Tax-time grimace – and gratitude

Tax time has rolled around once again, and before I raise my anguished voice to harmonize with your anguished tax-time voice, let me take a moment to thank the Internal Revenue Service for a memory that changed my life.

It was 1970, and I was just finishing up my Bachelor of Arts degree at Western Illinois University, about to start a career as a high school teacher. I was married with a very pregnant wife, and Barrington High School, where I had completed my student-teaching, had offered me a teaching job once my degree was complete.

But a thick letter arrived in the mail from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, offering me an assistantship if I would teach a class called “Corrective Composition” to undergraduates there whose writing needed remediation. In return, I would be paid enough money to cover tuition, fees, and apartment rent. With it, I could earn my Master of Arts degree.

In order to accept the assistantship, I would have to decline the teaching job I had been offered in Barrington. My wife, Gail, was fully on board, and the folks at Barrington HS agreed, saying the job would be waiting for me in a year once my Master’s was completed.

That, it turned out, was a lie, but I didn’t know it at the time.

When I got to Wake Forest and sat down to sign papers, I learned that my assistantship came with conditions, one of which was that I could take no other paying jobs while teaching at Wake Forest. And although the assistantship money would pay for my school fees and apartment rent, there was none left over for food, let alone for medical bills for a very pregnant wife.

It was 1970, right after the Tet Offensive of the Viet Nam War, and I was a 22-year-old, having just lived out the last of my 2-S (undergraduate student) deferment. Imminent draft papers loomed on the horizon, so student loans were out of the question. My father was a steel-mill laborer and my mom a stay-at-home wife, so there was no money to borrow there. My wife’s parents had been against our marriage from the start, so that was a dead-end, too.

A Master’s Degree full-ride was tempting, but if the conditions forbade me from taking a part-time job to put food on the table, I would have to decline.

“Wait a minute,” my advisor said, “you could apply for food stamps.”

I shook my head. I would not go “on the dole,” as it was called at the time. My parents had raised me with pride.

The man scoffed. “You think you’re better than people on food stamps?” he said. “Who do you think those people are?”

I stammered, not sure of what to say.

“Look,” he said, “let me explain to you how this works. You have a job waiting for you at Barrington with a BA degree, but if you can show up with a Master’s degree, they’ll pay you more, right?”

“Right, I guess.”

“And you’ll pay extra tax on all those extra dollars you’ll earn, right?”

“Right. I guess.”

“And every year you pay taxes, for the rest of your life, you’ll be giving the IRS those extra dollars that you wouldn’t be paying if you walk away now from that MA degree. Trust me,” he said, “your government is begging you to take these food stamps, because starting a year from now, you’ll be paying them back in spades for the rest of your life. You’re exactly the kind of person food stamps were designed for — someone who needs just a little boost to get over a hump in the road.”

In the end, I took the assistantship—and the food stamps. It was hard, but the hardest part was learning what it felt like to wear the stigma of being a food-stamp person.

You would be standing in a check-out line, chatting pleasantly with the lady behind you, and when it came time to pay, you’d pull out those food stamps instead of cash, and you’d see the veil come down over her eyes — that “Oh-you’re-one-them” look.

That, as I say, was more than a half-century ago. But I will never forget that feeling of paying for essentials with food stamps under the disapproving eyes of people who never needed them.

We were on food stamps for less than a year. I wanted to keep a few stamps as a reminder of where we had come from, but Gail wanted them all gone, feeling humiliated for having to accept them in the first place. I bowed to her wishes, grateful enough that she still accepted me as a sometimes-embarrassing asset to spend a life with.

As I said at the outset, tax time has rolled around once again, and, like you, I wince at watching the government suck the dollars from my bank account.

But — at least in my case — I realize that some of the dollars I am giving them this year are dollars I would not have had in the first place, if my government hadn’t stepped up to support me a half-century ago. Some of those dollars will go to help someone else over the hump to a better life.

And if you could take a look around you into people’s secret histories, you might be surprised that some of “those people” who needed government aid might not look at all like the people you think they’d look like.

If you’ve never been one of us, I’m glad for you. But now that tax time has come and gone, please remember that many of us “takers” have given back so much more over the years, thanks to the help we got way back then.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

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