Room and Board

My mother was nothing if not frugal. She was in charge of the family finances, which she handled with great care and economy. Sometimes this was a good thing, and sometimes it was just annoying.

We were a typical lower-middle-class, blue-collar family. My father, a machinist, didn’t make a ton of money, but he was perfectly able to provide for his family so that we lived, as Cornelia Otis Skinner once said, “if not in the lap of luxury, at least on the knees of comfort.”

When I was growing up, there was always something I wanted to have or wanted to do, and when she said no and I asked why, my mother would always say, “We can’t afford it.” She meant the money could be put to better use, but I heard that statement so often that it seemed to me we couldn’t afford much of anything. For a time, I actually thought we were nearly destitute.

One of the things I would like to have done was go to college, but that was something we really could not afford. To make matters worse, during my senior year of high school, my father took sick and was unable to work for several months. My mother’s thriftiness pulled us through that time.

Upon graduating from high school, therefore, I got a job as a stenographer for an insurance company in downtown Chicago. My salary was $265 a month. (This was in 1964; adjusted for inflation, that’s a dollar or two over minimum wage now). My mother suggested that since I was now working, I ought to contribute something toward the household expenses. She thought $40 a month would be about right. My father had recovered and gone back to work by then, but I knew she was still juggling the books paying off bills and that she could use some extra money. So, twice a month when I cashed my paycheck, I gave her $20 for what she called my “room and board.”

The glamour and excitement of being a working girl in Chicago’s Loop took very little time to wear off, and I decided I did not want to type for an insurance company for the rest of my life. It was clear that if I was to improve myself, higher education was a must.

I began looking into it and, despite not having the best grades in school, I found a couple colleges that were willing to take me. I decided on Wisconsin State University in Stevens Point. All I had to do was figure out how to pay for it.

I saved my money diligently, but by the next spring I was still a few hundred dollars short of what I needed for a full year. Then one evening at supper, my mother said she’d been going over the budget and thought they would be able to help me. “If you can cover your tuition and fees and books,” she said, “we will pay for your housing.” I was ecstatic. It looked like I was going to college after all.

My wardrobe at the time consisted mostly of business attire, and the week before I was to leave for school, my mother recommended that I buy some more campus-appropriate clothes, like jeans and sweatshirts. I demurred because, although I had more than I needed for my school costs, I wanted to keep the surplus for the incidental expenses I was sure to incur.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” she said, taking an envelope out of her apron pocket. “You take this and go shopping, and you can have what's left for your ‘incidental expenses.’”

The envelope was full of twenty-dollar bills, every one that I had given her during the preceding year for my room and board.