When I was a five-year-old kid in the 1950’s my family hit a particularly bad patch financially.   My father had a heart attack and was out of work.  Mom was working a minimum wage job and we were struggling.  I am the youngest, the older of my two sisters was a teenager during this time.

I remember friends of my mother bringing us food.  I remember riding out to the country-side to buy vegetables (lots of potatoes) directly from farmers to save money.  I remember following the spring plowing to gather night-crawlers that I sold to fisherman at five cents a can, money I gave to Mom for food.

I do not remember ever being hungry, although I do recall being somewhat tired of eating potatoes three meals a day.   Try as I might, I could not eat enough mashed potatoes a dinner to prevent the leftovers from showing up fried for breakfast.

Mom always found a way to feed us.  But one dinner time was a little more desperate than most.  We had chipped beef on toast, without the beef.  A slice of toast covered in homemade pan gravy (milk and flour) with a can of peas mixed in the gravy as Mom’s attempt to add something, anything to add some bulk to fill us up.

I loved it. I didn’t understand why no one else did.   I was five, what did I know?!

We had a family tradition in which on your birthday, you got to pick the menu for the family meal and the flavors of cake and frosting.  My choices were always, and long after we could afford real food,  chipped beef on toast, without the beef (but with peas) and German chocolate cake.   So once a year, and only once a year, I got my favorite meal.  It took me a couple of years to notice my sisters were always somewhere else for dinner on my birthday.  I learned later in life that they didn’t hate the meal so much as the reminder of how poor we were.   But we survived to see better times, although I’m not sure we ever broke into the “middle class”.  And here we are in the 21st century and I still love peas, and Mom for being fiercely creative when she was taking care of her family.