?What qualities do you most value in your friends?
Luckily I grew up in a loving middle-class extended family, quiet neighborhood and attended small private schools.
Several factors were very important, such as a strong Roman Catholic upbringing, stable neighbors and relatives, private schools, private social clubs, drug-free environment.
Under those conditions one instinctively learns to value people by class instead of wealth, affinity instead of convenience. Class means to me the set of values, example and conduct taught at home and reinforced in school.
Class is something that once solidly established you never lose, even if during the teenage years you occasionally temporarily ignore. It means you can deal successfully with people of what you consider of worse morals, manners or beliefs, but while doing so, you are well aware of the difference.
Class has nothing to do with education or wealth. While living in Hialeah we had a neighbor originally from a small fishing village in Eastern Cuba, reachable only by sea during the rainy season, who could neither read nor write, of very modest resources, who nevertheless had lots of class.
I never had difficulties in making friends, but always chose my friends first and uppermost, of equal class, honesty and compatible morals. Race had nothing to do with it, but no bullies, bad manners or drunks. One important thing to detect is resentment, meaning people who believe they are discriminated, that the world owes them, that don't believe it is their own fault if they are not where they wanted to be, it was something very obvious at the beginning of the Cuban revolution. The friends from my youth turned out to be loyal, and with rare exceptions, remained friends for live.
Friends made later on in live, beginning with the four that were in my class at Fort Belvoir Virginia, Roger Schumacher, Paris Laws, John Wilson and Dan Danford accompanied me to the same destination in Germany where we served together for a little over two years and got along fabulously, but afterward we lost track of each other.
I made many friends in the insurance industry and in church in Miami, later on in the condo where we lived, still later in High Springs, in church and the VA. Most of these were not life-long friends like the ones from my youth, only a few were.
When your friends are of the same class you normally can relax and share experience much easier than with others that are excessively ambitious, of low morals, poor behavior, manners, or otherwise incompatible.
In summary, I look for class, honesty, manners, compatibility of likes and dislikes. I have had good friends that were rich, others poor; wealth, specially if from birth, did not affect people who became my friends, they took it for granted, did not give it any importance, on the other hand some of the new rich tended to be arrogant.
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