TEACHING POOR KIDS THE MAGIC OF MANAGING MONEY

by Rosemary Reeves

Why can’t the poor manage money?  Answer: It’s all in their heads.

When I was a little girl living in the projects, my mother taught me that reading a good book was the most wonderful thing in the world, so when I began my first day at school I was excited to learn how to read and write.  Mom never described mathematics in the same magical way.  I soon found out why.  Numbers were merely functional.  Math had a neutral purpose and was nowhere near as interesting to me as a student in grammar school.  

My family was evicted from the projects after Mom got a job, which raised the family income above the poverty level.  Dad and Mom got a house several blocks away after being deemed eligible for a no-money-down, low-interest FHA mortgage.  They still struggled to pay their bills.  Money, or rather the lack of money, was the cause of many of an argument and the scourge of our household.  Words like “mortgage” and “bills” caused anxiety, provoked outbursts and instilled an unhealthy attitude toward money.  

As a child growing up in an environment where money was associated with everything negative and bad, it was best to avoid the subject.  There was also the belief within our family that managing money beyond merely paying bills was solely the province of the rich.  I remember evenings where the family gathered around the television to hear the nightly news.  At some point in the news there would be a report on the stock exchange.  Dad would often make some kind of joke or remark about the stock exchange being for “the rich guys” and what does that have to do with average people?  Likewise, when he read the newspaper, he always skipped the money section and turned to the next page.  

By the time I reached 8^th grade, I learned to hate mathematics with a passion.  That was unfortunate because mathematics and money often go hand-in-hand.  But who could blame me? The students were constantly drilled and tested on useless number problems such as calculating the speed of a train that arrived in Montana from Utah at 4 pm.  In real life, no one but an engineer has to know the speed of a train.  If a passenger needs to find out when his train will arrive in Montana, all he has to do is look at the train schedule.

One day the math teacher walked into the classroom and I felt the usual sense of dread, anticipating an hour of intolerable boredom and imaginary trains arriving in Montana.  To my surprise, she stood at the head of the class and said, “Today, we’re going to do something different.  I’m going to teach you how to write a check.  You’ll need to know this when you are adults because you will have to pay bills.”  For the first time, I felt excited about learning math.

For the next several weeks, she taught us such things as how to open a bank account and calculate its balance after deductions.  We learned how to pay a bill with a check and about bank penalties for being overdrawn.  She pointed out the importance of knowing these things as we pay our rent or mortgage some day.  I was excited to learn it all, because this was useful information that I would apply in real life.  This was the magic of mathematics, the magic of managing money.

In 8^th grade I had already made up my mind that I wanted to have my own apartment by the time I reached eighteen.  I wanted to hug the teacher for showing me all this.  Besides helping me toward that goal, I also desperately hoped that being taught how to manage money would save me from a life of financial struggle, like my parents.  I couldn’t learn from them how to manage money but it was wonderful that I could learn it in school.  Unfortunately, after a few weeks the teacher went back to the same old uninspiring and useless method of teaching math.  When I told her I wanted to learn more about bank accounts, she replied that I had been taught all a working adult needs to know to get by and it was time to move on to other things.

I was old enough by now to realize that most of the people I encountered in everyday life were middle-class and living a comfortable lifestyle.  Since this was the majority, it occurred to me that my mother and father must have made money mistakes along the way ─ big money mistakes.  

One of the biggest mistakes they made was thinking certain aspects of money management were only for the well-to-do.  Earlier I mentioned how Dad used to skip the money section of the newspaper.  When I grew up, I did the same thing.  I turned the page without even looking at it.  That’s because it seemed like a foreign language and on the television news they spoke this foreign language, babbling something incomprehensible about the Dow Jones industrial average and NASDAQ.  This was the part of the news that sounded like babble because I didn’t understand a word of it.  This was the part of the news where you got up, walked into the kitchen and made yourself a snack.  

The magic of mathematics disappeared almost as quickly as it surfaced, as my grades in math could attest.  The teacher who opened my eyes to the exciting world of managing money released me from the unhealthy way of thinking about money passed down from my parents, only to shut the prison cell once more and lock it for good. 

Part 9 of Liddonfield: One Neighborhood’s Struggle With Public Housing

PART 9:  DRUG DEALERS HOLD THEIR OWN MOCK PROTEST

By Rosemary Reeves

If you missed the first 8 parts of this series click on the links below:

Part 1:  A Politician's Legacy, An Architect's Vision

Part 2:  Early Signs of Social Class Prejudice 

Part 3:  The Housing Authority Lessens Security

Part 4:  Councilwoman Joan Krajewski Steps In

Part 5:  Where Did Liddonfield’s Working White Families Go?

Part 6:  Senator Heinz Visits Liddonfield’s “Golden Road” of Drug Deals

Part 7:  UCAN Rejects Mayor Wilson Goode’s Offer

Part 8:  UCAN Has Showdown With Politicians

A week after the seventh anniversary of the 1985 MOVE bombing, drug dealers attempt to use race as a means of creating conflict and divisions within the Liddonfield community.  Following a show of solidarity by black and white project tenants against the criminal agitators, drug dealers also ridicule the tenants by holding their own mock protest.

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The Liddonfield brotherhood was under siege by an invading force of criminal agitators who grew bolder with the knowledge that even if they were arrested the consequences were a joke ─ a few hours or days in jail and it was back on the streets to ply their trade.  Prison overcrowding assured their early release.  The drug dealers had the system in a vice grip and they knew it. 

While Liddonfield’s single mothers slept with their babes in cribs beside them, thugs regularly shot out street lights in the project in order to conduct illegal activities in the shadows.  The frightened women comforted their children when gunfire awoke them from their innocent childhood dreams, rocking them back to sleep when the shots finally gave way to silence.  One day, a towering figure of a man had the courage to ask the thugs to stop shooting out the lights.  He became a constant target of the drug dealers over the next four years, presumably to make an example of him. 

 According to a Philadelphia Inquirer article dated May 23, 1992 by reporter Daniel Rubin,  Standing Up to the Druggies. Long Intimidated by the Dealers, These Residents are Fighting Back, the drug dealers stole his tools from his pickup truck, set his vehicle on fire, dug up his garden, took his dog and sent a child to deliver the message that he would come out of Liddonfield in a body bag. Withstanding repeated threats and attempts at intimidation, all six feet, four inches of Leonard Bartosik seemed to be made of iron.

During those four years, Bartosik made a lot of allies.  On May 18, 1992 drug activists from outside the project joined over 200 Liddonfield tenants who rallied together to support Bartosik and to take back Liddonfield from the drug dealers who invaded it.  They marched through the project, pointing out drug houses.  In his Daily News article dated May 19, 1992, Score One For the Good Guys, reporter Don Russell states “the marchers stopped at Bartosik’s back fence and applauded the quiet man for standing up to the dealers.”  While the majority of tenants stood united, outnumbering the smaller group of criminals, the thugs retreated, delaying any attempts at retaliation. 

After the Liddonfield protest was over the drug dealers returned to break down the tenants’ newfound confidence through means of ridicule.  They did this by staging their own mock protest on the grass in a spot where they did most of their drug dealing.  According to Don Russell’s aforementioned article, Hope Smith of Liddonfield stated, “They were giving each other high-fives, saying ‘Power to brothers, Black power.’ Stuff like that.”

It is interesting to note that during the mock protest, the thugs were reported to have resurrected a slogan from the 1970’s Black Power movement.  Their deliberate misuse of the black power slogan served as a tool to divide the Liddonfield majority along racial lines, thus weakening their opposition.  It was also meant to alienate Mr. Bartosik from his non-white allies.

The drug dealers became aware that solidarity of the many was a problem for them.  To reclaim the project, they sought to split up the majority.  The good Liddonfield brotherhood of close-knit neighbors and friends was multi-racial, with blacks comprising over 25% of the project tenants.  Mr. Bartosik was white.  Those who rallied in support of him were of different races, ordinary people with families who just wanted a safe place to live.  Ironically, the rally took place only a week after the anniversary of the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia.  *

THE MOVE BOMBING DESTROYED A CITY BLOCK

The criminal agitators at Liddonfield focused on tenants who chose to put racial differences aside at an especially vulnerable time, which was the anniversary of the MOVE bombing.  After their mock protest they attacked Bartosik again, knocking down his wooden fence, chasing him with two-by-fours and ramming them through his windows.They were reported to have said to a young black man who witnessed the assault on Bartosik, “Don’t testify.  Don’t die for a white man.”  

According to Don Russell’s aforementioned article, the Liddonfield tenants who marched against drugs returned with walkie-talkies and held a vigil outside Mr. Bartosik’s Liddonfield apartment at 4 a.m. Raymond Harris, President of Whitehall Area Town Watch, was one of those who stood guard.  He told Russell, “We had to do something to give the poor man some rest.”

* MOVE was a black liberation organization founded by John Africa.  The group engaged in back-to-nature communal living within its Osage Avenue row home, whose walls were fortified with telephone poles to render it impenetrable.  MOVE members also constructed a bunker on the roof.  Neighbors complained they shouted rhetoric through a bullhorn throughout the day and night and their composts attracted rats and other vermin.  On May 13, 1985 police attempted to arrest MOVE members who had warrants issued against them for various crimes, including parole violation and illegal possession of firearms.  During the stand-off with Philadelphia police that ensued, Mayor Wilson Goode gave the order to drop an “incendiary device” from a helicopter onto the roof in order to destroy the bunker. 

The device exploded, setting fire to the house.  Firefighters at the scene were instructed not to attempt to put out the blaze during the midst of the gunfire between police and MOVE members.  The blaze quickly spread and burned down an entire city block.  Just two MOVE members survived.  News of the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia spread worldwide and worsened unresolved tensions between blacks and whites in the city. 

SOURCES:

Score One For the Good Guys,  Daily News, May 19, 1992, by reporter Don Russell

Standing Up to the Druggies. Long Intimidated by the Dealers, These Residents are Fighting Back, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 23, 1992 by reporter Daniel Rubin 

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