Allowances for kids were not part of the culture when I was growing up. My mother and dad never bestowed any systematic financial benefits on me, and I never heard about any of my friends receiving regular payments from their parents.
Even after all these years, I’m still not sure about the economic status of my own family or any of the others in the little paper mill community where we lived.
Most of the men worked shifts at the mill, and nearly all of the women were homemakers. We all lived in small, wooden cookie-cutter houses that International Paper Company built for its workers.
Nearly all of them had a kitchen, dining area and living room on one side of a narrow hall and two or three small bedrooms and a bathroom on the other side.
We could go into any of our friends’ homes on First, Second or Third Street, and everything in those houses looked the same as ours except for the furniture.
The houses were close together on small lots. My mother and Mrs. Martin next door could stand on their back steps and talk across the gravel driveway they shared about last Sunday’s sermon.
Every house had a one-car garage, and I don’t remember any families having more than one vehicle. Everybody kept their car in the garage, because the emissions from the mill would melt the paint on them.
Looking back, we must not have been as rich as some folks who lived “uptown” and had brick homes and two cars or as poor as families on rural back roads in ramshackle houses.
We had enough clothes and plenty to eat from my dad’s garden, chicken yard and bream fishing. And he would usually dig into the pockets of his khakis and give me enough change for necessities like comic books, marbles and BB’s for my Red Ryder air rifle.
But when I told him one day that I needed a new baseball glove, he said I had to wait until Christmas. He didn’t realize that it was springtime and I had to prepare for my career with the Yankees.
When I explained that to him, he asked if I had ever thought about picking up Coke bottles and pecans. Then he gave me an economics lesson on the benefits of those activities.
Starting that Saturday, I would walk on the railroad tracks from Cullen where we lived to Springhill three miles away and look along the ditches on each side of the adjacent road for Coke bottles.
The green, six-ounce bottles that people had discarded would shimmer in the sunlight. I picked them up, put them in my towsack and turned them in to Barrett’s Grocery.
Mr. Barrett, who gave me two cents a bottle, explained that the Coca-Cola people re-used their bottles. Other soft drink companies didn’t do that, so their empty bottles had no value.
After considering the possibility of drinking after somebody who might have had some terrible disease, I quit Coke and changed to RC Cola.
Folks didn’t litter as much then as they do now, and they were reluctant to throw away two-cent bottles. But I could still get a dozen or so bottles every Saturday and started saving for the glove.
Pecan trees grew wild in the woods by our neighborhood, so it was easy to fill those burlap bags with pecans when the weather turned cool and they started falling.
A general merchandise store uptown that sold farm supplies paid a few cents a pound for the pecans. With all that revenue pouring in from coke bottles and pecans, it didn’t take long to get enough money for the baseball glove.
Picking up pecans turned out to be good experience for the future. When I got to college in Natchitoches, there were pecan trees around the football fields where I spent every afternoon.
I gathered up pecans after practices and took them to Johnson Wholesale. They paid more than the store in Springhill, and I used the money to buy 25-cent peanut butter and honey sandwiches that some guys sold in the dorms late every night.
When I had children of my own and my son said he needed a new guitar, I asked him if he had ever thought about picking up Coke bottles and pecans. The expression on his face reflected the wide chasm between our generations.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES