Word: bobbed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Forresters' story, though, is about more than just real estate. It is about a fundamental shift in the social and economic structure of old working- class neighborhoods, away from the standard of living that Bob Forrester and his wife Carol have enjoyed...
...year is 1979. Billy Forrester, Bob's eldest son, 25, has gone to work "on the boats." He is married, has a child, and is a member of the Inland Boatmen's Union, just like his father. He works as a deckhand, making $11 an hour with full medical, dental and pension benefits. During his last full year in that work, he cleared $27,000 and saved $8,000, nearly enough for a down payment on a small house. The problem is that his company, United Towing, has just gone the way of dozens of other harbor companies...
Today the harbor jobs pay up to $265 a day, which means a worker can make $45,000 to $55,000 a year. But the few jobs remaining are tough to get. As Bob's youngest son Paul, 26, who has had an application on file with the Longshoremen's Union for three years, explains, "They pass out 50,000 or 60,000 applications. They give 3,500 interviews. For about 300 jobs." Paul keeps updating his file, but has heard nothing...
...world looked very different to Bob Forrester when he married Carol in 1953 and began a new life in Los Angeles. He grew up in East St. Louis, where his father earned a modest blue-collar wage as an engineer in a chemical plant. Carol came from Staten Island, from two generations of longshoremen. Neither Bob nor Carol went to college. But back then, lack of a degree was no impediment to swift upward mobility, and for Bob a union labor job was the quickest ticket into the booming American middle class...
...Bob and Carol got there fast. By 1962 they had three children, and they owned a comfortable three-bedroom house. Carol stayed home and raised the children. They had accomplished something else that has always been critically important to Americans: "I'm definitely better off than my father was," says Bob. "We have a nicer place, my retirement will be more comfortable than his." Bob now makes $40,000 as a union official, owns three houses and a lot, collectively worth $600,000, and when he retires will receive a pension of $1,600 a month from his union...