Being a rich grown-up kid in old time, and modern, Los Angeles


I've never been rich, and I've never been poor. I've been lucky, always somewhere in the middle. But I've known people who have gone to bed hungry, and slept on the street, and also people who are so rich that they can't seem to comprehend what being poor is like. My favorite story is of the rich child who was asked to describe a poor family - it went like this:

The daddy was poor, the mommy was poor, the children were poor, the maid was poor, the chauffeur was poor...

And while that's an exaggeration, it's not too far off from reality of the rich kids that I saw in Los Angeles, even ones as old as I was (and I'm in 23 in that photo, which was taken in Beverly Hills, by the way). Yeah, I'm just posing, I wasn't a rich kid. My experience is that people who have more money than they know what to do with pose to be poor, whereas people like me pose to be rich. Their Ferrari may be last year's model, which they want you to know. I was always trying to convince people that I could afford a genuine "Members Only" jacket!

All of this popped into my head yesterday when I watched a TikTok of a celebrity explaining to his children that they weren't rich, HE was rich. And I've seen a lot of that - children born into the type of wealth that an average person like me can hardly imagine. Living in a mansion on a large estate, owning your own pony at 11, getting your first Ferrari at 18. If your parents are multimillionaires, why not? You could wake up one day and your parents could stop buying you stuff, maybe to build your character, but that doesn't happen very often. I don't have any kids myself, but I can't imagine just turning my back on them like that.

I've always enjoyed sports cars, and I was always aware of them in the area of Los Angeles where I lived and worked in the 1980s, the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. To the south of me was Malibu, to the east was Calabasas, and there were a LOT of exotic sports cars driving around. I always enjoyed driving along the canyons, like Topanga, and I often wondered how many expensive sports cars were down there at the bottom, having gone over the edge by inexperienced drivers.

In a long life, the one thing that I've learned is that people are people. Rich or poor, it really doesn't matter. I'm glad to have seen both, and I'm glad to be somewhere in the middle.

Image at the top of this post: In front of the Ferrari dealership in 1981, 9134 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California.

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