re: #154 Shiplord Kirel, Friend of Moose and Squirrel

Later, with the rise of the “rural” sitcom, poorer people did make an appearance, as oafs and buffoons. It was all very demoralizing, especially to some of my working class contemporaries who were perhaps not as well informed as I was. They were actually about average for the time but came to feel that they were clinging to the fringe, barely part of society at all.

My dad grew up in rural eastern Oklahoma in the 1930s and 1940s. He told me when I was an adult that they were dirt poor, but everyone was dirt poor. He didn’t know he was poor until he went to California in 1952. My parents vaulted into the middle class in the 1960s after my dad moved from Western Electric to selling and installing private PBXes. Neither of them talked much about their childhoods—Dad because he sure as hell was never going back to farming and Mom because she grew up in the projects in Richmond, California and her father was a mean as hell alcoholic. (He lived until I was 22 and I never met him.)