In other stories I have mentioned that neither Tim nor I ever got a regular “allowance” when we were kids. This being the case, we had to come up with clever, creative, and sometimes devious methods to get spending money.  Most of the time we would “beg” for money from our mother, Ned, or Aunt Lou. We didn’t approach our Grandmother Ollie because she would always give us a lecture about how bad things were in the depression and that no one had any money and that we shouldn’t waste anything, etc. Once in a great while they would pay us for doing odd jobs, but this wasn’t consistent. Another method was to either grab pop bottles from around home of in the ditches along the road and cash them in at Teaco for 2 cents a piece. For a bottle of pop and a candy bar we would have to find 8 pop bottles, which would net us 16 cents. The extra penny would either go for a piece of bubble gum at Teaco, or a handful of Spanish peanuts at the machine at Heckleman’s gas station.

 

Of course Christmas and birthdays were a great source of ready and much cash! Sometimes we would get a five-dollar bill! Five dollars went a long way in those days when a bottle of pop cost 10 cents and a candy bar was 5 cents. One good source of money was when our mother would give me 36 cents for a school lunch. This meant that after I paid 25 cents for the lunch, I had 11 cents left over for a fudge bar (6 cents) and a bag of Becker’s Potato Chips (5 cents)! Ah, those days were great and I looked forward to lunch all morning! This however wasn’t consistent either. The days I didn’t get the extra 11 cents were depressing in deed. I would then beg other kids for a bite of their fudge bar or a hand full of potato chips. The kids must have complained to the school officials because eventually I got the 11 cents extra just about every day in grade school!  I remember one case of the teacher talking to me about begging the other kids for handouts. I guess being a scrounge paid off since it was an embarrassment to our mother to have a kid that looked for handouts every noon hour!

 

What I needed was a steady supply of money and one day I found it! I was nosing around Uncle Ned’s room. I jumped on the secretary desk in his room and put my hand on top of it and discovered a large cache of pennies! Apparently Uncle Ned had the habit of tossing pennies from the change in his pockets on the top of the secretary bookcase (see sketch below). There were hundreds of pennies on the top behind the top molding! Whenever I couldn’t get money though other means, I would get on top of the desk and grab 15 cents in pennies so I could go to Teaco of Heckleman’s and get a bottle of pop and a candy bar.  The source never seemed to dry up! Once and a while there would be a “steel penny” which was minted in 1943. I never saved them, but spent them like the others. I always wondered why no one at Heckleman’s ever got suspicious to the fact that most of the time I’d pay for things in all pennies! Maybe they were but I either didn’t notice of care. I’m sure Uncle Ned never caught on to what I was doing since he never bothered to jump on the desk and reach up on top of the bookcase to check if all the pennies were still there! If he ever did, he would have been really puzzled as to what happened to all those pennies he threw up there!