First Lessons in Class and Wealth

Mom: rolled-up jeans, freckles. Her dad had a duck farm in NH, where she married Dad.

I was born in New Jersey, and for my first birthday, my parents bought a house. It was small, white, and part of a “development” — that is, it stood where farm fields had been, not long before, and the houses along the half dozen linked roads near it came in several varieties but were all built by the same developer and were sold to young families like ours. I bet each one had a mortgage, like my folks had.

My father was a mechanical and electrical engineer, working for DeLaval at that point (milking machines!), and earned considerably less than $10,000 per year; my mother had taught nursery school but now stayed home as a “housewife.” Though we were just 15 miles from the Lincoln Tunnel entrance into New York City, two active dairy farms, Becker and Alderney, competed for Mom’s business and delivered, to our front steps, milk and cream in glass bottles.

Across the road, also sitting on what was once part of the farm, stood “the stables.” That’s what we called it, although later, it gained neat signs calling it a “riding academy.” It comforted my mother, a lost New England country girl, with the scent of manure and straw. From the house yard, I could see horses grazing in fenced pasture.