Some Things We Did.

Pop bottle deposits were a source of spending money for ice cream and candy bars, Kayo’s, a chocolate flavored drink, or Nehi sodas. With our wagons, Frankie and I would scour the neighborhood for pop bottles, Two cents for the 12 ounce bottles and a whole nickel for the quarts, but the quart bottles were very rare. Sometime we made a pretty good haul at the furniture factory where uncle Stanley’s brother, Johnny, worked.

I don’t remember how much things cost but a wagonload would get us both a pop and something else at the butchers and there was always the penny candies in small bins inside the glass counter full of smeared finger prints, no matter how much the butcher told us not to touch the glass. I wasn’t supposed to get any of the ones with out wrappers. We’d get our stuff and go around the corner on Huron and sit in the entry bay with two locked door at JP Shmidts. I don’t know why but some times there was chicken feet in there and we got sticks to push them into the street before we sat down and see who could drink their Kayo’s the fastest.

I was a shoeshine boy for a summer or two. My dad made me a box for paste and brushes and rags. It had a place to put your foot up on and a strap for carrying it over my shoulder. I gave a pretty good spit shine for a nickel. I’d set up at the bottom of the metal stairs leading to the el platform over past Checker cab.

“Shine, Mister? Only a nickel.”

Sometimes in the summer with my sister and cousins Janise and Linda, we’d set up a Kool-Aid stand there. Me and Janise and Linda played a lot together. We tried to get my sister to come out and play but most of the time she just wanted to sit around and draw.

Sometimes we went to Montgomery Wards to the top floor to look out the big windows down at the river and the tug boat pushing big barges of coal. I was afraid of the bridge we had to cross to get there and would make my sister hold my hand. In the middle she would shout, “The bridge is opening,” yank her hand free and run the rest of the way across.

I guess she was paying me back for the winter when my nose would constantly run and on the way home from school sometimes when I got mad at her for telling me to quit sniffling and blow my nose I blew it on her dress.