The Riches to Be Found in a Poor House

I grew up in a tenement where the rent was $50 a month. We moved out when I was 12, because the building was condemned.

The house we bought cost $11,000. When I sold it last summer, I got 35, not bad for a place with pails on the kitchen floor to catch rain from a leaky roof.

We had no garage, because we had no car. The old man, he drank too much and lost his license. My mother didn’t drive, and my sister was still too young.

We had no dryer, so wet laundry had to be hung with clothespins outdoors, even when it was 20 below.

We had no shower, so mornings meant sitting in a tub and praying that the water came out of the pipes warm.

But this old house did have something that I’d never had before.

It had a room for me.

After 12 years of sleeping on a couch--not a sofa bed, just a sofa--I finally had a mattress, a mirror, a dresser and a door that you could close, if not lock. A place you could be by yourself.

That first Christmas there, that was my gift.

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Funny thing about being young. You don’t know you’re poor. You don’t know it until you’re older and look back on it and wonder how you ever survived it.

Oh, sure, you do see the other kids coming to school in newer clothes, or being dropped off there in nicer cars. But you always think, “They’re rich.” It never occurs to you, “I’m poor.”

We thought poor meant bums.

A poor person to us was some stereotypical hobo from literature, who traveled by boxcar with a knapsack and stole a pie from a woman’s windowsill.

Our family worked. The old man did maintenance work in a factory, while my mother clerked at a Sears. I usually had a couple bucks in my pocket, the result of being one of those Rockwellian youths with a paper route and a stray dog chasing my bike up the road.

Nobody foreclosed on us. We paid the rent. We never ended up on the street. We used expressions like “money’s tight,” which meant we avoided extravagances like, oh, going to a doctor if nothing was broken.

Vacations were for people who went somewhere. We went nowhere, except for a couple of short trips in an uncle’s car. I do not believe that my mother ever sat in an airplane, or that my father did after he came home from the war.

And Christmas?

Well, we were poor, not destitute. Everybody got something. We ate well, then exchanged inexpensive gifts.

In the old apartment, we never had room for a tree. We barely had room for a branch. There was an oil furnace, which we filled by can from a tank downstairs in a shed. We put our Christmas gifts near this stove, because it would be warmer there, and Decembers in the Midwest ran a close second to Decembers at the North Pole.

At the new house, Christmas was better.

There would be gifts under the tree. Not many. Socks and underwear, too often. We didn’t get computers then; a computer was something called Univac that weighed more than a truck. The only thing I ever got with a mouse was a game called Mouse Trap, with a Rube Goldberg device that dropped a cage on a plastic rodent.

The other 364 days of the year weren’t so much fun.

At 16, I graduated from high school, bought a car and left home.

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One winter, years later, I was at a Dallas Cowboys football game when I was paged in the press box. “Call home,” the message said.

My mother had suffered a stroke. I flew home. The next morning, I took the old man to a doctor’s appointment, where we found out that his lung cancer was advanced. He was admitted to the hospital, one floor from my mother.

It was my first holiday at home in years.

On Christmas Day, a priest gave my father the last rites. After his death a few nights later, I walked up a flight of stairs at 4 a.m. in a dark hospital to tell my mother. Then I phoned my sister.

I sat in that old house that Christmas week, thinking about the good times I spent in it, not the bad. Another family lives there now. All of mine is gone. Death doesn’t discriminate against the poor. It will get you, wherever you live.

Christmas morning, the old man would come into my bedroom, my first bedroom, and tinkle a bell, telling me that Santa had come. My mother was in the kitchen, cooking something. My sister was already by the tree, unwrapping a gift. We had a home. We had each other. We weren’t poor. We were rich.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com