My wife grew up on a leafy cul-de-sac in West Seneca, NY, a suburb of Buffalo. Her house, like I think most of the houses on the street, was a comfortable split-level (2500 sq feet, built 1954) with a good-sized yard.
Yesterday, at a family brunch, my wife started asking her fifty-something siblings what the parents of various friends on the block did for a living. Her brother had almost all the answers; her dad filled in a few more this morning. I am changing the names but perserving the ethnicities.
Mr. Grimm was a bricklayer. Mr. Wojick was a foreman at the Ford plant. Mr. Majewski worked in a bronze casting factory, as did one other neighbor. Mr. Cobb worked in product safety at Fisher-Price. Mr. Frank was a stockbroker. Tombari sold insurance. Panetta was a meat wholesaler. White was a concrete contractor working mainly on bridges. Carlotti was a dentist (and my father-in-law, an oral surgeon). The Murphys, husband and wife, were teachers, and so were the Stones. Burger was a roofer.
That is a pretty wide range of livelihoods, isn't it? Perhaps it's not so different today. The price of comparable homes in West Seneca today is $179k; metro Buffalo skipped both housing boom and housing bust. There are fewer factory workers, natch. And I suspect that the dentists and stockbrokers probably live elsewhere. The area has had its share of McMansion building, and you can get a castle in the outer burbs for under $350k.
Yesterday, at a family brunch, my wife started asking her fifty-something siblings what the parents of various friends on the block did for a living. Her brother had almost all the answers; her dad filled in a few more this morning. I am changing the names but perserving the ethnicities.
Mr. Grimm was a bricklayer. Mr. Wojick was a foreman at the Ford plant. Mr. Majewski worked in a bronze casting factory, as did one other neighbor. Mr. Cobb worked in product safety at Fisher-Price. Mr. Frank was a stockbroker. Tombari sold insurance. Panetta was a meat wholesaler. White was a concrete contractor working mainly on bridges. Carlotti was a dentist (and my father-in-law, an oral surgeon). The Murphys, husband and wife, were teachers, and so were the Stones. Burger was a roofer.
That is a pretty wide range of livelihoods, isn't it? Perhaps it's not so different today. The price of comparable homes in West Seneca today is $179k; metro Buffalo skipped both housing boom and housing bust. There are fewer factory workers, natch. And I suspect that the dentists and stockbrokers probably live elsewhere. The area has had its share of McMansion building, and you can get a castle in the outer burbs for under $350k.
