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Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

"My Father’s Thrift." When I was a child, the unnamed enemy was “waste.” My father went around the house turning off lights when we left a room, or sometimes urged us out of a room where a light could be extinguished. He saved the soap ends and crushed them together for continued use. We children got new clothes rarely, and made old shoes last. You can bet we cleaned our plates—nobody had to remind us about the starving Armenians. My parents were “thrifty”—that was the positive word they used. What they were avoiding—“waste”—that word was heard only, very occasionally, in the adage, “Waste not, want not.” I wonder how many children today hear that saying, in the middle class. But we were not yet middle class; only struggling to become so in the postwar era when it was still possible to rise a quintile or two up the ladder, if you had two incomes, held a union job (as my mother later did), and could save.

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