly answered, “Watching the kids play in the backyard or turning on the garden hose and squirting them as they run past.” Like so many couples hit by the recession, Dan and April rent inexpensive DVDs and watch them at home.

  They also made room in their home for Dan’s grandmother. “It was either that or a nursing home,” Dan said. “We couldn’t have that—so we took her in, and my dad paid for her food and drove her to her doctor’s appointments and my uncle paid for her prescriptions.”

  Unfortunately, as so often happens, his grandmother’s condition deteriorated to the point where she had to have constant care. Her move into a nursing home took a big emotional toll on the family. Dan’s mother struggled with the reality that they could no longer take care of her themselves.

  This is a story repeated in nearly every family across America as life spans are extended with the trade-off of commensurate physical and mental health difficulties. Care is expensive and often bewildering for family members who are forced to take responsibility for two lives: their own and their elderly relative’s. Add dementia or Alzheimer’s and it is a heartbreaking experience with too little relief.

  Health-policy studies are warning of a coming cost crisis in long-term care for the elderly as more
nursing home patients with dementia are using those facilities for longer periods of time. In 1999 patients with dementia averaged a stay of 46 days in hospice care with Medicare benefits. By 2006 that average had more than doubled to 118 days in hospice care. That’s one more burden not just for families but for all taxpayers who are faced with the looming mathematical catastrophe of Medicare costs.

  When I commented that the difficult times meant more elderly Americans were facing very tough choices and that Dan’s grandmother was lucky to have a strong support structure, Dan responded matter-of-factly, “That’s what families do—help each other.”

  CHAPTER 8

  House Broken

  FACT: In 1999, 1.2 percent of home loans were in foreclosure. The foreclosure rate stayed in that range until the housing bubble exploded. By 2009 foreclosure rates were running at 4.6 percent. Houses financed with high-risk subprime loans were foreclosed on at a rate of more than 15.5 percent. Experts have estimated 1.2 million homes could be repossessed by banks in 2011.

  QUESTION: How much is your home really worth today? How much did you pay for it? Could you be just as happy in a smaller home?

  At the close of the twentieth century America went through a housing speculation bubble that became our equivalent of Holland’s tulip frenzy in the mid-1600s. Mortgages were ridiculously easy to get and the terms were ticking time bombs of a little cash down, interest-only payments for a few years, and then, boom, a very large bill due down the road.