A business school of hard knocks

Chapter 6: 1945, Sonora – At five, Betty opened her first business. She admired the ads of the Lucky Strike girls wearing long gloves, short skirts, high heels, and satin pillbox caps. She particularly applauded the ingenuity of the lacquered trays they carried like a personal shelf supported by a strap encircling their pretty necks.

Up early one Saturday morning, she set to work constructing one of those trays from a cardboard box she got from the store and borrowed a belt of Dad’s for the strap. Then she made a little flat-topped cap from stiff butcher paper, mixed flour and water in a bowl for paste to glue it together, then braided a half-dozen rubber bands for the chin strap. While she waited for the pasted flaps to dry, using Mom’s good sewing scissors she spent the next couple of hours carefully cutting out glossy pictures from Mother’s stack of Colliers, McCall’s, and Good Housekeeping magazines.

By midday my sister had set up shop in front of the Sonora Inn, sporting a pair of Mom’s long black gloves and clopping back and forth in a pair of her dress heels, hawking pictures to passers-by, singing, “Cut-outs, cut-outs, two-cents a cut-out. Or get yourself a deal: three for a nickel and you get yourself a steal!”

Within the hour Mom heard from a customer about the new commercial endeavor, hot-footed over to the Inn, and with smoke steaming from her ears snatched Betty by a braided brown pigtail and stomped around the corner, hauling my sister home by her hair, heels dragging and pictures flying, chewing her out royally for embarrassing the family like that.

Betty knew enough not to mention the 32 cents she’d made jingling in her coin purse at the bottom of her white shoulder-strap pocketbook.

1945 • Pinecrest ~ Every summer the family spent a couple of weeks camping in Pinecrest, pitching a tent and sleeping under the stars at night, boating, swimming, and fishing for perch and bluegill all day. Dad came up on weekends. The kids were free as wild finches from dawn until dusk, Larry and Carleen hanging their lines in the water, Betty and Claudia getting lost in the woods, Mom smoking and hanging out with the park rangers. The two youngest wandered around for hours at a time; Claudia often squatted at the base of some pine tree and cried until someone came along and found her. Betty was happily lost all day; the forest rangers found her most days, admired her lizards, washed her face, bought her an ice cream cone, then delivered the shoeless and grimy five-year-old back to the campsite. Mother wasn’t concerned when any of the kids were missing; she assumed they were off somewhere and would show up by nightfall.

Claudia was three the first time she lost her balance and fell in the camp’s two-seater latrine. Betty, who was two years older and supposed to keep an eye on her, ran for the rangers. The family joke was even though Claudia didn’t know how to swim, that’s where she went through the movements. Both girls were fished out more than once. Betty never did learn to swim, but being strong, she was able to haul herself mighty fast out of that stinky hole.

To be continued…