Social Mobility

As a child I remember hearing stories about a lost family fortune from my father’s side of the family. I never put a lot of stock into those stories, but evidently they were true. My father’s side was comprised of farmers for many generations. The Owens family owned thousands of acres of land in Kentucky, on which they farmed tobacco and raised horses and cattle. My father, Leland, blames his grandfather’s generation for whittling away the family’s money. Even with the loss of prestige of owning such an abundance of land, the family continued to farm. I suppose it is all they knew. They became good, working class farmers and small business owners, working on their modest-sized farms. But they did own the land which separates them from the working poor. The sizes of the farms dwindled over the generations; my father’s father, Harlan, owned about 30 acres in northern Kentucky. Harlan’s brother Ralph has expanded his wealth over time and now owns about 600 acres of land in Kentucky.

The Owens family continued to farm in Kentucky as far back as my father can recall, until my father’s generation. My father has six siblings, not uncommon in farming families. While my dad and his siblings grew up as farmers, running a small cattle farm and a hatchery, not one of these Baby-Boomers grew up to manage a farm themselves. Of the seven children, all went on to graduate from high school. Four went on to get four-year college degrees and the other three received technical training through the military. Before my father’s generation, there were no college graduates to speak of; there may not have been any high school graduates. I know neither of my father’s parents even went to high school. My father believes the Vietnam War is the catalyst for...

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...rations would not have been able to leave the working class. Since none of my father’s parents or grandparents had an education, they were unable to leave the family farms, even when times were extremely tough and they lost much of their land. However, I believe it was the ownership of land that kept my father’s family from becoming the working poor. Even when they lost much of their wealth, they still had the land to rely on. By contrast, since my mother’s family always relied on other people for their income, when that income was lost, more drastic measures had to be taken (such as sending a young girl to work in a factory). However, the ownership of land only allowed the family to stay working class. It was not until the children started to go to college that they found the Middle Class again. Education simply allows a person more earning power and flexibility.