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Old 10-20-2015, 11:03 PM   #8
kthoennes
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City: Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Vessel Name: Xanadu
Vessel Model: Mainship 37 Motor Yacht
Join Date: Oct 2013
Posts: 2,471
Very interesting question. My mother was the daughter of immigrants, one worked in a shoe factory, the other was a night watchman in a clock factory. My father was a rich kid, son of a German immigrant who got here in the 1920's with nothing and by the late 40's somehow he owned houses and neighborhoods and a chain of bakeries and apartment buildings. I tend to think of myself as the perfect example of how class works in the US. Yes, there are definitely class distinctions here. Old money, new money, trust fund kids, and what we sometimes call "white trash" - but as my own family demonstrates so well, I think class is much more permeable here, the boundaries are not nearly as rigid.

One set of grandparents were rich, but we weren't rich - and yet my mother the factory workers' daughter, taught me how to lay out a formal dinner service, so later in life when I was sitting near President Reagan at lunch, I knew what to do with a salad fork, or a demitasse spoon, or to cover a lemon before squeezing so as not to squirt my table companions. How to tie a bow tie. Cuff links. To open doors for ladies. No white pants after Labor Day.

I grew up in a nasty factory town in Connecticut, my wife is a farm girl from Wisconsin whose parents' first farmhouse in the 1970's had a partial dirt floor - and now we live in a ridiculously large, beautiful house, we sail transatlantic trips on the Queen Mary, and we just motored our big new boat from Newport to New York last summer along Long Island and the Connecticut shore. So yes, there are definitely class distinctions, but work hard and behave yourself and make good choices and the boundaries are still gloriously flexible.
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