Minding Your Own Business

This is an excerpt (Chapter one) of "Minding Your Own Business" by Raymond and Dorothy Moore

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One Man's Family

I was a member of one man's family who learned about home management with unnecessary pain. We were poignant examples of what not to do. I learned lessons which may have you saying, "Just like me" or "But for the grace of God, there go I." My dad was a wonderful father, a hard worker, and money earner who taught his children how to work. This was a great gift with possible eternal consequences. He was a man of unusual principle and offered such high quality in his business that he never had to advertise. I know of only one place he fell short: He could not save from what he earned.

The C. D. Moores

Dad had lost our mother in the "flu" epidemic of 1918-19 at the end of World War I and stayed single for five years before he married my second-grade teacher. Although she was an excellent teacher, she was as short on economy skills as Dad. The idea of sacrificing present pleasures for future benefits would have been about as popular at our home as a New Age preacher in an old-fashioned revival meeting.

Following the Dream

Dad was a prosperous building contractor whose work few could match in southern California. a wide array of clients pursued him--developers, movie stars, paving contractors, institutions. And he spent as if the future would always be secure. We had new cars every year, sometimes more often, and always with "good reasons." We went to the best private schools, and we always had all we needed to eat and to wear. Always thoughtful of his kids, Dad bought a fine dairy ranch at Selma in the San Joaquin Valley of central California to give them an experience "out of the city". His usual success soon called for more pasture, so he bought another near Kingsburg, And yet another beckoned--a luxuriant grape and alfalfa farm out of nearby Caruthers that was "too good to miss."

Property poor, you say? No, not exactly; but yes, almost! Dad was sometimes earning over five hundred dollars a day from his labor. If all had gone as he had planned, the ranches and farms would have been paid up in two or three years. Or if we had not been spending beyond our needs on new cars, a fine piano, organ, vibra-harp, on building and maintaining a swimming pool, and on and on.

Dad's dream was expanding, and soon his two oldest boys were out on the farm, learning in summers what it means to roll out of bed at four in the morning to massage the milk from a herd of Jersey and Guernsey cows--the best, of course--and to tend the births of their calves. Then we would shovel manure until breakfast, go to the field where in midday we mowed and raked alfalfa behind a choice pair of mules, and after a few days drying time, loaded the hay on a wagon pulled by the same critters. I'll never forget the irritation of dry alfalfa leaves on our sweaty backs as we pitch-forked the hay overhead.

I was the younger of the two, and the stronger, a full twelve years old in the middle of 1928. And much was expected, for Dad wanted his boys to be "rightly-trained." I didn't think much of Dad's dream in those days, but we bragged in our small talk with nearby farmers, and with relatives and friends back home in southern California. We were receiving eight-five cents a pound for butterfat--a payment measure for milk--the highest in the state. And our butterfat content was very high, as should be expected of a fine Jersey/Guernsey herd. Why shouldn't Dad buy more farms? Any good businessman must assess such risks. and why shouldn't these dreams come true?

The Crash of 1929

But my father didn't fully assess those risks. He was not aware of the going-on in the New York Stock Market and its heady "bull" market. The only bull we knew was that great big Jersey that faithfully serviced our cows and gave us some of the best calves in the county. Then one otherwise beautiful autumn morning in 1929, we read in big black headlines that the Stock Market had crashed. This had little meaning to us, for we didn't own any stocks. But we soon learned that when that kind of catastrophe hits, everyone suffers.

Dad came up from southern California to see us every week or so to "check on things" and to assuage our perennial homesickness. On one of these evenings after work, he opened his mail and fell into a rare, deep silence.

"Bad news?" we asked fearfully.

"The price of butterfat," he groaned. "It's dropped from eight-five to twenty-six cents overnight."

Our three farms went down like dominoes. the Kingsburg place which provided pasture for the Selma dairy farm went first. Then the beautiful grape and alfalfa place at Caruthers. And finally the dairy itself, and all those beautiful Jerseys and Guernseys, even their manure, whoe value I had come to know. Somehow Dad managed to hold on to our heavily-mortgaged home in Montrose, but the bank took a lot of his heavy equipment and our new, best car. the equipment loss could have been more serious, except that with the massive depression that ensued, there wasn't much work to do, and when Dad did land jobs, the pay was less than before.

But we all knuckled under. Dad had the kind of spirit that makes great men, great fathers. He was a man of muscle and faith. And our stepmother backed him well. Dad and Mother and we six youngsters lived mostly on potatoes, beans, and "day-old" bread which more likely had aged a week. We scrimped on electricity and gas and put bricks in the flush tank to save water. With no money for gasoline, we walked the two miles to and from school.

For Dad, the most humiliating experience of all was forced bankruptcy. But Dad promised all his creditors that one day, if he lived, he would pay back every cent. He did live, and none of us can forget when he came home to announce proudly and gratefully that every debt was paid. We went out for ice cream cones that night.

It seemed we had been victims of events beyond our control. Why should we suffer for stock market sins? We could also ask why anyone should suffer from hurricane, tornado, earthquake, fire, or flood. I did a lot of thinking when I went away to college at sixteen with twenty-five dollars in my pocket, to work my way through college by mixing concrete and milking cows, this time at two in the morning. There might just be some wisdom in putting aside enough for a "rainy day" and avoid overextending oneself in any kind of credit. People who were not in debt did not suffer the losses we did.

We were just "getting on our feet" when disaster struck again. A cloudburst capped several days of heavy rain in Montrose and Glendale, California; the weather man later said that we had eighteen inches of rain in a little more than half an hour. We lived in the foothills where no one ever thought of a flood, but the combination of forest fires the year before, the soaked ground just before the downpour, and the cloudburst itself brought a flood of water down from the mountains that hit our home at roof height, and left mud up to our piano keys. Fortunately all of our family were saved when we ran to our back porch. All the houses across the street, much larger than ours, were swept away.

So it was back to diluted milk, used clothes, and the general plight of the homeless. I dropped out of college for two years to drive a truck, wheel concrete, fix a brown-bag lunch of wheat bread and peanut butter, and help Dad build once again.

Still we did not learn. Dad rebuilt on the same lot, but his idea, instead of saving, was to defy future floods: We built a solid concrete house. It had such appeal that he shortly sold it at a good profit, and we built another house nearby. There he installed a fine badminton court, a better swimming pool, and new furniture.

College and on My Own

Eventually I went back to college, to work virtually my entire way, for there were no government aid programs in those days and few if any small college grants. My scholarship was a back-strengthening job firing boilers with four-foot logs, and serving an apprenticeship as a "plumber's friend." I managed a twenty-five cent hair-cut every six to eight weeks and meticulously cared for my one cheap blue-gray suit which someone had thoughtfully given me: no cleaning bills, no unnecessary wear. I seldom left the campus, not because of discipline, but for the few cents it took to travel.

And I learned more than science and humanities. I learned something about why and how to set priorities--to find what was really of first importance, and accept it despite my natural appetites or inclinations to the contrary. And I learned a bit about the healing balm of humor, not clowning, mind you, nor idle talk, but studying--and sometimes struggling--to make a happy exchange instead of a harsh one. I believe that this helped us over many a rugged hurdle in administering schools, colleges, and universites, not to mention family life.

One of our professors, Dr. Guy Wolfkill, had a formula for setting priorties that has guided us for the rest of our lives. His only obvious problem was trying to hide the stub of his left arm after he lost his left hand in an accident. Yet working with only one hand didn't seem to make much difference to him. He got more manual work done in his spare time than anybody on our Napa Valley, California, campus; he turned his home site into a beautifully-landscaped garden.

But we were certain that there must be something beyond his prodigious manual labors. And there was. it came out in class one day when he gave us in one short sentence a lesson we have never forgotten: "If you want to succeed at the highest level, you must learn to manage your life by sacrificing present pleasures for future benefits." This, we subsequently found, can and must be applied to every appetite and phase in life: to what we eat, drink, or whatever we do, even to the extent of worrying too much about having every speck of dust wiped from our coffee tables or the floors--and silver--weekly polished. These may give us pleasure, but there may be personal and family needs which far outweigh these momentarily satisfying preferences.

When I finished college in 1938, I had few dollars in my pocket, but no debts! I didn't have all A's as I had hoped; in fact, I had only about a B or B-plus average and enjoyed no academic honors. Yet I had so many good experiences and the prospect of more--including marriage to one of the world's great women--that my shortage of superior scholarship was neither necessary nor surprising, given an ordinary mind and a forty- to fifty-hour work week while in college--extending to eighty hours during vacations.

I was comforted with another gem from a favorite Wolfkill author: "An ordinary mind, well disciplined, will accomplish more and higher things than the most highly-educated mind and greatest talents without self-control." Hard work and self-discipline were teaching me lessons that one day would guide colleges and universities out of debt.

The Nels Nelsons

Dorothy Nelson was waiting for me, already out of college and on her teaching job. Dorothy, too, had learned the hard way. Our marriage united two families who had been hard hit by financial losses. her parents had been prosperous South Dakotans who chose around the end of World War I to sell their large farm and head for California. A Combination of disappointments in the early 1920's, typical of investing for investment's sake and city slickers taking advantage of naive ex-farmers, made the wealthy Nels Nelsons as poor as the once-wealthy C. D. Moores.

Self-Sufficient Farmers

Yet a remnant of their "fortune" remained. They still had four alkali acres clear of debt in the little dairy town of Artesia which gave them a place to start again. The family of six, two sons and two daughters, set up housekeeping in a tent while "Pop" built a house the size of a double garage. Since at the time it was a dairy community, he added a dairy next door which he rented out, and also a service station which he ran in their front yard. Their thrifty Norwegian background stood them in good stead as Mom and the four children grew a garden and raised chickens and turkeys in the back yard. Home-baked bread, milk from the nearby dairy, and produce from their back yard allowed them to live, they thought, like kings. Because Mom was an excellent seamstress, the children went to school in new dresses and shirts made from remnants and didn't know they were poor.

By the time the Great Depression hit, Dorothy's folks were self-sufficient enough not to be jarred very much. In fact, after things settled down a bit, Pop bought several lots downtown in Artesia for fifty dollars each--forfeited by those who could not pay their taxes during the depression--and built houses to sell or rent. During her first year of teaching, Dorothy bought three of these lots, one of which we used to build our first house.

Our Experience

Dorothy had experienced enough of both prosperity and loss to understand the value of money management and has since done a great job of helping me to grasp lessons my parents never did learn. We decided, mostly at Dorothy's initiative, to live on one salary so that we could be well on our way to completing our education and owning our home before starting our family. That settled another matter which often intrudes in home management: Who will control the family purse? I asked Dorothy to be the family treasurer.

I had enough responsibility through the years, as elementary school teacher in California's Hermosa Beach, U.S. Army staff officer and commander in San Francisco, New Guinea, and Manila, city school superintendent in Artesia, teaching fellow at the University of Southern California, college dean and president, university vice-president, U.S. Office of Education officer, head of an advanced study center out of Souterhern Illinois University and the University of Chicago, and finally, directing not-for-profit research foundations. Those successful institutional management years were based on the simple home management principles which I learned with Dorothy's coaching through years of successful personal finance.

Budgeting

For at least two decades we listed every penny spent. Not only dollars, mind you, bur pennies, too--a practice we strongly recommend to everybody who needs to establish some frugality cells in his blood. It used to be said that a penny saved is a penny earned but that was before income, sales, and a number of other hidden taxes. Now a penny saved is worth considerably more than a penny earned.

We budgeted for rent, food, clothes, and tithes, and lived within our budget. We bought clothes or anything "pre-owned" that we needed and which was of real quality. Bargains, no matter how cheap, are not bargains if they do not fill a real need. We saved electricity with sailor showers, cut transportation down to bare bones, did very little eating out, bought little or no chewing gum, soft drinks, ice cream cones, not entertainment. We lived on half the budget of most of our newly-married friends.

Does this sound austere, boring, or overly ascetic? Actually, it became a fun game. We did have a special night out after teaching once a week when we did our shopping at the Grand Central (wholesale) Market in Los Angeles, ate out at Schrader's Cafeteria with its delicious low-cost food and live dinner music in those days, and then went to our graduate class at USC. When we came home afterward, we zwiebacked (twice-baked) most of the day-old bread in the oven and crowded the rest of it in the refrigerator with the produce we had purchased. Milk came from a wholesale dairy outlet and only occasionally did we need to go to a regular grocery store to stock up on staples.

We sensed no deprivation for we kept busy on the job during the school year and in graduate classes at the university. We had an exciting life just getting started, making new friends, doing church and community work, leading a Boy Scout troop, and building and furnishing our first home. And in all of this we learned some more lessons in the economics of borrowing, buying, and selling.

Ownership

We bought our first used refrigerator by paying half down and the rest in thirty days. We bought a new Ford on a six-month contract. We took out a FHA loan to build our first home, sold it for thirt-five hundred dollars when we had to move to Hermosa Beach, and never borrowed again. Not that we wouldn't borrow if we had to, but we determined to live within our means even if the Joneses had other ideas; we avoided debt like the plague.

In one of our most important early economics lessons, the buyer of our first home wanted to relocate and was in a hurry to sell. He apologetically asked if we would like to buy it back for the same price as we had sold it. By that time I was on U. S. Army active duty in New Guinea. Nevertheless, we gladly bought it back , not because we were sophisticated about housing markets, but because we knew the house was a good one, well located, and would provide a home for Dorothy who went back to teaching in my absence. We realized a year later what a good buy we had made when we were offered sixty-five hundred dollars. So we sold it to the delight of Dorothy's folks who wanted her to live with them, worried that it might not be safe for her to live alone.

Today that house would sell for over sixty-five thousand dollars. We learned about quality, economy, and location which stood us in good stead as over many years we built seven more houses in places where we were assigned to work and all sold profitably.

We will talk more in a later chapter about profitably locating, building, and buying. Yet we underscore the principles of early frugality and avoiding carelessness in little things can keep you from the pain of financial disaster in big things. And we add that the big thing is often disheartened children or worse, a broken marriage. The lessons here are for parents, but also by precept and example, for children. Poor financial management can threaten a home and sometimes break it up completely, for financial distress is one of marriage's, and family's, starkest enemies. But the security and self-discipline of a well-managed family is a proven path to domestic happiness and peace.