Chapter 21

CINDY: Money was always tight. So Linda and I looked for ways to earn some cash for the important things in life like soda pop, playing the juke box, buying comics (with actual covers) and teen magazines, and later on so we could go to the dances at the pavilion on the lake.

We were encouraged to be entrepreneurs by our parents, I have no idea why, except maybe they thought it would keep us out of trouble?

The kids in on TV would set up a stand on the block where they lived and sell lemonade to all their friendly neighbors. Well, we lived in the country, hence no foot traffic, we didn’t have any lemons, nor did we have any money to buy lemons, and we couldn’t count on a lot of “aid” from Mother. She had enough to do without making endless pitchers of lemonade. So that wouldn’t work.

What could we sell? We didn’t have any friendly neighbors drifting by but we did have a fair number of cars and trucks, laden with fishing poles, that passed our driveway heading to the lake to try their luck.

Our driveway was just a few hundred yards from the gravel road that led down to Salerno Bay, a fishing destination for both town and city folks. Joe Urich, who owned the little café and bait shop (yes, a rather unappetizing combo, to be sure), sold worms for 25 cents a can and they each only had about 10 worms in them. We could do better. And we had a farm full of the slimy little critters. Bingo!

Daddy helped make a sign we could put at the end of our driveway that said: “Worms10 cents.” And he showed us how to use this electric stick thingy that you poked into the ground and all the worms would scurry to the top. Just a little digging sometimes. Easy-peasy. We charged 10 cents for a can of regular worms, and 25 cents for a can of nightcrawlers. We filled tin cans that Mother washed out for us (from grocery store vegetables and fruits.)

LINDA: So we dug worms. Picked the best, fattest ones and left the little ones to grow. We filled our tin cans with moist black earth and dropped in our treasures, counting out 20 in a can (take that, Joe!). We put the sign on the mailbox at the end of the driveway and we waited. If you dig it, they will come. We did sell quite a few worms, and started getting repeat customers. The fisherman liked our product.

But, believe it or not, worms need taking care of. If you forgot to dampen the soil at night and then cover them, they dried out and were just little crispy threads by morning. If you put in too much water, they drowned and began to stink. It was a delicate balance. We did it one whole summer – OK, for a month maybe – and got tired of the work that cut into our playtime and swimming in the lake. After all, we had to stay home to tend to the customers. Mother didn’t have time to sell worms on top of her already copious workload. And besides, it was seasonal.

So we saw an ad in one of our comic books about selling greeting cards: “Make Big Money Fast.” It beckoned to us. Music to our greedy little ears.

You had to send in $5 to get your starter kit. It contained maybe 10 individual sampler packets of birthday cards, sympathy cards, congratulations cards, anniversary cards, etc. You get the idea. Each packet had about 5 or 6 cards in it and sold for $2. Wow. Easy money. If we sold them all, we’d quadruple our investment. So we talked Daddy into fronting us the $5 – we’d pay him back!

Our kit arrived. The cards were not quite as nice or pretty as they looked in the advertisement. But Maple Lake didn’t have a lot of options for greeting cards, so this would be a cinch. We cajoled Mother into driving us up and down a few streets (there were only a few in our small town) so Cindy and I could go door to door selling our cards. We’d probably be out of stock in an hour and could go home rich.

Not quite.

First, our sales pitch sucked.

“Um, I don’t suppose you’d be interested in buying some greeting cards, would you?” one of us would say quietly. This was probably me, as Cindy (as usual) was hiding behind my back. People looked at us, smiled pityingly, looked at the cards and said they already had some, or they didn’t have any use for them, and politely turned us away.

Mother had greeting cards for every occasion for a loooong time. We had to pay Daddy back out of our worm money.

Later, as teenagers, with our friend Linda A., we hung out a lot at Joe’s place, about halfway between the farm and

Linda’s lake cabin. (More about her later.) We could play the jukebox with our scant cash, have a soda, sit and laugh at the outside tables by the lake, and just be teenage girls.

One day, Joe offered us a gig cleaning cabins for for$1 a cabin. He had several tiny one-room cabins he rented to weekend fishermen. They had a bed, kitchenette and small bathroom. We would go into the cabin, divide up the work. I always took the kitchen, Linda A. did the vacuuming and mopping, and Cindy always got the bathroom somehow. We made the beds with clean sheets together.

We cleaned three cabins that day. Joe paid us in jukebox quarters. Each one had a slash of red nail polish on it. He told us they were only good at his place because they were marked. Well. (And yes, we believed him)

We didn’t do it again. Not that he asked. Don’t think the quality of work was up to his minimalistic standards. But nobody could say we didn’t try!

CINDY: One summer, we were scrounging around for something to make us a few bucks (we’d graduated from cleaning cabins), and Daddy came home with an offer. Our neighbor, Oliver Provo, who lived about a quarter mile away, had a big field of alfalfa and he needed it de-weeded. So off we went with our burlap bags and scythes and began pulling thistles and cutting the mustard weeds out of the field. It apparently makes cows sick. Oh my goodness, what an awful job. It was hot and sticky and buggy, and we only got 10 cents per full bag, and he wanted them plumb full! We finished the job, but if either of us had ever thought of being a farmer that experience quashed that dream!

LINDA: One summer, when I was 13, Andrea talked me into joining her crew to detassel corn. Now I was barely 5 feet tall and the corn was about 7 feet tall and you had to pull the tassel straight up out of the stalk, not bent or whatever. I had to bend each stalk of corn way down to do that. It also was sticky, hot and exhausting work that started at 4 a.m.! I only lasted 2 days. I’d rather be broke! What a wuss.

CINDY: That winter, Linda began babysitting. I think she was 13. Most of the time I went with her, because . . . Well because I always went with her everywhere! We had a few regular customers. These were not easy jobs.

LINDA: I had babysat Dale, of course, but he was pretty well behaved and I was a lot bigger so I could manhandle him of need be. Babysitting other people’s kids is a whole other ballgame. The Schermer family lived about a mile away and the parents liked to go out every Saturday night. They bad three little grubby kids who always seemed to have colds and snot running down their dirty faces. They were pretty well behaved, but the house smelled funny to me and they always had box elder bugs drooping off the ceiling. I’d try to clen up the kids and get them into bed so I could read, a sheet of newspaper or a magazine over my head to keep the bugs out of my hair. I tried to be nice and do the dishes once but the kitchen sink was full. And when I went to give the kids a bath after dinner, the bathtub also was full of dirty dishes. How many dishes did these people have, anyway, and what did they eat on when they ran out? But they paid well—sometimes $4 if they got home after midnight. I took Cindy with me once for company and help wrangling the little brood, but she was grossed out by the condition of the workplace and never came again.

She did come with me to babysit the Benzschawel kids, though. She was almost the same age as Connie, their oldest, and that was helpful – they played while I tended to the others. Also, no snooty noses, no box elder bugs and no dirty kitchen. A breeze. And they were usually home by 11 and also paid $4.

But by the time I was 15, I had another important job waiting for me and it didn’t pay in money.