1933: DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

In the top lower drawer of Mama’s white kitchen cabinet neatly wrapped in rubber banded books were S & H Green stamps and Octagon Soap wrappers.

 

They were Mama’s problem. I had my own. I needed silver from Hershey Bars so I could make a silver ball bigger than Theresa’s. If I ate Hersheys every day and twice on week-ends, I was sure mine would never be big enough. Her brother, Tony, knew who would buy it but wouldn’t tell me. Tony was going to sell his sister’s and get part of the money. I told him I wouldn’t give him any of mine.

Maybe my friend, Shirley, knew the person but her daddy never gave her money for candy.

 

From gutters I often found empty cigarette packs that had silver paper in them but they were hard to separated from the white paper they were stuck to. Most of the time I got scraps that were no good and went back in the gutter.

 

Daddy smoked Raleigh cigarettes. Whenever he could find a minute between his patients, he lit one and then, if the weather was right, opened the window in his office. Mama always got excited when a box came from Raleigh. She liked the eight new water glasses and put the assorted odd ones we had been using for a long time into the cellar.

Daddy got her six steak knives. ‘Why six?’ I asked. ‘You are the only one Mama makes fried steak for.’ Daddy’s answer was, ‘Because I’m the Boss.’

 

While looking in the gutters every dry day of the week, plus the better days when it rained hard and rivers flowed down our street to the sewer, there were always great things for my many collections. Popsicle sticks, like little canoes, floated to my hands. Those I saved in an empty cigar box, hoping to get enough some day to get learner skates free.

 

I had another cigar box where I kept my personally licked clean Dixie Cup lids, each with a different movie star. Ginger Rogers, George Raft, Wallace Berry. It didn’t matter too much if I already had the same one. There were plenty of lid savers like me.

 

Wait, I had another cigar box. By the way, I saved cigar boxes too. I got them from the corner druggist’s back yard trash. This one I kept tied with a big red ribbon. It held my bubble gum cards. Talk about trade, talk about shooters, a flattened tin can pounded around a couple of cards made the best kind and that was the kind Robert always had. Robert also had big hands with long dirty fingernails and could span his fingers further than any of us players. Naturally his pile was the biggest.

 

What I kept waiting for, hoping for, was that he would slam his hand into something sharp one day, break all of his nails, and I could get some of my cards back.

 

I never did.