My parents made it through the Great Depression and World war II

 From today's version of reality this concept might be foreign in many ways to people living today.

My parents both turned 18 during the Great Depression. What did this mean?

It meant for my father that even though he was valedictorian of his High School Class that his father didn't let him go to college? Why?

Because his father was an Electrical Contractor and people in the trades always had jobs while often people with college educations during the Great Depression Starved to death if they were white collar alongside rivers living in tents with water but no food. So, my grandfather knew this and made his boys work as electricians in his own business.

But, as a consequence of this when World War II happened instead of being needed as soldiers in the Army they were needed to build Liberty Ships which were the cargo ships that shipped cargo all over the world to the soldiers in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

My mother's father was a night watchman and so she grew up poor in Alki Point, Seattle Washington. But, when she was 18 years old her father left and didn't come back leaving her alone to support her mother for the next 10 years almost until she married my father and then her mother lived with my father and I while I was growing up. Her two sisters were older than her and so by the time their father left for parts unknown they were adults already too.

So, my mother worked making shoes and purses in a garment factory at first and by the time she married my father in 1946 when she was 27 she was working for Bell Telephone as a telephone operator then in Seattle Washington. 

I was born when she was 29 years old in Seattle in 1948. We lived at first on my grandfather's property in Lake Forest Park Washington. My father built an apartment for us under the Garage on the side of a steep hill. I could walk outside and eat raspberries grown just outside where we washed clothes in our apartment. I also could walk out among all the apple and black Cherry trees because my grandfather had over 2 acres of land with cherry trees and apple trees on it. Later when I was 12 my 17 year old male cousin and I both climbed tall 3 legged ladders and picked Black Cherries for my grandmother and grandfather. My cousin was from Southern California too at that time because we had moved to southern California when I was 4 years old. I met my cousin when I was about 5 I think for the first time that I can remember. He lived in Glendale, California which my aunt said had the best public school system in Los Angeles County at that time. He eventually went on scholarship to USC for his bachelor's degree and then NYU for his law degree and has been a very successful lawyer ever since about 1968 when he bought his first sailboat which was a 22 foot Columbia at that time. We used to sail to Catalina Island a lot from Newport Harbor then in the Los Angeles area across the 26 miles of ocean between the mainland and Catalina Island then.