When Kids Had Jobs

Sacked Potatoes at four years old: 
When I was quite young my parents had a general store in rural Nebraska.  Needing a few cents for a soda I ask if there was any work I could do.  They showed me how to weigh out 10 pounds of potatoes in a paper sack and would pay me 1 cent per sack.  They were surprised when they found I had filled over ten sacks.


Tended Our Motel:

When I was between eight and ten years old we had a motel in Southern Oregon where I helped my parents by showing the rooms, checking in guests, carrying their bags, cleaning the rooms and making the beds with 'hospital' corners.

Picked Blackberries and Hops:

During the summers a friend and I picked and sold blackberries door to door.  Another time we went with his mother to pick hops in the field along with transient adults.  I was allergic to the vines but we stayed with it and made between one and two dollars a day.  It was there that I first experienced seeing two men in a fist fight.

Set Pins, Collected Scrap and More:

During my fifth and sixth grades I set pins in a bowling alley for 5 cents a line.  The evening leagues had five  players bowling three games so I could make 75 cents.  Soon I learned to set two alleys at a time and doubled my earnings.  If I set both early and late leagues I could earn $3.00 plus tips.  All this was not without risks as sometimes pins would fly out of the pit and through a window.  Once I was tired, let my feet drop a little and had a pin hit me in the head.  The manager took me to the hospital and I checked out OK.  Some friends would help unload cream cans from the truck at the creamery and earned some cash.  The Korean war was on so we would collect scrap metal to sell to the junk yard.  I also had a small route selling Grit magazine on Friday afternoon, making a penny a copy.

Full Time Summer Farm Work and Other Jobs:

My seventh, eighth and ninth grades found me with paper routes, working at the swimming pool, mowing lawns, scooping snow and even working a couple of weeks on local farms as well as my parents store.  The rest of my high school years were more of the same with the summers working full time on a farm.  We worked 12 hours a day with lunch provided, six days a week for $25.00 a week.  During my last summer our high school building burned and I got to play fireman and take a hose inside.  Before we were called out I could see the hallway wall bowed in about 6 inches.  These jobs got me a 1949 Cushman motor scooter ($65.00) and the next year a 1937 Buick Special ($55.00).  I graduated high school in 1957 and went straight to Basic Training at Lackland Air Force Base, ending my youthful jobs.

Conclusion:

I am sure that many of you have similar memories, done without worrying about government regulations and onerous child safety laws.  Doing these jobs taught us about work ethics, respect for our elders, the value of money and prepared us for our adult life.  Today adults deliver the papers, automatic pinsetters set pins and most kids are forbidden to work similar jobs.  I believe WE were the lucky ones, gaining knowledge you can't learn in a classroom.

My "Little Boy's Toys"

Long before X-Boxes, Smart Phones, skateboards and Wii, there were scooters, roller skates, chemistry sets, crystal sets and books filled with do-it-yourself toys.  This was a time before lawyers took the fun and pain out of playing.  As an 'old timer', born in 1939, I invite some of you to go back with me and remember this simpler, and I believe 'funner', time.

Our scooters had two wheels about 8 inches in diameter, no lights, a friction brake and back-up parking stand.  They would take us to school or store and only wore out the sole of your pushing foot.

Roller skates had steel wheels, toe clamps, a leather strap to keep your heel in place and a skate key that hung around your neck on a loop of string.  That key would do all the adjusting needed to keep you skating.  When your shoe did slip out of the toe clamps the skate would ride up your heel and take some skin, leaving you hopping along with one skate on and the other flopping around your ankle.  We often combined an old skate with some boards and a wooden crate to produce a scooter more similar to what we see today.

Wooden swords were made by nailing a short piece of lathe (remember real lathe and plaster walls) across a longer one sharpened with an ax or old butcher knife.  These battles usually ended with little more than a knot on the head and some slivers.  If they did draw blood Mom was usually there with a "Band-Aid" and kiss.  If it was more serious she would get out the iodine that caused more pain than the injury itself.  (blow, blow, blow)

Cooping saws, wood burning sets, hammers and nails were other fun tools for unsupervised craft  projects that we would later proudly present to our adoring parents.

BB Guns and slingshots were about the only things that were forbidden or sternly warned about (You will shoot your eye out!).  Old inner tubes kept us with an endless supply of elastic material.

Before transistor radios there were crystal sets you could order for maybe 50 cents.  They consisted of a little bar with a "cat whisker" on the end that we moved about on a small "crystal" mounted in a piece of lead, all attached to a copper wire antenna and ear phones. When we were lucky we could listen to a nearby radio station.  This must have seemed like a miracle as it used no outside power.  These could be upgraded with a tuning coil of copper wire wrapped around a toilet paper roll with a slider made out of a tin can.

Tin cans were the metal of the day for us as they were plentiful and every basement or garage had tin snips.  Combine the end of a tin can with a wooden thread spool, a nail, a brad and a sawed off end of a broom handle and we could have helicopter blades that would sail 50 feet into the air.  Of course this could not be completed without cutting your fingers on the sharp tin, but we all had a lot of that.

Chemistry sets were the pride of geeks to come.  They contained many elements that are banned in mail shipments today.  We could turn water red, heat test tubes until something burnt and create nasty smells along the way.

As I said, most of this was done with little, or no, supervision.  I guess they felt we had enough 'common' sense to not get too badly hurt, and if we did we would learn a good lesson.  And I was a town kid that envied the farm kid who could do so many more fun (dangerous) things.

Stay tuned for "Kids Used to Have JOBS."

Toys for Kids - Painting the Doll Bed

Painting the Doll Bed:

This will be just a short catchup blog to encourage those who built the Doll Bed to finish up with paint and decoration.  I chose a nice pink for mine and added some flowers to the foot board, followed by lace trim to hide the "Box Spring."  The next step will be to make the Cover, followed by the Pillow.  Stay tuned for more!