Lessons in Thrift from 91 Years in Wisconsin
A ten part article series by Donald W. Marschall, Member, The Green Mission Inc. Youth Coalition
Member, The Green Mission Inc. Youth Coalition
The Green Mission Inc. | GM-ESG
Interview recorded by Rick Marschall and Annabelle M. Marschall, Youth Coalition
About This Series
My name is Donald W. Marschall. I am 91 years old, and I am a member of The Green Mission Inc. Youth Coalition. For the past two years I have served as feet on the ground for The Green Mission Inc. and GM-ESG across the Upper Midwest, performing prospective property inspections. When a building is being considered for deconstruction and reuse, I am often the first one to walk through it and take stock of what deserves to be saved.
Not long ago, my son Rick and my granddaughter Annabelle, who is also a Youth Coalition member, sat me down with a recorder and asked me how our family got by in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s on a Wisconsin teacher’s salary. The articles that follow came out of that conversation. We did not call it sustainability back then. We called it getting by. But looking back, I believe the way we lived has a great deal to teach us about the way we ought to build, buy, repair, and reuse today.
Article 1: Groceries on Half a Paycheck
By Donald W. Marschall, Member, The Green Mission Inc. Youth Coalition
People today talk about grocery prices, and I understand why. But let me tell you what grocery shopping looked like when Carol and I were first married and I was in the service in 1961.
We got paid once a month. The Army did not believe in spreading things out. On payday we would go straight to the PX and buy our groceries for the month, and that food had to last until the next check came. My pay was around 89 dollars a month, and by the time we walked out of that store, close to half of it was gone. Half of everything I earned, spent on food in a single afternoon, and then a month of making it stretch.
We managed because our rent on base was free. That was the only reason the arithmetic worked. I was still making payments on my car, and we were paying on Carol’s organ besides. I want to say a word about that organ, because it tells you something about my wife. Before we were married, Carol saved her own money, dollar by dollar, to buy that organ. When we got married, she was not about to give it up just because her circumstances had changed. She had earned it, and we were going to keep it. So we budgeted around it, the same way we budgeted around everything else.
That was the discipline we started our marriage with. You knew exactly what came in, you knew exactly what had to go out, and the space in between was where you lived. There was no credit card to lean on and no ordering out when the cupboard ran thin. If you bought too much steak in week one, you were eating awfully plain by week four.
It sounds hard, and I suppose it was. But it taught us something that carried us through the next sixty years: nothing that comes into your house is disposable. Not food, not furniture, not the house itself. When half your paycheck goes into the grocery cart, you do not throw food away. You plan, you stretch, and you use everything.
That is the same principle I carry with me today when I walk through a building for The Green Mission Inc. Every board, every fixture, every door in that structure represents somebody’s paycheck from long ago. Treating it as garbage would have been unthinkable to the people who paid for it, and it ought to be unthinkable to us.