Echoes of the Past

Echoes of the Past

I write this not to beat my own drum, but to illustrate how much the world has changed over the generations.  Whereas my generation started working and got married and had kids quite early in life, many modern young people are still living with their parents into their 30’s.  One can blame the con game perpetrated on modern young people by the student loan fiasco, and myriad other sociological causes, but the fact remains, in many cases, people don’t start living productive lives until quite a bit later in life than we did.

It is so obviously a different world than the one that I grew up in.  My first earning job was cutting grass and landscaping at age 12, followed by mucking out dairy stanchions and helping bale hay at age 13.  At age 14, I was “picking rocks” and driving a tractor to plow and harrow potato growing fields.  At age 16, I had a driver’s license and was working a full 2-10 pm shift for $1.09/hour in the “Berkshire Mills” in Adams, MA, while pursuing the Scientific course in high school, with grades near the top of my class.

The “Berkshire” here lent that name to Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Corporation. It was a traditional New England cotton mill, converting southern cotton into cloth.  Workers comprised a mixture of locals and in 1952, some displaced persons from the European wars.  I learned to work with and interface with adult men in the real workforce at an early age.  I also picked up some habits like drinking and smoking early on.  While my $1.09/hour was fine for my young needs, I could see that guys were supporting their whole families for not much more.  I could directly see the value of education in my future, particularly since my grades were decent.

Cajoled by my mother and high school principal, I went to Northeastern University in Boston and majored in Chemical Engineering.  I pretty much worked my way through college with help from a few academic scholarships, and some minimal, but emergency help from my family.  My class (’59) at Northeastern consisted of about half 18 year-old kids just out of high school, like myself, and half Korean war veterans in their 20’s, many of whom were married and raising families.  Of course, I associated mostly with the latter, since I had already been in the workforce, and not with “the kids”.  In truth, I fit in with both groups reasonably well.

I wish I could say that engineering school was a “snap”, and that I graduated at the top of my class.  In truth, it was hard, working and going to school.  Northeastern is a co-op school, so that helped, but sometimes the co-op assignments did not pay very well, and I would do construction work instead, with better pay. Overall, my engineering grades were decent, but I devoted insufficient time to pull top grades in some of the other classes.  I think my education in the humanities really started by living life well after college.

I married, and fulfilled my 6-month active duty military responsibility immediately after graduating from Northeastern.  We had a son, to add to my wife’s son from a previous marriage.  I joined an international oil company, and we moved to the New York City area during that first year after graduating.  We moved to Holland within a year, and soon after that had a daughter.

I relate all of this, because at age 25, I was married with 3 children, living in Europe and working professionally at an oil refinery in Holland.  We had a house, a live-in maid, new car, a decent salary and a great future.  And this was not only me.  My contemporaries, both American and European, were similar – professional, productive, in our 20’s, raising families.  A definite part of productive society.

Can you see the difference?  Many modern kids, in their 20’s, living with their parents, owing upwards of $200k in student loans, unable to earn very well with that degree in English or History or Social Justice or Political Correctness that they paid $50k a year for.  They will not be out from under until well into their 30’s.

Again, this not to glorify the past contrasted to our modern times.  There are many young people in our day and age who start in life early and attain success at an early age, with and without college.  One of the watchwords of our society is that we want to send all of our kids to college, thinking that it will guarantee some degree of success in life.  It seems that a poor choice of course of study in college doesn’t guarantee much more that a large student loan bill, and small chance of a decent paying job.  Many times, a technical school or trade school, while not as prestigious as some colleges, offers more insofar as a career path is concerned.

Ray Gruszecki

April 7, 2019