The town sits in that first ring of working class suburbs circling Detroit. Two decades ago it was filled with blue collar workers living a middle class lifestyle. Most of them had two cars, a little place up north, a boat, a gas fired barbecue grill and a couple kids they thought would go to college.
Bob and Mary had all that, plus the brick bungalow they had owned for just over twenty years. Three days ago they packed up and drove off in a 17 foot U-Haul. They left a lot; there was not much room in the used trailer home they bought. “I’m glad our daughter is living up at Central now,” Bob said while his teenage boys were struggling to get a couch onto the U-Haul.
Work in the construction business dried up on Bob a couple years ago; the hours he picked up clerking in a hardware store barely covered the phone and utility payments. Mary’s long time office job was changed to part-time independent contractor status with no benefits. “We tried to keep paying all the bills on time, but things kind of spiraled down hill,” confided Mary.
Just a few years earlier, the couple got a second mortgage. The market was at its peak; their place was worth $140,000. “We weren’t frivolous with the money,” Mary explained. “We did take a little vacation so the kids could see California, but the cars got fixed, some credit cards were paid off, the kitchen remodeled and a new roof put on. The money just went. And now you could maybe get $80,000 for the house.”
“You know that columnist Peggy Noonan?” Bob asked.
“Yes, I’m familiar with her,” I said. “But I’m still trying to figure out how working as a speech writer for Ronald Reagan was joining the revolution.”
Bob laughed, “Yeah, in those days bad times meant double digit inflation. Anyway, last summer she wrote that for the first time in America much of the population can no longer hold the basic assumption that their kids will be better off then they were. That struck a nerve. I always thought all our kids would finish college, do something rewarding and have a bigger, nicer house than ours. Now I'm not sure if they'll find a decent paying job.”
He listened for a bit as his boys moaned about leaving a snowmobile behind. "It just needs some tuning up," said the 16 year old.
Bob turned back to me after telling the boys to just listen to their mother. “I sure hope things pick up soon. We’re praying that the trailer park is a temporary thing. If not… well, it’s an old trailer but those things hold up well. Maybe one of our kids will need it.”
The parents of Bob and Mary came of age during the 1930s. They believed in steady work, paying the bills on time, a savings account and home ownership. Times could get bad, but virtue would prevail. They tried to drum all this into the heads of their children. Their grandchildren now face the 21st century version of the Great Depression.
JDA©9/29/10
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