What is this wealthy bit all about.?
As a kid I thought my family was wealthy. We lived finally after Dad retired near Philips at Exeter where the wealthy of the world sent their children. Our High School was next door to the campus and all of us intermingled.
A great many of the High School boys would buy Junker's and rebuild them with money they made from part time jobs. They had wheels and the wealthy did not. The girls at the school, be they the daughters of the king of some country dated the High School boys who had hot rods. The sons of the wealthy were not allowed to own cars.
This took a large number of the males out of the dating pool for a year or so. Then when the wealthy found out their daughters were involved with the son of a small business or son of a milk farmer-----they were whisked away to another big money school.
My problem was I was not Jewish, when the sons of the immigrants moved into town and their sons came sniffing around me, my parent would welcome them but their parents with numbers tattooed on their wrists looked at me like poison.
Outside of the differences in wealth, we never felt poor. If we kids wanted something we would work after school and all summer long. Few of us wanted to go to college, we all wanted a trade. We had seen how our parents and grandparents working for defense in WW2 had managed to buy their own homes and even afford a summer place on a lake.
Wealth was what we accumulated by our own hands and we were proud of it. My Dad would laugh when an acquaintance would brag they had a child in college to study some cockamamie study, especially the liberal arts. He would complain about the price of pumping out the septic tank, darn $2.00 an hour while a educated person was getting $1.50 an hour.
Don't matter how much money one has, go broke and just go back to work to make more .
This was the Yankee Mantra, and still is, this is America and few are poor unless they think they are.------From rags to riches.
