ABSTRACT
I grew up feeling deprived of everything I thought American children had: candy, new clothes, toys, a bicycle, roller skates, Boy Scouts, even streetcar fare. My parents, relentless penny pinchers, shared a blinding faith in education, but rarely told us children of their determination to send us to college. In the early 1930s, as the furniture industry began moving west and south, father’s factory was struggling to survive. When I was in high school, dad worked part time. I was unaware that the folks had saved sizable sums for our education and their old age. We had rent from the two apartments in our house and from another house three miles away. Because mother didn’t give me the things all the other neighborhood boys had, I thought that we were poor.
