How well off (or not) was young Bill Clinton, really?

[KoKo]

25. Agree, Merrily....

A small store in Arkansas would have brought in a middle class income. And, nursing would have paid enough at that time in that area to be middle class. Maybe his salesman father had a life insurance policy and that gave money for both Bill & his Mom.

There's very little about his father around that I've seen. I don't even think I've seen a photo. But, his father's family may have had money of their own and contributed to Bill growing up. I've not seen anything about that anywhere.

I never thought he grew up poor, but to people in living cities outside the South ...they might have seen anyone from a small town in the South as poor compared to those able to attend Georgetown and Yale.

BTW: The Telephone Company, Banks and Cigarette Factories were a big employer of Women in the South during WWII and afterwards. Also there were family tobacco, produce and dairy farms that provided good incomes to those families who had enough land to make it profitable. I grew up in the South...so that's why I'm passing this along.

Thanks for the research on this because some here may be too young to know Bill's background and may think he grew up dirt poor with a struggling single mom and had to go to bed many nights without food or something.

Like Obama the story about childhood gets lost in the seemingly Democratic necessity of always having a candidate who "came up the hard way" and "wants to make a difference because they struggled so hard" they can therefore identify with the poor and middle class. Sometimes its not quite the way the Campaign Ops present it.