>>>OTOH, who your parents and ancestors were counts for a lot in what you start out with in the lottery of life.
>>>
>>
>>My father grew up in Southern West Virginia. His father was a coal miner who worked maybe half the time.
>>
>>He enlisted and went to Korea (after the war), came back, went to college, and became a teacher.
>>
>>Then he got into I.T. in the early days of IBM and EDS and became a highly successful project manager.
>>
>>When he got married to my mother, she came from a family that was even poorer than his.
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>>And yet by the time I was born, they were generally middle to upper-middle class. How did my father do that? He worked his butt off.
>>
>>Yes, that's just one story - though there are many more like it.
>
>Yep. And as you tell it, one key factor is that he went to college. How did that happen? The American people decided that those who'd served in the military deserved an education and paid for it. That was an attempt to level the playing field. It worked really well.
>
>Tamar

Yes, but there is more to that story.
In the working class neighborhood where I grew up, most of the men in my circle served during the Korean war.
However, in that circle, only my brother and I took advantage of the GI bill and went to college.
We lost our father when we were very young and our mother raised us, with help from her mother.
Her mother could quote Shakespeare and Tennyson with ease, and my mother read Dickens and Kipling to us when we were small.
I've always wondered if that's what pushed us the way we went.