by Nomad
My father, born in 1929, grew up in the midst of the Great Depression, in what most people would consider extreme poverty. His father died one week after his birth leaving his widowed mother to raise her five children alone. Had it not been for a productive farmland, it is doubtful they would have survived. “We didn’t have two nickles to rub together,” he’d often tell me,”but we never even realized we were poor. Everybody we knew was in the same situation as we were.”
In 1951. he left the farm to join in the Korean War to fight the spread of the Communist threat. The Red Menace- China- was on the verge of expanding across the border into Korea. Following that, he received credit from a GI loan which allowed him to buy a very humble mobile home to start his married life.
In the economic boom of the 1950s, my father found employment as a precision sheet metal worker at a aircraft manufacturing plant. Along with thousands of other unskilled workers returning from Korea, the company trained my father with the idea of steady long term employment. In turn, my father worked at the company for thirty years. He did not particularly desire to rise up in the hierarchy of the company. He told me that he’d prefer not to have the stress that went with the responsibility. He preferred to spend more time at home at the end of his shift. There was also the goal that he knew that his children would, by his hard, boring and unsatisfying labor, have a better life than he did. It was an attainable goal. Through the use of collective bargaining of his union or the rare labor action, my father’s wage steadily increased.
In 1951. he left the farm to join in the Korean War to fight the spread of the Communist threat. The Red Menace- China- was on the verge of expanding across the border into Korea. Following that, he received credit from a GI loan which allowed him to buy a very humble mobile home to start his married life.
In the economic boom of the 1950s, my father found employment as a precision sheet metal worker at a aircraft manufacturing plant. Along with thousands of other unskilled workers returning from Korea, the company trained my father with the idea of steady long term employment. In turn, my father worked at the company for thirty years. He did not particularly desire to rise up in the hierarchy of the company. He told me that he’d prefer not to have the stress that went with the responsibility. He preferred to spend more time at home at the end of his shift. There was also the goal that he knew that his children would, by his hard, boring and unsatisfying labor, have a better life than he did. It was an attainable goal. Through the use of collective bargaining of his union or the rare labor action, my father’s wage steadily increased.
