The Dusty Road

Walking barefoot along the dirt road I watched the dust swirl around my legs. Nothing on but a pair of ragged shorts, skin tanned with small beads of perspiration forming on my flushed face. Eleven years old and plugging thirty five cents into the cigarette vending machine watching the pack of Winston’s tumble into my young addicted hands. Most of my time was spent in the forest swinging on grapevines, discovering caves and leaf fossils in the rocks. Being shot at and chased for getting to close to a moonshine operation. Being washed off nightly and given one bath a week in a #2 wash tub. Laying in bed on a hot summer’s night with the windows open hoping for a breeze to cross over my moist body and enjoying the chill when my wish came true. Finding a pond in the woods my friends and I would go skinny dipping as we shared our secrets and fears. Eventually it would be time to go home my stomach would start to tighten as I worried about what was going to be waiting for me when I arrived. I remember taking my first shower with running water when I finished gym class in Junior High School. A few of my childhood memories do you have some you would like to share?

Nutter,

I didn't have a childhood when I was a child, but am having a wonderful adult liife.

Reachng the sumit of Ben Nevis on Nov 3, 1998 was a highpoint for me.
Going to Euro Disney was wonderful also--I liked it so much I went three times.

Very Good thread.

Nutter,
you have memories that kids today can only read about.

Nutter,

I am curious. When you were eleven years old , where did you get thrity-five cents to purchase cigarettes?

Climbing trees in our yard, riding my bike for miles, walking everywhere, going to church every Sunday a place I loved, quiet suppers unless I decided to make a big thing about something and then was sent to bed without any supper, playing restaurant and school with my dolls, reading when I woke in the middle of the night, loving every moment of school except gym class, riding the train to the Chicago loop and shopping with my mother at Marshall Fields, visiting relatives who lived in much more casual homes than I did, helping my father with our Victory Garden which later became a Peace Garden, picking grapes from the vines on the side of the house, putting my hand in cement my grandfather poured for a sidewalk (and now wondering if my hand print could still be there.)

Alice wrote:

Nutter,

I am curious. When you were eleven years old , where did you get thrity-five cents to purchase cigarettes?

Thirty five cents was very hard to come by. It took exactly 12 pop bottles returned for the 3 cent deposit. For those that do not remember the glass pop bottles the cost for sixteen ounces was 10 cents plus 3 cents deposit which you received back when you returned the empty. For quart bottles you received a quarter. I searched along the road ways and would find them laying in the brush and sometimes I would go door to door bumming bottles from those who never returned them. The yards and houses were scattered and very far apart. Sometimes people would let me use there mowers sometimes gas powered sometimes not and would pay me two dollars for grass cutting and trimming. Two dollars purchased a lot back then. I also worked off and on for a farmer raising tobacco. Five dollars to spend ten hours planting tobacco by hand. Hand picked tobacco worms from the leaves, harvested to dry and helped move to market. Lot of work for a kid ten and eleven years old. Sometimes I was broke and couldn't afford the habit so I snuck them when I could. Sorry I got a little long winded.

I never smoked because I could never afford the cigarettes. Now I find out I could have saved pop bottle tops!!

I got a job when I was sixteen at a dry goods store, sort of a little department store. I worked in the basement in the mens and boys department as well as material, notions, towels and sheets. At holiday time I was a present wrapping, wrapping presents all day, which was my favorite job there. Men's underwear kind of had me baffled at the time.

Carol

Not the tops, Carol, the bottles. I was generally too busy doing housework and watching my siblings to be able to play or get money for doing anything, but I do have fond memories of being able to visit my grandmother. What fun we had together!

I remember a lot of days playing outdoors and riding bikes until way past dark. We played games like pickle, kick the can, flashlight tag, red rover, four square, and a lot of baseball and basketball.

We took the bottles back to the store for candy, not cigarettes! Unless you count those candy cigarettes.

My folks would have killed me for smoking. They were so anti-smoking that they turned off the radio if a smoking ad came on.

Smoking has been found to decrease the incidence of Parkinson's disease.

From my memoir, The Last of the South Town Rinky Dinks.
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One of my first half-grown experiences came in Mrs. Thompsie’s store. I decided I wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes, but the sale didn't happen exactly the way I'd thought it would.

I started smoking a few cigarettes a day when I was fourteen or fifteen, but I had absolutely no way of getting enough money to buy them for myself. (By the way, it's now been many years since I smoked, but I try not to preach on the subject.)

By this time, I was making the daily trip to the store for Mama two or three times a week. One day, it seemed perfectly natural for me to smile my very sweetest Donald Harpe smile, which was ordinarily a pretty good persuader, and politely inform Mrs. Thompsie that Mama wanted to buy two packs of Old Golds today, please, as she had been smoking more lately.

Pretty smart, huh?

Mrs. Thompsie didn't believe a word of it. She refused to let me have the extra pack of cigarettes, and the next day told Mama I'd tried to buy them. I don't rightly remember how I explained myself out of that one, but I know for sure I never tried to buy another pack of cigarettes from Mrs. Thompsie as long as she ran her store.

Bet you didn’t know that back then a storekeeper would open a pack of cigarettes and sell them for a penny each. Only had a nickel, buy five cigarettes. That would last for a while anyway.

Don Harpe said I started smoking a few cigarettes a day when I was fourteen or fifteen, but I had absolutely no way of getting enough money to buy them for myself. (By the way, it's now been many years since I smoked, but I try not to preach on the subject.)

Don: Preach away I was hooked at eleven and continued the habit for 43 years. Tobacco free at last.

Helen said: I remember a lot of days playing outdoors and riding bikes until way past dark. We played games like pickle, kick the can, flashlight tag, red rover, four square, and a lot of baseball and basketball.

Helen: What in the world is Pickle? I know where my imagination goes, but I have a dirty mind. The other games I know about but Pickle is a new one for me.

Ha! I wondered if anyone else knew that game. Or maybe it's called something different in other places.

It's playing catch with a baseball and you have a runner who tries to make it back and forth to home base. The runner gets caught in a "pickle" (in the middle) where the throwers try to get the runner "out." If the runner gets tagged, he becomes one of the throwers and the one who tagged him becomes the runner.

Probably very different than where your imagination took you!

The only thing that comes to mind is the time Hawkeye and me, a couple of streetwise urchins always on the lookout for mischief, decided to join a new Boy Scout troop being formed by Goodyear. All the other members were nice boys from up in Goodyear Heights.
So we went to Camp Manatoc where there were to be events like building a fire by rubbing two sticks together. This seemed damned primative to me, not to mention Hawkeye, so I took a box of matches along and Hawkeye brought a vial of gasoline. All those other saps were rubbing little sticks together while we had flames shooting twenty feet in the air. We won first prize but later in the day they took it way from us.
A few weeks later the scoutmaster told us some boys are not cut out to be Scouts and since we had been Tenderfoots for 16 months without earning a single merit badge we were two of them so get out and do not come back again. We left gleefully, hooting and hollering all the way back down to the low ground's mean streets, our natural habitat.

No one mentioned "spin the bottle."

Re. The Boy Scouts. "Always be Prepared." I guess being prepared for making a fire did not come with rules. Dick's idea sure beat rubbing sticks together. However, what would you have done without matches?

Helen said: It's playing catch with a baseball and you have a runner who tries to make it back and forth to home base.

We called it "monkey in the middle" it was a keep away game. One person was in the middle and two other people passed a ball, rock, what ever you had while the person in the middle tried to intercept it. If it was intercepted the last person that threw the object replaces the person in the middle.

Yeah you were right the game you described about the pickle wasn't even close to where my imagination was taking me.