His family was literally dirt poor, sharecropping corn, wine, olive oil and sheep for a landlord who extracted 50% in payment.

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Most of the time that involved working other peoples' land -- sharecropping.

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My own mother, a beautiful, uneducated woman from a working-class New York family, and my father, a young southern man from a poor sharecropping family who entered the Marines at the age of 17, represented far more to each other than just romance.

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