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.
Member, The Green Mission Inc. Youth Coalition
Casseroles, Coupons, and the Cheapest Store in Town
By Donald W. Marschall, Member, The Green Mission Inc. Youth Coalition
When I started teaching, we raised our family on a schoolteacher’s paycheck, and stretching that paycheck at the grocery store was a serious part of the family business.
Here is something younger people may not realize: when we were shopping in those years, there was no such thing as a generic brand. Today I trust Aldi completely, and everybody compares the store brand against the name brand to find the deal. Back then there was nothing to compare. You could buy anything, anywhere, and figure you were getting the best price available, because the generic label had not been invented yet.
So how did we save? We shopped around. Carol did a great deal of the grocery shopping, and we did a lot of it at the Tempo Food store on South Main, because it had the best prices in town. That was the whole strategy. You knew which store was cheapest, and that is where you went. Loyalty belonged to the price tag.
Carol also worked the coupons. Every week there was a section of the newspaper that came out, and she would go through it with the scissors. Rick helped a little too. His rule was simple: if he saw a coupon for something he liked, he would cut it out. Otherwise he was not going to get it, coupon or no coupon. That is its own kind of discipline, and I respect it to this day.
As for what we ate, I can tell you exactly: macaroni and cheese, casseroles, and Hamburger Helper. Plenty of ground beef and round steak, and ring baloney too. The casserole was the great equalizer of the family budget. You took a pound of meat that might feed three people on its own, and you put it in a dish with noodles and vegetables and whatever else was in the cupboard, and suddenly it fed the whole family with leftovers besides. That is how you made the meat go further.
Rick, as a boy, took great pride in how big a plate of food he could finish off. He came along in 1971 and he was a big eater right from the start, so believe me, the casserole earned its keep in our house.
There is a lesson in all of it that I see every week in my inspection work. The families I grew up with did not have more resources than families today. They had fewer. What they had was the habit of getting full value out of everything that passed through their hands. A casserole is just a way of refusing to waste what you already have. So is deconstruction.