Adventures, Wit & Wisdom

In the fall of 1952, I had been working on a poultry farm feeding twenty thousand chickens. This took two hours in the morning before school and two hours in the evening, seven days a week. On one Saturday morning after I had finished feeding, I was bored because there were not any boys my age living near us and I was seven years old.

Back then they did not medicate boys that were energetic, so I decided I would walk back from the poultry farm down the road (I usually walked through the pasture) and pick up pop bottles. Now, pop bottles would bring two cents each and you could sell them at Wyble’s Store and get some much-needed penny candy.

As I walked along, I came to a long driveway where some people whom I did not know lived, so I walked up to the house and knocked on the door. A lady in an apron came to the kitchen door and as she opened it, I felt a blast of warm air hit me in the face. This meant only one thing; she was cooking on a woodburning cookstove.

I asked her if there are any kids here that are my age.

“I don’t think so, but my youngest is here. “Arthur———Arthur,” she called.

Then a thin, tall young man came to the door and looked down at me and said, “Hi, I’m Arthur. Do to want to swing on my swing?”

There were two swings on a limb of a large pecan tree, so we swung for a spell and talked. Now, Arthur was seventeen or so, but I did not care about the age difference, I now had a new friend.

He wanted to show me his car he had purchased. He told me all about it, though I was not all that interested in a car at seven years of age. I still listened intently.

He said, “It’s a 1949 Ford Coop with a three-speed transmission and a flathead V8 motor” as he cranked it up. “Just listen to that motor purr.”

As we headed back to the house, he said that he could not drive it yet as it cost twelve dollars to register it and he did not have the money. Just then, I looked over to my right and something stirred my interest. There, under the shed, sat a red Schwinn Roadmaster, 26-inch bicycle, and I went over to get a better look.

He said, “I don’t have a use for that bike anymore. Would you like to buy it?”

I asked how much he would take for it. “Seven dollars,” he said.

I went straight home and told my dad about it. He just calmly took a drag off his cigarette and said, “Well I guess you are going to have get some extra work and earn the money to pay for it.”

You see, all the money that I earned working at the poultry farm, thirty-five dollars a week, went to buy groceries and kerosene to cook with and ice twice a week for the icebox. We did not have electricity yet and my dad was a union carpenter and work was hard to find.

I went up to a neighbor’s house and asked if she had any work I could do. She let me cut the grass in her front yard which was about twenty feet by forty feet if I could push her reel mower. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

She watched me closely and when I finished, she went into the house and gathered up all the change she had while I put the mower up in the garage. When I got back to the front porch, she handed me a hand full of change. “Is that enough?” she asked, as I counted out two dollars and fourteen cents.

“Yes, ma’am. Is there anything else I could do tomorrow or one day next week?”

“I will check with my husband.”

“Ok, thank you, ma’am,” I said.

It was a mile back to Arthur’s house, and it was getting late and I still had to feed the chickens. I ran so fast back to Arthur’s house that I could have won the Boston Marathon because I was afraid that he would sell the bike to someone else. I finally arrived at Arthur’s house, out of breath, and knocked on the door. Arthur came to the door and said, “You're back.”

I asked, “Would you take a down payment on that bike until I can earn the rest?” He, his mother and dad, laughed out loud as I handed him two dollars in coins of the two dollars and fourteen cents.

He said, “Sure, and if you cannot get the rest, I will give you back the two dollars.”

I worked at anything I could find: cutting stove wood, picking up pecans, and I picked up all the pop bottles I could find. After about three weeks, which seemed like an eternity, I earned the other five dollars and went and purchased the bike.

After this experience, I had gained a friend and the respect of several people in the community, not to mention a good life lesson. I had made my first acquisition absolutely on my own and rode home on the sweetest ride I had ever had. However, the first toy that I can remember was a small wind-up metal horse and rider that I still have to this day and it still works. You simply wind it up by the key on the horse’s underside and it gallops across the floor.