Parsimonious behavior

As post-war baby boomers, most of us had parents who had suffered through the Great Depression, and then WWII. They faced the poverty of the 1930s and then the scarcity caused by rationing during the war.

Both doing without and making do were part of our childhood culture. The 1950s were relatively affluent times, but the habits of constant economizing were so inculcated in the new parents of the day that we kids thought starvation was imminent.

This philosophy elicited a lot of practices and even defined some personalities. The rural lifestyle demands resourcefulness and ingenuity. New parts and material are expensive and usually far away, so "make do" is the order of every day.

A friend of mine from a logging family once took a winter course in diesel mechanics from a junior college. He told me later that he didn't think much of the instruction because it only taught how to replace broken components with new. My friend wanted to learn how to repair the parts themselves, but that was beyond the scope of the course.

Another acquaintance once related to me that years ago he was fixing a hayrack, and needed bolts. Instead of pawing around in the shop for hours, looking for the impossible, he bought what he needed. When his father saw the new hardware, he said, "New bolts, huh? Well, this place is way too fancy for me."

Often it becomes so that ingenuity and resourcefulness are priorities, not replacement or repair. When I was in school in the early 1980s, I worked for a swimming pool and spa maintenance business.

Once, while installing a pump, I lacked a certain type of pipe fitting. Instead of driving 10 blocks and paying $1.50 for the proper piece, I spent a half-hour putting four or five fittings together in a clumsy mess.

I thought the boss would praise my work, but no. Laughingly, he said, "You damned ranchers. You spend $20 in time to save $1.50 on the material. Run downtown and get the right thing. Get a box of them!" The incident made me realize the different approaches to work, and learned that "Save money at any cost" isn't good business most of the time.

One of our paternal uncles was obsessed with saving pennies – at any cost or effort. If it took two days of labor to save 1 dollar, it was a good deal to him.

My brother bought a 100 ft. of nylon rope for maybe $18.00. He cut lengths for all the gates that had nothing but twine or rusted wire. The uncle wouldn't have it. He went gate by gate and took all the ropes because he alleged that we were too needy to have anything new, or something like that.

There was no hardware store in Helmville and traveling was slow. We went without a lot of things – not for the lack of money, but for the effort involved.

One summer I watched our father spend two or three days hanging up junk. He pawed through all the messes in the corners of the old shop, and hung up every small piece of iron that could be hung. Halves of ruined hinges, old doorknobs – crap like that. He was satisfied with the work, and out of the hundreds of scraps, nothing was thrown away. That was the point, I guess.

Another uncle announced one winter morning that he was going to spend whatever time was needed to rethread every old bold in the shop. He spent days in the dark, cold shop, rehabilitating rusty bolts.

He was hailed as a hero by the family, although his days and days of labor didn't yield twenty pounds of usable material. The cost of those rusty, pitted crooked bolts was probably more than new ones would have been. But that wasn't the point in those days.

The world has pulled away from the ethics of industry and saving. It's a throwaway world and little is built with future repair in mind. In household electronics, especially, the models change so quickly that it's never considered.

All the parsimonious behavior I've described is not due to financial concerns. It's the way they grew up. And we, their children, still carry some of that culture.

Thrift is always a good practice, but when it gets to be an end in itself and costs more than normal spending, it's time to consider other means or another lifestyle.