VT SAID:
“What about the pig farm the guy lived behind?
What did everybody else do for a living including your folks?
I've shoveled my share of horse and cow manure so know a thing or two about growing up poor. It wasn't the pine barons of New Jersey but then you didn't have forty below zero or six feet of snow on the ground.”
The “pig farm” itself was a defunct operation of just a few animals. “pig farm” was more a derisive place name, not a “farm” in the true sense of the word.
My Dad was a bayman, tonging for clams, literally scrapping the bottom of the bay for a living. Mom cleaned houses, I guess you would call her a domestic. Many others worked construction, building cheap vacation house developments, all piece work, and seasonal. Then there were those who worked the vacation trade, 10 weeks a year. Yes a few, damn few, had anything like what we would call a regular job. 10 miles to a “super market”, 15 miles to a movie, 39 to a hospital. A “good job” was as tool taker on the Garden State Parkway.
So your point about folks being displaced by mechanization is far from relevant.
My point remains that as poor as things were most folks found a way to make a living. A few chose to live very poorly. Those folks up the road, they always had a few horses. No farm, so all feed was bought. They could buy horse feed but not electricity. That is a choice.
Now I suppose a lot of folks would say that’s the way we live now. We gave up our downtown Philly brownstone. We don’t have heat or AC. We use a foot pump to get water in the sink. We have no TV and do not listen to the radio. Most people don’t understand our life style and would never ever consider it. Hell, must cruisers we meet are only doing it for a few weeks or months as a break. Yet we don’t consider ourselves poor or deprived, indeed we are rich in experience.
People make life style choices that do not make sense to us personally. It is not good to over generalize about what is good or bad for another.