To this day, my cheeks burn at the memory of it.
A few years after my father’s death, my mother moved the Kramer family from the home he had built in Palisades, in Rockland County, to a drafty old barn of a house in New Hampshire, for a fresh start not far from where two of her sisters lived.
The Kramers were outsiders in so many ways in our small adopted town.
First, we were New Yorkers, but not the sensible kind who came up to the tourist location for the summer, spent tons of money and left on Labor Day. To the locals, I suppose, we were the worst kind of “flatlanders,” the kind who didn’t have the sense to go away. You’d think that deciding to live among them year-round would have won us points with the local populace, for our hardiness, at the very least. You’d be wrong. We were forever outsiders and most of the locals treated us as such.
Also, there were too many of us. I was the eighth of nine Kramer kids, and my mom bought that drafty old place because it was one of the only ones large enough to house us all.
My mother had a great eye for “location, location, location.” Our new home had a commanding view of the ski mountain. When the leaves were off the trees, you could see the lake from two of the bedrooms.
Living on a golf course, but with no insulation or money
It wasn’t until that first winter that my mother realized — well, we all realized, as we shivered in the living room beside the fireplace — that the “summer cottage” she had bought on a golf course had no insulation. The wind would whip up the fairway, sway the towering pines surrounding the house, sweep across the porch and into the house, meeting little or no resistance.
But the fact that we lived in the part of town where we lived suggested to those who didn’t know us that the Kramers had money.
The Kramers had no money. (Actually, that may been the strongest Kramer family tradition, one that is still very much intact.) My mother was a teacher raising nine kids on a teacher’s salary. I still have no idea how she did it, but she’s been gone too long for me to find out now.
The point of this is that ours was a paycheck-to-paycheck household, like those I wrote about this week. The gap between the poverty level and what it takes to actually get by here has never been wider. Back then, we got by the way the working poor still get by and have always gotten by, on the kindness of family and neighbors and our church.
But New Hampshire in the 1970s was nowhere near as expensive as Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties are today. The amount it takes a family of four to survive here now — about $130,000 a year — would have bought an well-insulated mansion on a many acres back then.
Things are different when you can’t afford the basics
We also got by because we school-age kids qualified for free lunch, which is where that long-ago memory comes in. My mom filled out the forms, including the figure of her paltry annual salary and the number of dependents in her household. We more than qualified.
Every morning, students would line up to pay for their lunch, receiving a token they would later hand to one of the hairnetted lunch ladies. Qualifying for free lunch meant standing in the same line for the same plastic token, with one distinct difference.
I’d make my way forward in the line, arriving with eyes downcast to stand before the head lunch lady, a woman who also drove our school bus. Apparently, she took offense at the idea that people who lived on a golf course were getting anything for free, because every time I stood before her, she’d turn to her colleague and announce, loud enough for all to hear: “Free Lunch!” Sometimes, she’d mutter under her breath about the golf course, sometimes not.
That daily exercise in humility made a strong impression on me.
The United for ALICE report on the working poor, the basis for this week’s story, found that 16% of children in the U.S. lived in poverty in 2022 but another 34% — more than twice as many — were in working-poor households, ones that were Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, or ALICE.
That means that half of America’s children in 2022 lived in households with income below the ALICE threshold, households struggling to pay for the basics: housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, technology, and taxes in their communities.
Households like the one I grew up in.
Peter D. Kramer is a 37-year staffer who writes long-form narratives on a variety of topics. His story looking back on the Oak Street fire in Yonkers won a national Headliner Award for outstanding news specials/feature column. Reach him at pkramer@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Writing about Lower Hudson’s working poor triggers lohud reporter’s memories of growing up
Reporting by Peter D. Kramer, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
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