Tag: books

Something New

~ John ~ 2 Comments

I guess the year was 1955 when my Grandfather bought me my first typewriter. I placed it on the desk that my Dad had bought for me to do my school work on and began to learn how to type with one finger at a time.

I loved that old typewriter but I wasn’t allowed to do my school homework assignments on it because my teacher had demanded that all homework assignments be done in pen (Not a ballpoint pen either because she always said, “It is impossible to write with a pen.” She was talking cursive writing of course because we weren’t allowed to print our assignments either.)

But I did find uses for my typewriter. I used it to write love notes to my girlfriend. I even thought about writing a book. But the problem was that it took me about an hour and a half to finish and entire 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet of typing paper.

But within a few months of getting the typewriter, I happened to notice an old mimeograph printing machine in the basement of a local grocery store owned by a friend of mine and he told me that I could play with it.

I learned to type on stencils that the mimeograph machine used and did a mock up of a one sides, one page newspaper.

The store owner was impressed and told me, “If you will put the advertisement for my store on one side of that newspaper of yours, I will buy the paper, the ink and the stencils for the mimeograph machine and I will put one of them into each bag of groceries i sell. People will enjoy reading the little news articles.

I offered my friend a better deal. I told him, “If you will do all that and pay me a penny apiece for walking all over town putting these papers into door handles, I will distribute them for you to every house in this town once a week.”

My friend bought the deal and before you know it, i was printing the paper on Wednesday evenings after school and on Saturday myself and a few friends walked all over the town putting a newspaper into the doors of each one of the 800 houses in the town.

For the later part of this story, the local Business men’s Association picked up the idea and began to finance me and it finally led to the first newspaper in our town in a Hundred years.

So I ended up being a Teen-aged High School student with a newspaper and once the Businessmen bought me a mailing permit at the post office, I had taken on the neighboring community and we had a weekly circulation of 1,400 copies. The story expands from there into a real enterprise but that is for another story another time.

Snake Day At Mel’s House

~ John ~ 2 Comments

Image above generated by GEMINI artificial intelligence… no living or dead people represented in the image.

When I was a kid — a young, snotty-nosed asshole of a kid —I did a lot of foolish things and this is the story of one of them:

Mel and her husband owned a five and dime operation in our small country village when I was about 12 years old and she had a toy department in that place too.

Mel was one of the town’s best gossips.

I am telling you that if she heard something at Noon, it would be complete and totally enhanced by the grape vine and would arrive at the other end of town within the space of one telephone call, amplified and enhanced by all the other gossip mongers in town … a matter of minutes. Pony Express has never been as fast as that gossip delivery service.

But she had a good heart and her son, (Name With Held) was one of my closest play mates.

This meant that I had unrestricted access to all the best that was Mel …. including the fantastically delicious cookies and candy that she made.

But Mel had a mouth on her … she could whoop and holler and cuss like a sailor when she got mad– and she got mad at me a lot because i acted like a total asshole most of the time.

But when times were good, my friend, her son and I would spend leisurely hours laying in front of their television set watching “Superman” or “Dragnet” or stuff like that.

So one day when I was in a bastardly mood, I decided to put a very realistic-looking rubber toy rattlesnake into a cigar box and took it over to the variety store to tease Mel with it.

When I arrived at the store where her and her husband and son also had an apartment, she was in her kitchen in the middle of baking cookies.

When I arrived, her attention was immediately drawn to the closed cigar box which i held suspiciously under one arm.

“What’s in the box?” She asked.

“Ahhh, nothin'” I replied.

She kept wheedling me about what was in the box, growing more incensed with each passing moment that i refused to tell her.

Finally, red-faced and puffing wrath, she screamed, “What’s in that G*d-d**ned” box?

Handing the closed box to her gently, I said, “you had better not open it.”

Those were wasted words.

She did open the box, stood there for a split second, screamed a shrill ear-piercing scream, throwing the box across the room and calling me the foulest possible names she could think of all the time.

“You little bastard,” she raged… “If you ever do anything like that again I will kill you!”

Mel was always going to “Kill” me over something that I did or the other but she never really got around to actually doing it.

Did I mention that I went home without any cookies that day?