Bad Economy

I wouldn't say we were poor when I was growing up. I mean, I didn't HAVE to share underwear with my two brothers. It just made things easier if you weren't too picky when it was getting close to laundry day.

Mostly I didn't think we were poor because we had about as much money as everyone around us. That's what happens when you live a peaceful little community where the biggest industry is growing sugar beets. There isn't a lot of opportunity to make money.

However, my mom did a good job of providing us with a few ways to supplement our allowance. Once in a while we could get paid to help with the ironing. The going rate was ten cents for a pillowcase and two handkerchiefs for a nickel.

(For the record, I've been married for twenty years and I'm not sure my wife knows it's POSSIBLE to iron either pillowcases or handkerchiefs. Occasionally she will touch up one of my wrinkle-resistant shirts.)

Anyway, we could've had a handkerchief in every pocket and you still wouldn't have enough money to buy anything really good. If you wanted the big money you had to wait until Fall and go to the county fair.

At the fair you could display all of your best hand-made kid junk and hopefully win a ribbon (which you didn't care about) and a cash prize (which you would think about constantly while looking through mail-order toy catalogs). A white ribbon paid $1, a red ribbon paid $3, and best of all was the blue ribbon, worth $5. If you prepared carefully and hauled enough of your priceless treasures down there, you could come home with the equivalent of over 100 ironed pillowcases.

What kind of things did we take to the fair? Sometimes it was paint-by-numbers "art". Once it was a batch of snickerdoodles (when my mom was teaching a 4-H cooking class, story for another day). But most of the time it was models.

Model cars, model airplanes, model ships. If it was some kind of vehicle and required a LOT of assembly, we wanted it. My older brother once built a model of the original Starship Enterprise. (He wouldn't let us touch it, but we were allowed supervised looking.)

When you're building models with an eye toward the blue ribbon, you really have to pay attention to the details. That means no glue smeared across the windshield and don't skimp on the paint. By the time I got to junior high I had a whole box full of tiny Testors paint bottles. The highlight of any trip to the drugstore was finding a really cool paint color, like metallic blue or metallic red or even metallic green. You could never go wrong with metallic.

So basically, our goal as a kid was to spend five or six bucks on a model kit, color it up with ten different bottles of paint, and stick it together with a fresh tube of glue because your last one dried up under your bed. And if it turned out really really good then the county fair people would pay you five dollars, which you would probably put toward buying your next model.

The end came for me when I saved up for six months to buy the best model ever, a Kenworth eighteen-wheeler. It must have had five hundred pieces. It was almost two feet long. I worked on it for months and only got the frame assembled. It was too much model. Eventually I just gave up. I think it's still in the box, somewhere in my parents' garage, unfinished.