A Life in Four Colors Part Fifty-Seven

Early on, Susan and I had made a plan: I would take advantage of my academic scholarship at Berry College to get my degree, also working part-time while Susan worked full-time. Once I completed my degree, I would get a job and work full-time while Susan would go back to school.

Susan always said that going back to school seemed like an impossible dream. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school, but she assumed that would mark the end of her education. It wasn't that her grades weren't adequate--they were. Susan was brilliant, in fact. But her family had pressured her to take a job as soon as possible to add to the family's meager income, and she acquiesced, going to work in the payroll department of the Arrow Shirt Factory. She worked there until my graduation from Berry in 1975, and her paycheck covered most of our living expenses for those four years. I worked twenty to thirty hours a week to supplement our income, but I earned less  per hour than she did. Nevertheless, we had a plan, and we were going to make it work.

The spring quarter of 1975 (Berry was on the quarter system then, not the semester system) presented us with a  major challenge. I had decided that I wanted to be a teacher, and part of that process required that I student teach for a quarter. Berry College did not allow its student teachers to work while actively student teaching, which meant that we were going to have to get by for twelve weeks with only Susan's income.

Susan and I were always planners, and that's what saved us. Beginning in September before I started student teaching in March, we cut our "fun budget" to almost nothing, squirreling away all the cash we might have spent on comics, books, and record albums. We limited ourselves to only one modest Christmas present for the other. We curtailed our usual trips to Cumberland Mall in Marietta. The frugal living paid off: by the time the spring quarter began, we actually had saved enough money to get us through on Susan's income until the fall, when I would start teaching.

Two things altered our plans--one good and one bad.

The good thing? It turned out that, since I had a teaching contract to start in mid-August, few employers were looking to hire me in mid-June (after I graduated from Berry) for an eight-week period. At the time, Georgia' unemployment law allowed me to receive a modest unemployment check every week for that eight-week period. I had no idea that was possible; it was my faculty advisor at Berry who had suggested I check into it. My unemployment was only $54 a week--but that was $54 a week we hadn't expected to have. We thought we were rich!

Thankfully, we didn't spend all that money. Our first big expenditure that summer was the lumber necessary for me to build a set of bookshelves for our living room. They were humble bookshelves, built meticulously to a plan that allotted so many shelves for standard sized hardcovers, so many for paperbacks, and so many for oversized books. The two units were four feet wide; one was eight feet tall, the other four feet tall. (That allowed us to decorate above the shorter unit.) I had plenty of time that summer since I wasn't working, so I devoted almost a week to assembling, sanding, staining, restaining, and sealing those shelves. I still have them in the basement; we both loved those shelves, and never dreamed of replacing them. Those shelves took almost $100 for high-quality white oak lumber plus the necessary stain, sealant, nails, screws, and other supplies.

Me sitting in our new chair with our bookshelves next to me

That was pretty much two weeks' unemployment, but we still had six weeks of other checks to supplement our budget. So we decided to splurge again and buy our first brand-new furniture in four years: a green and white clad swivel rocker and sofa set for our living room. The cost was $240, which was almost five weeks worth of unemployment checks. We debated long and hard on that, but we really wanted to replace the worn-out fold-out sleeper sofa in our living room, with its torn upholstery and lumpy mattress, and Susan said both the sofa and chair were just the right height. At only 5'2", she discovered that a lot of sofas and chairs had such deep seats that she either had to sit on the edge of the seat or her feet stuck out awkwardly if she leaned all the way back. We never got rid of the sofa and chair, either. In the 1990s, we had the worn upholstery refinished in a Southwestern fabric; Susan continued to use the chair until 2018, when she finally replaced it with a power recliner that brought her some relief from the disabling pain of a chronic illness; the chair was moved to the master bedroom, where it still sits today. The sofa? It's in the finished basement, where it has been since 2000.)

Our living room looked great (well, it looked great to us, at least)--and we were able to pay for everything without financing. We thought we were ahead of plan as far as our budget was concerned.

Susan sitting in the "just-the-right-size" swivel rocker

Remember that bad thing I mentioned?

Well, what I didn't know was that, while teachers started teaching in early August, first-year teachers didn't get their first paycheck until the last weekday in September. We had assumed that I would get some small check at the end of August, since I would have been working for three weeks by that time.

We assumed wrong.

As I said, we hadn't spent all the money: we had one unemployment check in the bank, along with the money we had saved over the fall and winter to get us through the spring and summer. It was a good thing we didn't fully restore our fun money budget: if we had, September 1975 would have been the first month in our married lives when we would have had to ask my parents to loan us money for living expenses--something we really didn't want to do, even though my parents would have undoubtedly helped us out with a loan.

I never forgot the dismay I felt when I learned that I would not get a check for seven and a half weeks after I started teaching. (Years later, when I became the guy who wrote the paychecks for Dr. No's Comics & Games, I said I would never make my employees face that sort of dismay. I have always paid my employees without a weekly hold-back, distributing paychecks on Monday that included all hours worked through the Sunday one day earlier. I still do that today; I don't want any co-worker at my store to struggle to cover the bills while waiting for a paycheck for work done a week earlier.)

We learned about the value of budgeting. We developed spaghetti and meat sauce recipes with double the spaghetti and a little less meat sauce. Our homemade soups were a little thinner. Our homemade chili had a lot more beans in it. We became regular shoppers at the Sunbeam Bread day-old outlet store in Cedartown. But we got through. And we were ready to begin phase two of our plan when Susan was accepted in Coosa Valley Tech's data processing program in September.