Dad and I closed up the pool hall one late summer night, noting that we had only accumulated a total of 16 dollars as a result of the entire day’s business. That wasn’t a good day, but it was a good day to float the Piney rather than play pool.
Today there are few 13-year-old kids worrying about family finances, but I really stressed over those hard times when Dad was worried about paying the pool hall’s electric bill. I offered my ideas on saving money. One was the elimination of my regular haircuts. About every month Dad would come to the pool hall before Main Street businesses closed and send me across the street to the barber shop, in a day when Mr. Holder, the barber, thought that if there was any hair within 3 inches of your ear, it ought to be whacked off. If I had had the nerve to be rebellious, I would have had a fit about that.
I’d go back to the pool hall after a hair cut and the old men would all have some kind of smart-aleck remark about how much lower my ears were growing all of a sudden, or how good I smelled. So I told Dad that I figured he was spending about 20 dollars a year on my haircuts, and that was one whole good day’s profit in the pool hall, and an absolute waste of money. He thought I was on to something there, and proposed perhaps having Uncle Roy cut my hair.
Uncle Roy had three sons and if he had taken all three of them to a barber shop, the annual outlay on haircuts for him would have been about 60 dollars. His sons, Butch, Dave and Darb, always looked a little scalped, like me and most boys back then, so none us relished a haircut delivered on the back porch by Uncle Roy. I wonder to this day if I would have had more success with girls if I had ever had hair long enough to see if it curled or not.
Eventually I convinced Mr. Holder, who liked to play golf, that if he would cut my hair free, I would keep him supplied with almost new golf balls I found scouring the weeds around the golf course, which sat up above the river next to the McKinney Hole only a little ways from our home. Other golfer-pool players, like Shorty Evans, found out about that and I began to make some pretty good money finding and selling lost golf balls for a quarter. When you combine that with the money I made in the summer guiding fishermen on the Piney River, you can understand how I could sometimes accumulate a pretty good sockful of money in my secret hiding place. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Dad, but you can see how a man hard-pressed to raise a family in that time might be tempted to borrow a little if he knew where I kept that sock. And I never did think that float trip arrangement was fair. I paddled the old wooden johnboat all day for three or four dollars and Dad got three dollars for renting the boat!
One of those old timers at the pool hall said that when he was a kid, his dad gave him a nickel to go without supper, then snuck in a stole it out of his overalls pocket while he was asleep, and wouldn’t let him have any breakfast because he had lost the nickel!
That kind of childhood didn’t seem to have any lasting affect on him though, as he was fairly rotund and happy. But you could make an argument that he suffered psychologically, since he showed up at every church picnic and ate some or all of everything. He would dang near empty our penny peanut machine every time he came in and would put a handful of peanuts in his soda pop. You could argue he was trying to hide them from someone, going back to his boyhood and those stolen nickels.
It might be good to go back to a time when we could trade used golf balls for a haircut. Bartering worked really well once, in a time when Grandpa McNew traded a shoat for a 1949 Chevrolet pickup, then traded a bushel of potatoes and a dozen eggs to have some neighbor fix it so it would run. Maybe that kind of thing wouldn’t work today in the city, but it would here in the country. I have a lawn mower that I would trade for a good fishing reel or a box of .22 shells.
I never have wanted a lawn mower. Do you realize the futility of mowing a lawn when you live out in the country? Mowing a patch of weeds like the ones that make up my lawn might kill a baby rabbit or two, or mash some whippoorwill eggs or ruin a patch of wild flowers about to bloom. And what good will it do? The whole thing grows back in a couple of weeks just like it was. I’d druther fish than mow. Let winter take care of the weeds!
The above story is a shortened excerpt from my new book, “The Buck That Kilt the Widow Jones.” To get a copy, call my office, 417 777 5227. And read other articles and the story about how the local sheriff’s office tried to charge me with trespassing at a local place on a day when I was 50 miles away! That’s on… www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
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