COLUMN: One a Penny, Two Another Penny

By Tobin Barnes 

The penny bandits, among other woes, drove my old man nuts.
    

Soft drinks, back when I was a kid, sold for ten cents a bottle. (I know, that officially dates me as a codger.)
    

Oh, and here’s another stunner from the past: people drank only twelve ounces at a time.
    

Yeah. Weird, huh? It’s shocking that people could be completely satisfied without having to buy the stuff by the liter or the big gulp or the half gallon barrel, for crying out loud. (Man, are we on the downhill slide or what?)
    

Anyway, getting back to the dime pop machine we had at our motel, my old man had given me the profits for all the things I did around the place. Even then, I was making maybe a nickel an hour, but, hey, I got room and board, too.
    

Well, it so happened one day, while I was collecting the take from the tin box in the machine, I discovered these filed- down pennies scattered amongst the nickels, dimes, and quarters. The machine had evidently accepted these maimed pennies as dimes and coughed up bottles of pop in exchange.
    

The pennies continued to appear in the ensuing days.
    

Image via WikipediaSomeone, evil in intent but admittedly industrious on a certain level, was making a nine-cent profit on each penny he or she was “investing” and leaving me with a loss of whatever I was paying Cappy, the pop route man, for each bottle.
    

Now imagine tediously filing the edges off one penny after another to get free bottles of Coke and Seven-Up. No doubt, crime was paying, but one would think an honest use of a person’s time would be more interesting, less mind-numbing and more profitable, although there might be a certain craftsman’s pride in this kind of work.
    

Technically, my old man was left monetarily unscathed by this penny-ante crime spree. I was the one taking the hit.
    

But it came down to principle with him. See, someone was stealing money that could have been his if he hadn’t chosen to give it to his kid. So this was serious business.
    

So the cop was on the beat, but I had to do all the work.
    

From there on it went like this: step one--I had to empty out the coin box several times a day to maintain a clean evidence trail; step two--I had to keep an eye on the pop machine to identify likely suspects.
    

Whenever I was watching TV in the living room, I also had to be looking out the window intermittently to see if anyone was using the pop machine. (Yeah, another crappy job at the motel. How many is that now?) Then whenever someone used the machine, I’d go out and see what kind of coins were in the box.
    

This went on for a couple days until we got a break in the case.
    

One day, a car, containing a girl and a woman, parked horizontally to the pop machine. I was at my post, watching. The woman got out--she was pregnant, which is neither here nor there--went to the machine and started putting coins in and taking bottles out, giving the bottles to the girl in the car.
    

Well, obviously, this was it.
    

I told my old man, sitting there on the couch, and he was out the door in a flash--almost as fast as when he went after the pop bottle bandit. (He was never queasy with confrontation issues.) In minutes he had broken the case wide open and called the cops down for the clean-up.
    

Case solved.
    

It turned out that the woman and the girl were part of a small but insidiously cross-bred network that had its tentacles around most of the pop machines in town.
    

Phew!
    

Vendors, such as I, could now rest easily again knowing that pop machine profits were safe once more.

All ducks are wearing dog masks

"I know, right? Mind blown! :)"

COLUMN: The Crickets without Buddy Holly

By Tobin Barnes Flies were one thing.
 
Yup, you may have read that we killed a lot of flies in a counter-intuitive attempt to improve our motel’s business when I was a kid.
 
Of course, it didn’t do a darned bit of good, but there you go.  This was just another part of what I’ve been talking about.
 
And, heck, those flies were nothing compared to the crickets.
 
That’s right. One summer, we had a cricket infestation of Biblical proportions. Moses couldn’t have called down a greater plague...and we weren’t Egyptians--as far as I know--deserving of the wrath of god.
 
(On the other hand, some powerful fly god might have been wreaking vengeance on us for the thousands of fly murders we’d blithely perpetrated.)
 
Image via WikipediaThe stars must have been in perfect cricket alinement and all the necessities of breakneck cricket reproduction in place, because our motel turned into a Yazgur’s Farm for the mother of all cricket Woodstocks.
 
It was crickets till hell wouldn’t have them.
 
Hyperbole is not nearly adequate enough to describe the multitudes of crickets hopping and bopping around, desperately trying to get out of the heat and into our air-conditioned rooms cozied up next to the tourists.
 
Thank goodness, my old man never even considered the use of swatters like with the flies (“Go out and kill 50 crickets”). Even he knew that I couldn’t be the solution to a problem this overwhelming. It was much too vast for a kid, a man, and that kind of plan.
 
Instead, he turned immediately to DDT.
 
Nope, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was not on my old man’s bookshelf. Heck, he didn’t even have a bookshelf.
 
Environmental awareness was not yet part of the scene there in the early 60s, so he hadn’t yet heard of the eco-damage that DDT caused. Few had. And even if he had heard, he might not have cared as long as DDT was still on the market and legally usable.
 
The crickets were all-consuming. They had to go.
 
So my old man sprinkled that white DDT dust everywhere he thought it might be useful. To be most effective, he tried to think like a cricket to divine where he should best spread the poison.
 
And the cricket portion of his mind told him to put it just about everywhere. After all, any place could be housing a cricket convention, and there was to be no cricket fun here, there or anywhere.
 
As unsightly as it turned out to be, he thought he’d bar cricket entrance by putting a line of DDT in front of each motel room door. And because crickets could sometimes be seen boiling out of any random crack or hole, he poured it down every sidewalk crack and pavement hole he could find.
 
We’re talking a ton of cracks and holes.
 
I sometimes wonder whether my life might end up being years shorter because of all the DDT my old man spread around.
 
No doubt, the crickets lives were shorter.
 
And so was the neighborhood dog’s.
 
Before the DDT was used, this dog came around lapping up dead and dying crickets right off the pavement--not appetizing for us but maybe like popcorn for him.
 
After the DDT was applied, the dog continued to dine--now “cricket au poudre,” perhaps--until we noticed and tried to shoo him off.
 
Too late.
 
We never saw that dog again.   

(Sent by Roy Wilson)

COLUMN: What's the Matter with that Kid?

By Tobin Barnes
I was a killer in my youth.
  
Yup, cold blooded, cold hearted.
  
I killed flies.
  
Man, I must have killed thousands.
  
I can’t say I feel any remorse, however. Both the flies and I were pawns in a bigger game. They played their part, I played mine.
  
The flies swarming around the pop bottles in the wooden crates at our motel were a nuisance that drove my old man nuts...flies, and other things.
  
So, anyway, the flies had to go. Though there were other fairly obvious solutions, I and my swatter were the closest to his mind.
  
That’s why my old man would see me sitting around, doing nothing, maybe watching TV--just like him--and he’d send me out to do something productive instead, like summarily executing insects. He’d tell me to kill fifty.
  
I suppose my old man could have told me to go out and kill flies until lunch or until supper or till the cows came home or until he told me to come back in, but such an amorphous sentence would have sounded like punishment, and he wasn’t trying to punish me. He was giving me a job.
  
Fifty flies.
  
It was a crappy job, but it was a job, nonetheless. There was a beginning to the job, at fly number one, and there was an end to the job, at fly number fifty. It was a job with defined purpose and symmetry, maybe more than many can say about their jobs.
  
I only wonder what the guests must have thought of that little kid out there. Probably wondered when I was going to move up to torturing cats.
  
And after completing my job, I’d come in, get something to drink, possibly something to eat, sit down on the couch there and watch a TV program. Then, oftentimes, my old man would tell me to go out and kill fifty more. Yeah, this job had a rewind button.
  
In my contemplative interludes while waiting for the next fly to land, it sometimes occurred to me that the 50 X 50 X 50 fly carcasses were piling up. And that perhaps new cannabalistic flies were now attracted to our motel beverage area by the dead flies already there. It seemed that no matter how many flies I killed, it never put the merest dent in the problem.
  
I’ve since theorized that flies, like other scavengers such as vultures and sharks, keep an eye out not only for nourishment but also keep an eye out for their fellow scavengers. When they see other flies (vultures, sharks) circling in on a prize, they nudge on over to that area, too.
  
Therefore, it’s my belief that though I was killing flies at a steady clip, the worldwide fly population was merely shifting its multitudes incrementally in the direction of our motel where there seemed to be boundless opportunity, thereby almost infinitely refreshing our supply.
  
Yes, my job was a bottomless pit in so many ways.
  
But, for this and some other more normal chores, my old man compensated me with the proceeds of the pop machine, making me an young entrepreneur in the refreshment business. It was my job to keep the machine filled with pop and change, collect the coins from the tin box, and pay Cappy Ferguson, the route man who delivered fresh bottles. And I kept the profit...yeah...well, to save up for college.
  
Cappy loved to BS with my old man, just like Rocky, the car dealer, so he’d take his break at our place when he delivered to us and spring for cokes for the three of us.
  
Also in the interest of fairness, I have to admit that my old man took his turns killing flies, too, but I don’t think he was ever under the constraints of a quota like me. While having a smoke outside, he’d lean his weight on the hood of our car--or sometimes a tourist’s car--parked in the lot by the pop machine, and reclining like that on his elbows, he’d nail flies with the swatter whenever they landed. He was all wrists as opposed to my stalker style.
  
Unlike me, my old man looked upon this pastime not so much as a job but as a sport with a life purpose.
  
Anyway, things proceeded much like this at the motel until yet another crime spree broke into our summer quietude. I might tell you about it next time. 

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COLUMN: Working on the Fly

By Tobin Barnes
The empty bottles in the wooden crates by the pop machine at our motel drove my old man nuts.
  
Made him hate those same bottles that he at other times had loved and valiantly protected for their two-cent apiece cash value.
  
He hated those pop bottles because they attracted flies in the non-winter months, particularly during the summer tourist season. Tourists meant money, but flies didn’t, so, yowsa, did he ever hate flies.
  
Flies had sticky summer conventions around our empties. They liked to explore the insides and outsides and discover everything about those bottles, whether they had held orange, grape, cola or even cream soda (yuck!). Nope, these weren’t particular flies. Sticky, syrupy sugar of any concoction was their raison d’etre.
  
A goodly number of them became so overwhelmed with the bounty they’d climb right into the dregs of those bottles and dog paddle--even backstroke--around in them, slurping it all up, evidently enjoying the fly life to the max.
  
That is, until they realized it was all too much of a good thing and found themselves drowning a gurgling death of sweet slop.
  
Whenever my old man would show someone a room on the ground floor, he’d necessarily have to walk them by the cases of empty pop bottles. Then swarms of flies billowed up petulantly around them every time, and though my old man hadn’t been to business school, he innately sensed that this just wasn’t a good first impression when here he was trying to get money out of skeptical, tight-fisted Iowa farmers temporarily identifying themselves as skeptical tourists.
  
But heck, I used to think, they’d already been looking at him pretty warily with his wearing overhauls--sometimes without a shirt--and all the what not I’ve already told you about.
  
Well, whatever. No use discussing his Bates Motelesque, edgy appearance with this guy. That was one big non-starter. He marched to his own fife and drum corps.
  
So it came down to the flies.
  
Yeah, flies and dead flies and sticky pop bottles--even I, who could usually care less, had to admit it could be a ugly mess.    
  
Now one solution would have been to get rid of those cases of empty pop bottles. After all, no pop bottles, no flies, you’d think.
  
But nope, that was never even considered because, of course, to my old man’s way of thinking, that would mean people might not return their empties. And that meant that money, at the rate of two cents a pop, literally, would be marching off the premises.
  
But you know, I’m thinking--with the admitted benefit of 50 years hindsight--that most guests would have just left their empties in their rooms, which most of them did anyway.
  
And we could have stored the bottles inside instead of outside. And, sure, some bottles might have been sitting around at times on the concrete by the pop machine, but we could have moved those inside as well when we saw them.
  
Decades later, and maybe even then as a seven-year-old kid, I clearly see that would have been a reasonable solution.
  
But maybe the fog of war clouded my old man’s judgement back then because... well, see, “I” became the other solution.
  
After finishing up with Art James and “Jeopardy” on a summertime morning or maybe a rollicking edition of “Truth or Consequences,” my old man would turn to me there on the sofa and casually tell me, “Why don’t you go out and kill fifty flies?”
  
Weird, you say?
  
Not in the world I lived in.
  
So there I’d go with my fly swatter, out, to kill fifty flies.
  
And, believe it or not, I counted them as I killed them...one...two...three....