Hard Living On Clay Street (2)

Hard Living on Clay Street
Portraits of Blue Collar Families
Joseph T. Howell

I first encountered this book in 1986. I was in college.. bored one day I picked up a book belonging to my roommate and opened to a random page and read some of it.. It seemed real.. and interesting.. Later in the year he threw the book out, not wanting it anymore.. I picked to book out of the trash and said I would take it...
So I have hauled this book around for 19 years.. I finally got around to reading it...
It is the non-fiction account of a working class neighborhood in DC in 1970/71. It looks mostly at 2 families.. The first is a young family, lots of kids.. dirt poor.. with the daily struggle to pay bills and have enough money to eat.. mostly because the husband is too busy drinking to bother going to work. The family has little structure.. everything is a crisis... They also seem to have a lot of medical problems. Of the 7 family membmers aged 3 ~ 65, 3 are hospitalized, and the wife puts her surgery off until the following year.
The second family is older.. the couple together 6 years each have 3 adult children from previous marriages. The husband, and auto mechanic makes good money, and they are financially comfortable. The drama comes from the wifes 3 children and their marriage woes.. each has problems, breakups, and ongoing crisis.. which the mother worries about continunally.
A very interesting book which could have been written today.. just change the amounts they earned and paid for things... Very little analysis.. their stories are presented for the view to evaluate.
It appears another edition of this book was put out in 1991.. with a new epiloug.. I will have to look for this and see what became of our players.