In my sociology of poverty class, we have done a reading on status within a trailer park. We have also read sections of “Code of the Street” about inner city Philadelphia, where the people themselves call each other either “decent” or “street”. Then I asked the students how stratification existed in their home neighborhood where they grew up.
In my home neighborhood, status was evident in a number of ways. First, there was the one family on the block, a Catholic family, who bought 2 neighboring houses & then built a mid-section to unite them. They had THE BIGGEST house on the block, and 11 kids. Not only that, they had money. When you went into their house, they had a stereo speaker system where music played from room to room, and the parents could talk into it from the kitchen or living room, and reach any one of the many bedrooms and carry on a conversation with whoever was there. Now that was status in the late 50s to early 60s.
There was a division between the lower part of the street and the upper. The upper part, my family’s area, had larger houses, 2-3 stories, and sometimes a screened-in porch. The yards were kept up and trimmed, with nice green grass, although not quite up to the bright green yards people have today through a lawncare company. Our house was 3 stories. We also had a full basement we roller-skated in, on rainy days, it was so large. My dad had an “office” down there, and my mother had a washer & dryer. My older brother also carried out science experiments down there and later made films.
Down the street, the houses became smaller and the families were working class. We knew the difference, even as kids. When we walked to school, which we did every day, we saw the change occur. Poverty showed up a little farther on, just a few streets away. The kids there never had anything, and their hair was unkept, the girls’ hair may have been matted or wildly natural curl, not neatly bobby-pin curled. They didn’t have their own bedrooms either. If you went inside their houses, they felt “dirty”. They didn’t have the giant dining room with mahogany or cherry-wood table sitting there like a trophy you could never touch.
Our mothers were home. We came home for lunch. Working class kids had to go home w/ someone else for lunch, as their mothers were working.
As a kid, if you had a COOL BIKE, you had status. For us, it was a stingray-seated bike. If you had roller skates with a key, you were cool. We created our own private, membership by invitation only clubs of kids. If you were “cool” you could join our club. We rode our bikes around the neighborhood and climbed trees, sometimes finding a little nook or cranny we called our “hideaway”. This is where our club would gather and meet, like a secret society.
As a kid, I always played w/ the poor kids at school, but my mother would never let me go to their houses much after school. Unless their mom happened to be the Girl Scout leader, and I would go there for a weekly GS meeting, but then come home.
I never fought much. I was never a fighter, in any way. Occasionally, someone attacked me, as I vaguely recall. In those instances, I would throw a punch & then duck out. I can remember being really angry with some close friends. We would VERY rarely physically fight, but would yell and send them home, not allow them to come in our house, gang up with other kids to exclude them, those kinds of games. More than likely, I was the one being excluded. I tended to be really close with just a few girlfriends. When they turned against me, I was crushed, & then my parents would go to bat for me & tell me how they weren’t anything. I was a fairly lonely kid. 🙂
Doctor Grandma 