Lifestyles Report…‘Govment cheese’

DEBBIE NORRELL
DEBBIE NORRELL

There is so much fodder for columns on Facebook. Last week I ran across a repost from 2015. It was a picture of a block of Pasteurized Process Cheddar Cheese from the United States Department of Agriculture, Washington D.C. better known as “govment cheese”. The caption read, “if you never had this then you don’t know what it’s like to be poor.”

I am a child of the fifties, a baby boomer and according to national statistics we were poor growing up. But I didn’t realize we were considered poor until I was an adult and found out how my parents, mostly my mother disguised poor. I was born in 1952 in Belthoover and when I was born my parents lived in a rental on Chalfont Street. Both of my parents are from Richmond, Va., my father came to Pittsburgh to work on Neville Island. After renting for 10 years my mother had squirreled away enough money to pay for a lot on the east side of Pittsburgh. According to her side of the story my father was shocked that my mother saved enough money to buy a lot that a house was going to be built on by a Black builder. The bottom line is she did it and we moved in to our own home in October of 1954.

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