Mr. Write's Page

When I was a kid, we moved constantly. Dad was in the Air Force, and especially in the early years, we packed up and moved often — sometimes every few months.

The pace slowed as the years went by, but Dad still got reassigned regularly. According to Mom, we changed residences 25 or 30 times before I finished high school.

As you can imagine, the details of those moves — the planning, the execution, most of the actual work — fell to Mom. By the time Dad retired, it was no secret that she had reached her limit, moving-wise.

Dad still relished the adventure. He dreamed of moving to a mountain cabin in Asheville, a beach house in Savannah, or who knows where.

Mom would have none of it. She had done all the moving she intended to do.

After Dad died, and Mom was left alone in a two-story, four-bedroom house, we tried to convince her to move to a smaller place. Not a chance. She wouldn’t budge.

As for me, when I went away to the University of Georgia in the 1960s, living in Athens for four straight years was a personal record — the longest I’d ever stayed in the same place in my life.

Some people spend their entire lives in the same place. My grandfather Frank, for example, was born at home — the Byrd family home in Suwanee, Georgia.

Frank lived in that same house well into adulthood. After he married my grandmother Leila, he built a house for the two of them across the road from the Byrd place. And he lived there contentedly for the rest of his life.

Why am I droning on about houses and moving? The subject came to mind because of the contrast between the awful conditions in the job and housing markets these days and my own employment and house-buying experience in better times.

Consider the following facts from my young adulthood, and ask yourself if anything remotely like this could happen today…

In 1972, I finally had a bellyful of working among the jackals at the Georgia State Capitol, so I resigned my position, and we moved to Fort Lauderdale.

I had no particular job prospects down there. We knew the city because Deanna’s stepdad, Roy Miller, lived there. We simply packed up our apartment in Atlanta, piled the kids in the car, and moved.

For a while, we stayed with Roy. I got busy looking for work, and before long, I was hired as a copywriter at a small advertising agency in nearby Deerfield Beach.

Shortly after that, we bought a house in Sunrise, one of the ‘burbs for non-millionaires. It was our first house.

At the time, my attitude was that a job and a paycheck would materialize soon enough. All I had to do was pound the pavement until it happened. And it did.

That was the bank’s attitude, too. Okay, so I was new to town and new on the job. But we seemed to be upstanding folks, and we had a modest amount of savings. Why NOT give me a mortgage? So they did.

In 1979, seven years later, the process repeated itself.

By then, the ad agency had folded. For a few years, I had been working at a local Chamber of Commerce as the public and governmental affairs guy. It was honest and interesting work, even though the political types I had to deal with were the same variety of jackal I left behind at the Georgia State Capitol.

But the really bad news was my newly-hired boss. Not only was he an utter jerk, but he had just added an old pal to the staff — a fella with a background in public and governmental affairs. It was time for me to move on.

I resigned — politely, in order to depart with a decent recommendation. We sold the house in Sunrise, packed up our stuff, piled the kids in the car again, and moved back to Atlanta.

On arrival, we moved into Mom and Dad’s basement. I got started job-hunting, and we began searching the northern suburbs for a house.

Naturally, we found a house before I found a job.

This particular house had sat empty for almost a year, and it needed attention. The owners were desperate to sell. It was a good deal in a great location. So, in spite of being unemployed, I applied for a mortgage.

Consider the bank’s choice. I was new in town, and I didn’t have a job.

On the other hand, we were upstanding folks, a typical young middle-class family. The sale of our previous home gave us a sizable down payment. I had a history of steady employment.

The bank assumed that I would find work directly, so why NOT give me a mortgage? And they did.

Almost immediately, I did find work. I took a job in the Advertising Department at Lithonia Lighting, where I worked for the next 25 years.

These events occurred 30 years ago. Could someone without a job secure a mortgage today? Not a chance.