How We Made Money

I have been working on four other Blogs and two web sites, so I haven't had much time to work on this Blog. Here is a link to "Myrtle Beach Explorer" and here is a link to "Is This Your Money?"

My brothers and I found ways to make money at an early age. The earliest “job” I had was selling newspapers. At about 8 years old, Mom would loan me 50 cents and I would walk uptown to the Press and Standard office and buy 10 weekly newspapers. My route was the streets on the way home. There were a few people that were regular customers each week. Some didn’t have the 10 cents for the paper and they would “owe” me. I stopped by one of my Aunts every week and she would usually pay me with a coke. By the time I got home, I wouldn’t always have enough money to pay Mom the 50 cents I owed her. If I had known Don would have turned out to be good at business, I could have hired him to be my business manager.

The next “job” that I can remember was in the cotton fields next to our house. I was about 9 years old and we had moved from in town to the country where it was too far to walk to get the weekly newspaper and sell it. Anyway, I was getting burned out on that job and was ready for a career change. This new job wasn’t the kind of job where we had to get hired. There was a man with a scale and a truck that he kept parked on the dirt road that ran through the field. Anyone could just walk into the field and pick cotton and then take it to him to have him weigh it and pay for it. The first time that the field was picked, we might get about 1 cent a pound for it. Then, as the cotton thinned out from subsequent pickings, it would go up to about 4 cents a pound. I could tell fairly quickly that this new job was what people called real work. Even though it was probably costing me (or Mom) 10 cents a week for me to sell newspapers, I was beginning to doubt my decision to change careers. We soon realized it was also taking a toll on our play time. Fortunately, at this point in our careers, nobody cared if we showed up for work anyhow.

At about 11 or 12, we got jobs setting up pins in the bowling alley of a place called the Rifle Club. It was a private club and we had to have a Social Security card to work there. I don’t know why we needed a SS card. If they withheld any money, it never showed up on my SS record in later years. Back then bowling alleys were only partly automated. After each bowler threw the ball, we would have to quickly pick up the ball and put it in the return chute and then pick up the pins and load them in the pin setter. Then we pulled a cord and the pin setter would lower the pins into position and stand them up on the alley. That was the only part that was automated. We had to do this all before the ball got back to the bowler. So we had to be fast or we wouldn’t be put on the schedule to work anymore. Most of the time there would be enough “pin-boys” as we were called to set the pins in each alley. There was a small step type opening between two adjacent alleys where we would position ourselves when the bowler threw the ball. This would give us some protection against being hit by the pins when the ball knocked them into the pit at the end of the alley. How chaotic the pins acted depended on the bowler. There was one bowler that we called Superman. Whenever he bowled, we feared for our lives. He threw the ball so hard the pins would sometimes fly over the backstop of the pit or come into our protected step area. I remember being hit by pins when he bowled and having bruises the next day. Sometimes, we would be short of pin-boys and we would have to set pins in two alleys. We got double pay then, but it was hard to set pins fast enough to do both alleys. The good part about setting pins in two alleys by yourself was that you didn’t have to keep an eye on the other pin-boy. One night Ron was setting pins in one alley and another pin-boy (it may have been me, I don’t remember) was setting pins next to him. Ron and the other pin-boy attempted to put the balls in the ball return chute at the same time and Ron’s finger got caught between them. I cringe when I think about it. Stuff squirted out of Ron’s finger and he appeared to be in considerable pain for a while after that. What with child labor laws, kids just don’t seem to have those kinds of character building opportunities these days.