A Life Changing Experience At The City Dump
It was a life changing experience for me, at 10-years-old, to find out everything was free at the city dump.
It was a life changing revelation to me when my mom brought home a rusty old 28 inch bike that had been thrown in the city dump. In addition to the bike, was a big stack of new comic books, with the covers torn off, and a partial set of encyclopedias. I may have been all of 10-years-old, at the time. she brought the books home in a wooden orange crate, along with some wheels she also found.
My childhood was affected by my family’s poverty, due to my dad’s coal mine cave in accident. This meant not having a television or telephone growing up, and left me in envy of normal kids that had; new bikes, clothes, shoes, and many other things that we could never afford. Suddenly, I realized all I had to do is fix it up, and I could have a bike, almost like the ones that the other kids at school had.
Being a dreamer that alway envisioned himself as a person capable of achieving any goal I set a mind to. i started by taking this old rusty bike apart with an old pair pliers, and a screw driver. I took all the plates out of the drive wheel hub, sanded and oiled them, and put them back. Next, I straitened the chain guard, and fixed the broken link in the chain. Finally, I sanded all the rest of the parts, and painted it with some old black oil based, lead paint, using a brush my dad had in the old coal shed out back. I guess you could say that this was my very first restoration project, all the way back in 1957!
My interest in junking only grew from there, as I then began to pick up pop bottles, copper, and iron to sell to, old Boney Whites’s junk yard to get some new tubes and tires. Soon, I walked down to the town square to the Western Auto Store, and purchased the tires and tubes, as well as the camel tube glue and a patches kit (planning ahead). With the single nickel I had left, I went next door to the Rexall Drug Store, and ordered fountain Cherry Coke for the long 3 mile walk home.
In mean time, I had been saving metal angle iron so I could make an orange crate into a trailer, that I could pull behind my new, semi-restored 28 inch bike. I also cut some blocks of wood with a hand saw, so i could reach the pedals. Usually getting on this bike, far too big for me as a 4th grader, involved using a porch step to get on, and my full body weight to take off. And I was on my way to school.
After school, you would find me riding through alleys and back streets, picking up junk, either to sell to the local junk yard by the pound, or to bring home to fix, repair, or restore. This all helped my family’s many needs. It is also where my entrepreneur life began, with the attitude that anything is possible in America, if you work hard at it. I saw these broken items, not as junk or trash to be thrown out, but as an opportunity to get a hands on education along with using common sense anything was possible to me.
I also became well read, reading all of these comic books, as well as these encyclopedias, and time spent at the public library. My imagination was now in high gear, working as labor on the farms, along with shoveling snow in winter, and mowing grass with my reel mower i found at the dump and fixed up, I was well equipped for any work that was offered.
Big problem and a shock to me it was shamed and frowned upon by my peers to be a junker. So I soon learned not to share this fact with anyone early on. Small town, small thinking, and as I grew up, as young man, it was hard to find a girlfriend that thought a junker had any kind of a future. My remedy was focus on a higher education, while earning my way silently.