Page 50 - Firehouse Pond

Down at the dump, I also picked persimmons and blackberries to sell to the

corner grocery store. Did you know that the seeds, if you cracked them open
would have either a knife, fork, or spoon design in them, but not the hybrids
of today? Other times we would go and pick apples and peaches.

As I got older, I had a paper route for both the St. Louis Post Dispatch and
True Grit. The newspaper furnished a cart to carry the papers, but they didn't

think I was big enough to get it over the railroad ties, so they weren't going to

hire me. My Grandpa Oscar Parsons said he'd help me, and he did. I would
haul fifty to sixty thick papers. Grandpa would meet me at the tracks and pull

the cart over the railroad tracks. I also sold our local newspaper on the

corner.

Grandpa Parsons, himself a carpenter, built me my own two-wheel cart and
I'd go with it to the train depot when they were unloading melons. Freight

trains came in loaded with cantaloupe or watermelon. They guys would give
me the busted fruit. I'd take it all, and take it to the house, trim the pieces to
look nice, cover the pieces with wax paper, and then sell the pieces up and
down the street. The sizes were perfect for the older folks who couldn't eat

whole melons. I usually got about ten cents for a quarter of a watermelon. Out
of growing season, I would pick up rags and sell them to interested

businesses. I'd also collect metal and sell it.

I was very good with the slingshot-the best around, in fact. My sister was not
as good. She was shooting clinker coals at me one day (the coal that never

burns completely). We were just aiming at each other's bottom half, but she
hit my eye, and I lost my eye. She didn't mean to cause harm. I made our
slingshots from forked tree limbs and rubber tire tubes.

Once we lived beside a warehouse, four or five stories high with lots of
pigeons and blackbirds sitting on the edge of the building, about thirty-five to
forty feet up there. Grandma said that if I brought her a blackbird, she'd make

blackbird pie. That didn't even sound good to me; I don't know what that is,
or even if there is such a thing. I brought her pigeons to cook and they were
very good- like dove or quail.