As a young girl growing up, the youngest of a large family, I always got hand me downs.  I didn’t mind so much except I was the tallest of the 5 girls.  Everything was always a little tighter and shorter on me. 

In elementary school I remember always feeling poor.  My mother and father were divorced before I was 5.  My mother worked very hard keeping our family together in the this big house with holes in the wall and mice running around in the walls and downstairs at night.  At school during an assembly, my teacher pulled me out of the auditorium to give me a pair of really nice shoes.  I was so self-conscious, I remember trying to hide my feet when I went back to my seat.  Thank God the lights were out in the auditorium when this took place.  Then another time when I was much older, I was in 7th grade, I was pulled out of class again to be given clothes to take home, just like they had done in the past.  This caused me much embarrassment as I didn’t want to be thought of as poor, and I didn’t want anyone thinking my Mom couldn’t take care of us.  I told them to get my older sister, who was in the 8th grade, to take them home.  They promptly told me she had told them to have me take them.  I said thank you and that I would be back after school to pick them up.  Ofcourse, neither of us never did pick up the clothes and they never offered us clothes or shoes again.  I think they understood.

I also ran into my father around this time.  I was either in 6th or 7th grade, when a friend of mine and I walked about 2 miles down to the local five and dime store.  Orcourse the owners, husband and wife from some foreign country and very nice, new my whole family, who didn’t.  My friend and I were picking out some candy when I saw this man.  I said to my friend, "I think that is my dad."  From pictures I had seen I had determined this.  I don’t ever recall seeing him before this.  I waited and hid a bit until I thought he left the store, then walked up to pay for our candy.  Mysteriously this man, my father, was standing next to me, although I hadn’t notice him there, when the owner said, "Do you know who this is?"  I was so embarrassed because, there were other shoppers in the store, so I said, "No."  I thought this would be the end of it and tried to convince myself it wasn’t my father.  She said, "This is your father."  I think I said something like "Oh, hi."  We stepped aside and started to talk.  He asked about my sisters and brothers, but never asked anything about me.  How old I was, what grade I was in, how was I doing in school.  All I could think about was how ragged my clothes were, with holes, rips and tares in them.  I didn’t want him to think my Mom couldn’t take care of us without him, and I was angry because he didn’t seem to care about me.  Maybe it was his way of denying me because I denied him.

Well, that was the last time I saw him until one Thanksgiving Day dinner many years later when I was a senior in high school, some of my brothers and sisters went across the street to see him.  He and his wife lived in a mobile home park 4 mobile homes down from his dad.  My Mom sent some of us over to get my brothers and sisters, and I volunteered to go with some of the others.  I didn’t talk to him or his wife, I just observed and listened to the others talking.  I somehow felt I was betraying my mother by being there, then we left.  The 3rd and last time I saw him was at a little wake we had for my grandfather, his dad, at my brothers house.  I was married and pregnant and flew in for the funeral.  I think we spoke for about 5 minutes and that was it.  We found out about my fathers death when my mother read it in the paper years and years later.

The other disturbing thing the grade school (K thru 8) system did in the 60’s was to separate smarter kids from average kids.  I took this as an offense.  The good thing was, I remember thinking all us average kids had all the good looking guys in our class (smile).

I grew up in an all white neighborhood, went to an all white grade school until my 8th grade.  The first Mexican/American boy came to our school and he was taken in by most of us.

My mother did a wonderful job raising all us children, and I know for a fact she was proud of that and all of us.  She once said to me, "One thing I can say is none of you turned out bad or went to jail."  Five out of 11 of us went on to get our college degrees.  My mother lost 3 of her children, my siblings, before her death, and this was very hard for her throughout her life.  It was something you didn’t ask her about, because it was too painfull for her.

Horrible stories.  Sad stories.  Makes me feel that a great deal of the real picture of human existence is whitewashed and made to look glowingly perfect.  Sort of like the pictures of perfect families as portrayed on television during the fifties.

I do sense rather strongly, however, that a cruelty has crept into people that was not there when I was young.  Eighty now, I grew up in a small town in the Shenandoah Valley.  There was segregation, and it was taken for granted and not spoken of.  But there was also mutual respect and caring.  The poor among us were looked after by the entire community as much as possible, and we children were taught this was an important aspect of our lives as "good people."  We did not, so far as I can remember, think or say cruel things or act in a mean manner.

Frankly, and I may be mistaken in my belief, but I really think a lot of the snowballing of unconscionable behavior came about because our numbers have become overwhelming.  My home town had 432 people in it, rich & poor, black & white, when I was in elementary school.  Now they tell me it has tens of thousands of citizens! 

I am a 44 year old married women with 3 kids who was raised in the south bronx all my life..At the age of 40 my husband moved me and my now 9 year old to the suburbs of New Jersey…I got my first real ah ha moment there when we were out numbered, and for the first time in my life i felt out of place and my 6year old said to me that she loved where we moved to, but , she didn’t want to be the only brown face…The difference was the school system which blew me a way from one public school to another public school in the suburbs. If you saw where we came from you would have thought we were payin for private school..My neighbors were no longer jealous of me and my family  because where we moved to they feel if you live here you can afford so good morning. So they are the nicest neighbors i have ever had…As apposed to my project neighbors who wouldn’t even speak to you if you acheive to much in the neighborhood…They felt as if you think you are hot stuff or to good for the hood so you dont want to be around that when u are tryin so hard to acheive some type of comfortablity in life..

I have two to share: 1)I remember comments being made by the ‘adults’ in the family and neighbors about the time the ‘gypsies’ came into town (we lived in Los Angeles, the Crenshaw district; a middle class working neighborhood) as a result of a death.  There was a Funeral Home on Slauson, one block from our house.  ‘They camped out for a days’ (a phrase repeated by several adults); we (my siblings and I) were told it was customary for them to pay their respects for days.  Everyone was in an uproar.  This took place in the late 50’s and 2) I realized from the first day in high school that the ‘head of the house’ was assumed to be the father of the family.  The teacher asked everyone to state what their father did for a living.  I was nervous and wondered what to say because my dad wasn’t one to hold down a job for long, we only saw him now and then or he would call once in a while. (He was an irresponsible parent, who didn’t even pay my mom for child support.  My mom and us (3 siblings) grew up living with my grandparents.)  When it came my turn to give an answer, I just said I didn’t have one.  The teacher took it as my dad passed away at sometime in my life; I didn’t bother to correct her.  My grandfather was a great role model, however he passed on when I was 8 years old; I am pround of the influence my mother, and both my grandmothers had in my life. 

One of the things I’ve thought about is the number of people I went to school with and the ones who were "class-conscious" in terms of who they dated and married are all divorced, some several times divorced, while those who were not married once and are still married.  One in particular married against her parents’ wishes and they disowned her -her husband, who in their eyes was not ever going to amount to anything, ended up doing quite well.  Her parents, however, never really relented. No matter how well he does, he is still not what they wanted.  

I think like all prejudices, our "class-consciousness" is something we learn from our parents. 

My Daddy, was a bit of a bigot.  Anyone not Norsk was somehow less than he was this included my Mom (southern, Baptist, & female).  I listened to his often funny yet always cutting put downs of blacks, brown, yellow, republican, white collar, ethnic et al, and learned that isms were all false. 

We should not be colorblind nor should we discount religious, ethnic, or social distinctions. Rather we should accept and celebrate the very things that make each of us unique.  Different is not better or worse it is different.

The bedrock of the American Experiment is each of us is endowed with inalienable rights, not by the state, but by our creation. Life lived is lessons learned, and shared. I do-not want to live in a bland, homogenized country, I want to hear dialect, taste flavor, see the ever changing landscape.

When I was a young child, about age 9. 

Yes, I do remember a difference in the class system.  I will be 80 years old in December.  My grandparents came to this country from Italy, my parents were born in the United States.  My mother had to leave school when she was in th 6th grade to go to work, picking coal from the railroad tracks.  They never spoke anything but English at home, so I was only able to c