Democratic Primaries

I think when I was in high school, he earned $3 per hour. My mom worked part time as a secretary at the school I attended. Between the two of them, we did OK. When I was 16, I worked 3 hours a day, six days a week for $1.25 per hour, almost half time. My job was delivering milk to homes from 5 AM to 8 AM. That freed up the rest of my time for school and other things. My parents made me put 75% of what I earned from that job in a savings account, "for college."

We did OK, though. We wanted for nothing, actually, but didn't have a nice new car, or a big house. Still, I ended up in the college prep track in school, and went off to a state college nearby. Despite our blue-collar income level, that path was available to me. It was not available to many of my friends who were not Caucasian. It was not available to most of the girls I knew, either.

I never thought about any of that until a few years later. I dropped out of college, bummed around the country, and then joined the USAF. After that, I went back to school, with the GI Bill and little else. During my educational hiatus, I found myself immersed in a very different world than the one I knew in my childhood. All of that changed the trajectory of my life.