The way I saw it, East New York had alot of opportunities for a kid to make some extra spending money.
Of course, most of us got a few bucks a week allowance money from our parents. Obviously that wasn't enough, a kid has gotta have his candy, his ice cream and his baseball cards. The candy's of choice, that is, my choice back in 1959 were Hollywood ( kind of like a 3 musketeer with nuts), 5th ave ( a clark bar with 2 almonds on top), Clark bar ( maybe a Reese,s cup spread out into the consistency of a kit kat), mallow mars ( they came with a coupon to get prizes, it was a marshmallow cup), Lik-m-aid(koolaid but you just ate the powder), Payday (covered with peanuts no chocolate), wax lips ( they were wax lips that you chew very sick thing), fudgethingie with a spoon( tiny spoon you eat the fudge, i have no idea what the name was),
chunkie(raisins nuts whatta chunk of chocolate),chuckles ( hated the red and the black ones, loved the yellow and orange, my friend always took the green one from me), red hots ( hot hot hot),frozen milky ways bars( yep we would freeze them), bon bons ( only available at the movies, filled with ice cream chocolate coated), malted balls ( only a few of us liked these),non pareils ( white sprinkles on chocolate disk) one time i had white bugs on my non pareils grossed me out and i never bought them again, Bonomo's turkish taffee ( you smack it and crack it), junior mints ( soft chocolate coated mints, i still buy them), and thickly salted pumpkin seeds ( so salty), red pistachio nuts ( why red, our fingers got red, our mouths got red), then we didnt like the bad breath fixer stuff but bought them occasionally black jack gum ( licorice tasting), violets (gross), sen sen ( teeny weeny little flat things a mixture of soap and licorice) ,,, and oh I forgot an old favorite PEZ, gotta love pez,,amazing alot of these are still around today. Today I buy Hershey with almonds, M&M peanut, and Kit Kat mostly.
OK, back to making money.The first money maker was making pitchers of lemonade and selling little paper cups of it for 5 cents a cup. That was a young kid job. When we reached 10 years old we became prostitutes ( haha nonono just kidding). We used to go behind the projects to the factories and find stuff they threw away. The glass factory had these semi-circular pieces of glass that worked as magnifying glasses. We would burn our arms with them, as the sun got really hot you could burn other people's arms too, we would sell them to people who didnt want to go look for them. Then one day we found cans of cleaning fluid. A big score. When I look back on it, they were garbage, useless rejected cans. We sold these for a dollar each. We had about 30 of them, that was a huge score. I don't know if we lived in a dumb neighborhood, so people bought them, or maybe they just felt sorry for us poor kids trying to earn a living. Some of us became newspaper delivery boys. we wore a sack with papers and dropped them off at people's doors in the projects. We didn't do the bike thing and throw it in front of houses like in the movies. We were in the projects, it was up and down the staircases. We made two cents a paper. I delivered the New York Daily Mirror. Then we went on to be delivery boys. Mind you , no girls did this stuff, It wasn't chauvinism , Girls were just smarter than us. The first delivery job was a Speedway on Stanley Ave, Henry was the owner, he gave us 10 cents per carton delivered. Can you imagine how heavy that was, a full carton of canned goods, and you had to walk about 2 blocks to deliver it, no bike , no wagon, carry it. A 60 lb 10 year old skinny kid that I was lugging these cartons for 10 cents. I did like riding down to the basement on the conveyor. I think we werent supposed to do that. Then i moved up in the world and delivered for the drug store. There were two on Stanley Ave. Alben, and Good Ray, they both paid 25cents a delivery. more than twice as much money and a little bag to carry. And the people appreciated getting their drugs, so you got a much bigger tip too. Drug store tips were a quarter to a half dollar. Supermarket tips were about a dime. When there were no deliveries, we would fill cough syrup bottles, and coke syrup bottles. Coke syrup was a big drug store item back then, it stopped nausea. Why did they stop selling that, it tasted great.
As we got older we got more industrious. Me, Richie and Red, came up with a great idea. Everyone seemed to like bagel or bialy with cream cheese and lox ( smoked salmon). Kids hated the stuff, we liked hot bagels and bialys but hated the stink of the fish. I love it now by the way. So , the idea was to go to every apartment in 2 projects.over 1000 of them. Well, we couldnt do all of them but we went to quite a few. We took orders for Sunday breakfast deliveries. The usual order was 6 bagels, 6 bialys, 1 lb of cream cheese, 1/2 lb of lox,we may have had some other fish too. like herring or smoked whitefish. We got the money in advance. Our prices were half of what it was in the stores. They were low prices because we just made the price up. We thought it was a great idea, and by the response it was HUGE.
I forget how much money we collected, and we figured on making a ton of profit. So we got close to $400 on our first run. The sad part is , there was never a second run, we didn't want to rip anyone off. We just got too busy, playing punchball, or skelly, or I dunno, we just forgot. We kept the money and enjoyed it. Noone ever came looking for us. I don't think we told our parents. My father was a cop, so he probably would have thrown us in jail. Instead it was our secret little one day business adventure, that had great potential, but turned out to be a one day HUGELY profitable day. Then , I got a steady job on Sundays. I worked at the chicken market on New Lots Ave. near Ashford St.. In the morning the chickens would be loose, running around, keeping in shape. This was a kosher chicken market. My job was to catch the chickens. There were two ways to catch a chicken. One was grab them by the wings from behind. Be careful they scream and can peck you. The other was with this long metal hook. You scooped the legs out from under them. Then I'd carry them by the legs and put them in a cage. When a customer came in, I'd have to grab them a live chicken. Take them in back, to the "kosher neck cutter" theres a name in Yiddish for it, something like Sheichel, i tried googling kosher neck cutter but nothing came up.This guy wore a cap, he would slash the chicken's neck in one svelte swoop, then stuff the birds head in this can, and the blood would drain. Then pluck the feathers in the machine. It was a very busy place with fresh chickens. The chickens didnt get the antibiotics and hormones that today's chickens get. They were tough, fresh city chickens, eating corn and worms, and who knows what. If you were lucky you got them with an unborn egg ( no shell on it) it was inside them. Great in chicken soup. That was an intersting job. Another was shoveling manure and walking horses to cool them off at the riding academy. Lots of good employment for very little pay, but lots of fun.
One day, it came to us, in a dream. Let's start a business. So what better business than a Radio Repair Shop. We got a free room at the Community Center to start our shop. We would go to the junk yards on Flatlands Ave. and take car radios out of cars. That part was fun. Take the knobs off first, then juggle it around and pull it out, the speakers were usually right on top of the radio. We would take a bunch back to the shop. We would get one working so we would have music. The rest would get stripped for parts. We had lots of tubes. There were 4 partners in this business. Yep, it was big business. A couple of us would go to the drug store and test the tubes in the tube tester. We had capacitors, resisters, tubes, speakers, a soldering iron, screwdrivers, wire cutters. We were very professional. We put our sign up and business started coming. Transister radios were making an appearance on the scene, and the big Emerson's that were portables with a plug, and RCA's were fading out, as Sony came out with an 8 transistor radio, small compact and totally cool. Many years later boom boxes came about. Strange how things go in the opposite direction after a while. Business was booming, we had a big backlog of radios to fix. Our major problem was, we had no idea how to fix radios. If it had tubes we would test them all and hope we would find a burnt out one and we were successful at fixing it. Others, we would check things with this ohm meter or something, and occasionally we found a broken wire. I had my first soldering job on a nice little portable. The wires were so small, the solder was so big. I liked the way solder bubbles and melts. So I splash some on the broken wires i twisted together. I gotta say it held really strongly. But the whole radio was covered with melted solder and melted black tape. It was a mess. Good thing the radio had a cover. Who cares how messy it looked inside. Look inside a mouth with tons of fillings, disgusting, but it works. So it was the same attitude, our work wasnt pretty but at least 10% of the time we fixed your radio. Some we couldnt fix. In a month or so, the shop closed down due to lack of satisfied customers. But we learned alot about different colored wires, and how hot solder is. We learned how easily plastic melts, speakers puncture. It was definitely a learning experience.
When I hit 7th or 8th grade, I got a really important job, working in the dry cleaners. I was the bagger. I did some miscellaneous work there also, like spraying the soapy stuff on stains, or soaking badly stained clothes in the 'perc". Perc was short for a long chemical name, that i'm too lazy to look up right now. It was deadly stuff. It came out of the "cooker". It certainly took stains out of clothes. Someone had to shovel out the perc from the cooker everyday. It was like shoveling pounds of ash, like they do on the coal engine trains. The thing is, the fumes were hazardous to your health. But in 1962 nothing was hazardous to your health. So I shoveled. It made me so high , that when i was done shovelling , I'd bump into racks of clothing , knocking some on the floor. What a great job. I also got free dry cleaning as a benefit. The owner didnt know we had 6 people in our family and alot of clothes to clean. When he saw the piles of clothing I brought in to clean, I thought he was having a heart attack.
And then there was Big Bill. Bill was a big black guy with slick hair and sometimes a bandana. He was the presser. Bill got paid by the piece. Some articles of clothing worth more than others. I was the guy who counted the pieces and wrote down how many Bill pressed. if the total came to 120 I would round it up, to maybe 374. Bill loved me. The owners caught a few of my accidently on purpose mistakes and I no longer did that. It was back to bagging the clothes. I would hang some clothes on this metal stand, roll down a bag, rip the bag off the roll, shake it a few times to puff it up and get it right over the clothes, then twist tie it and staple the ticket on the plastic. Of course if it was an opposing Little League uniform, a few extra things took place. Like, stapling the legs together , spitting on the clothes, putting pins in so they'd get stuck. nice things like that. I was the fastest bagger known East of the Mississippi. I got paid $1 an hour , off the books. The job got passed down to my friend Johnny, the Richie, and a few others. I would pass the Cozy Bar ( which was next door to the cleaners) with my mother and Big Bill would say hello, my mom would say " you know people from that dirty bar?" I'd say oh mom that's Big Bill. She would just roll her eyes.
There were other jobs later on, although not boring, sometimes interesting , like working in Pitkin Pawn Brokers ( i said pawn not porn ). The owner would give people money for anything they brought in. One time he gave a guy $5 for a suit with poop in the pants. GROSSSS. Another guy bought a watch that stopped every two hours. The guy refused to go get it fixed. Repair was free. He would come into the store and set his watch every two hours. The weirdest people came into that shop on Pitkin between Osborn and Thatford. Brownsville, USA.
It was fun growing up in East New York, establishing a work ethic. Ahh yes, kids today, have video games much better idea.
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