The art of the scavenge

by David Benjamin

“Workin’ on the railroad, a dollar and a dime a day,
“Give my woman the dollar, and throw the dime away … ” — Josh White

MADISON, Wis.—Kids need money.

I’m not sure how kids get it these days. Maybe they just ask Mom and Dad, as payment for playing Little League and soccer, taking ballet lessons, signing up for AP math, promising to abstain from nookie ’til marriage—maybe for just looking up from their mobile phones and recognizing their parents.

But, when I was a kid, I was constantly scrounging for a buck—well, no. A buck was a fortune, roughly equivalent to $9,500 in 2024 dollars. I would gladly settle for a nickel, enough for a Milky Way at Woodliff’s. A buffalo would also buy a package of Topps bubble gum, which was unchewable but it came with five baseball cards and the hope that one would be Warren Spahn or Henry Aaron.
I circulated among scavengers and hustlers, every kid alert for an angle to work, a deal to make, a dime to cadge, a sale to pitch.

(“Hey, Gerald, y’see this? It’s a railroad spike. I found it down by the tracks, Y’want it? I’ll sell it t’ya. You could get a buck for it from Izzy Cooper. Izzy, you know. The junkman. Okay, well, tell ya what. Fifty cents. Awright, a quarter then. Uh huh, right. Well, when’ll ya have it? Next week? Jeez, I dunno. I could sell it right now to Harley Nicks, but he’s only got twelve cents … ”)

Reputedly, there were kids who got allowances. No kid would admit this, for fear that every other kid within scamming range would be bugging him for a loan or trying to sell him a used Timex with the big hand missing. The most frequent dialog Peg, Bill and I had with our mother was about giving us an allowance, just a quarter. Seventy-five cents a week, cheap! Except that Mom, in all our years together, rarely had quarters to rub together. Six bits represented roughly three tips—earned in that many hours—from the skinflint farmers and horny husbands on whom she waited at the Carlton supper club. It might’ve been small change to Howard Hughes but to Mom it was blood, tears and hard to let go.

Sans allowance, my only steady income was dollar bills in birthday cards from grandparents and, in a rare, prosperous year, Dad. Two bucks in annual income wasn’t enough to keep any kid in comic books, Milky Ways, baseball cards and—the big kahuna—the Monroe County Fair every August. Rollercoaster, Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl, Fun House, Penny Arcade, shooting gallery, ring-toss ripoffs, hot dogs, caramel apples, cotton candy and, well, for that matters, pigs and cows and harness races. Every kid I knew spent the year saving up for the Fair.

But where’d we get the money to save up?

Begging was an option best applied to grandparents, rich uncles (if we had any) (I didn’t). More lucrative was scavenging, an activity almost exclusively confined to pop bottles. Before beverages were packaged in plastic, deposit bottles were each worth two cents, paid by the cashier at the A&P, the Red Owl, Shutter’s or Burnstad’s. Or we could take them to the bottling plant. “Market towns” in those days had bottling plants. Ours produced mainly Seven-Up, Nesbitt’s orange and generic fruit pop in several flavors labeled—after our town—“Tomah”.

There wasn’t a kid in town who didn’t constantly scan the gutters, alleys, backyard stoops and Tomah’s two dumps for the glint of an empty. Five bottles got you this month’s issue of “Superman” or “Sgt. Rock.”

Once, along with Bill and our cousins Bobby and Danny, I hit the pop-bottle jackpot. A teenage new hire at the A&P, unaware of their value, started stacking empty bottles in 24-count crates against the store’s rear wall, in the alley, outside! Each crate was a 48-cent windfall. It took days for the A&P manager to notice the glut of empties being turned in at two cents a throw by the same four kids and then to figure out where all the bottles were coming from—over and over again. Until he caught on, Bobby and Danny, Bill and me were tycoons.

In a small town, of course, every kid was an odd-job contractor available for mowing and weeding, snow-shoveling, strawberry-picking, potato-planting, corn-husking, manure-shoveling, whatever menial task that could be fobbed off to an underage laborer willing to work for two bits an hour, or a day. Once, for grandpa T.J., I spent a steamy July morning hauling sod in a wheelbarrow and laying it on a sprawling patch of bare ground in front of his house. When I was finished, my arms caked with dirt and my face gone Buckwheat, T.J. dug a slightly mildewed greenback out of his miserly changepurse—the biggest payday of my life.

I blew it all before sunset.

Odd jobs were an erratic occupation, especially for kids who lacked the entrepreneurial spirit that made P.T. Barnum and Willie Sutton household names. The exception—for whom, briefly, I served as a sort of protégé—was Fat Vinny (about whom I’ve written an entire novel). Among kids, Fat Vinny was so widely despised that he hired other kids as his bodyguards.

The secret was, of course, that he could afford to pay them because, to adults, Fat Vinny was all charm and industriousness. Like me, he lived above a store on Superior Avenue, the town’s main drag. Aware that he occupied the catbird seat of Tomah’s economy, Vinny cornered the franchise on sidewalk clearing after snowstorms for every store from Gillette Park to the library. Depending on the merchant’s gullibility, his going rate was two to five dollars. Counting both sides of the street for five blocks, there were forty storefronts. How could Vinny possibly clear all that pavement after an overnight blizzard, before the stores opened?

He didn’t, of course. I did, and a bunch of other kids.

For fifty cents.

Fat Vinny also had a monopoly on delivering flyers for the drug, dime and hardware stores, whose newsprint sale circulars had to be stuffed into every mailbox from Tech Terrace to the Creamery. When Vinny delegated these deliveries to me—because I had a bike and he was too fat to ride one—I learned the hard way to demand at least a dollar and to get it upfront. Collecting from Fat Vinny, after the fact, was the definition of a sucker bet.

Finally, the capitalist aristocrats among kids in those days were the ones who had paper routes. A paper route—especially if the kid was delivering the La Crosse Tribune, the region’s evening daily—was status. It was an actual job, with a steady income, every week. Three dollars, even four!—a fortune too bountiful to spend. Kids with routes had bank accounts. During sandlot games after school, action would inevitably suspend in the third or fourth inning when two or three players would peel away and go to work. We watched their departure in mute reverence. Always with money in their pockets, they were Everytown’s kid elite, more important to us than a Pony League hero or straight-A report card.

Perhaps because I learned a little about hustling during my Fat Vinny apprenticeship, I got a couple of paper routes—although not permanently. During his summer vacation, I substituted for Freddy Poss, whose Tribune route—the biggest town—had more than hundred stops. One winter, subbing for Kevin Clark, I delivered fat copies of the Milwaukee Journal in sub-zero cold on streets too steep and icy for bike traction. But every paper was delivered. After moving to Madison, I tried starting a route of my own, delivering the Milwaukee Sentinel—until I realized that nobody in Madison had even a passing interest in what was happening in Milwaukee.

Fortunately, by then, I didn’t have long to wait before my ship came in. A year after folding my Sentinel route, I was old enough—at fifteen—to put in eight hours a day, every weekend, at Octopus Car Wash. I was hauling in $1.10 an hour.

I could afford to buy books!