Mom and dad were both school teachers when my sisters and I were young, but we were a family of six so I'm thinking we were lower middle class. Mom quit teaching after my oldest sister was born, so my dad started driving a bus and teaching swimming lessons to bring in some more income.
In the early 1970s we moved to a small rural town in South Texas to be near my maternal grandmother. My grandfather had passed away and grandmother needed help running the family business. My grandfather was a successful mechanical engineer at GE for years-- then they moved back to grandmother's small Texas hometown and opened a Chevrolet dealership in the 1940s. The business was successful but not huge by any stretch, but grandmother was not able to run it so she turned to my dad for help.
I'm thinking we moved to upper middle class level during this period, but we always lived very frugally. Rented an old two story plantation style house with no A/C for years from a little old lady, and she kept a bedroom in the house and lived with us for years. She finally sold my parents the house, and we/they lived there until the mid 1990s when my parents retired and moved to the hill country. One sister and her family currently live in the old house. It was, and still is, a great old house. I remember having to paint that house with my dad during the summers every few years. He and I would come home from work, (I washed cars, swept floors, and "gophered" during the summers) eat an early dinner, then we grabbed the paintbrushes and painted until dark.
During college I remember my mom telling me to write letters instead of calling on the phone because phone calls were too expensive, so even when they were making good money they remained frugal. I try to do the same with our two teenage boys-- they both work at various jobs. My 13 year old is a paintball referee on the weekends and my 15 year old is a bus boy at a local high end restaurant. They both wanted jobs so they could buy what they wanted without having to ask me for money. I guess they figured the jobs would be easier-- I'm pretty Scroogy.