When I was 12, I got my first paying job.  In Coleman there were two Jewish families, the Handlemans and the Zweigs.  Both families owned dry goods stores, the Handlemans on the southeast corner of Commercial Avenue and Pecan Street and the Zweigs on the northeast corner of the same streets.  Louis Zweig hired me to wash the store windows, be a stockboy, sweep out the store and all around gofer.  It was a two story building with the excess stock on the second floor.  Some of the stock must have been there a long time because the boxes were so dusty.  I earned 25 cents a day.  That is when I got a social security card.  At that time you could not get a social security card unless you were working.  Almost all kids worked.

I wanted to deliver newspapers but you had to be 13 to do that.  When I reached 13, I quit Zweigs and started delivering the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  Coleman had a huge (?) office building.  It must have been six floors with an elevator.  On the upper floors were offices of dentists, optometrists, etc.  On the street floor was J. C. Penney.  Penney’s had the pneumatic tubes that carried sales slips and money to a cashier upstairs and change back downstairs to the sales clerk and customer.  In the lobby of the building was a newstand owned by Mr. Driscoll.  He was the Star-Telegram dealer in Coleman.  It was an evening and Sunday newspaper.

I had saved my money and bought a bicycle.  Newspaper boys had a delivery route.  My covered about ½ of the south side of town.  Paper boys bought the papers from Mr. Driscoll and were responsible for collecting from customers.  If a customer did not pay, Driscoll did not lose.  The paper boy did.  Monday through Saturday I could load all my newspapers on my bicycle in saddlebags and a basket on front and deliver my papers in about two hours.  The Sunday paper was something else because it was so big.  I could load only about 1/3 my papers at once which required me to go back to Driscoll’s twice more to reload and deliver some more.  I recall that it was not unusual for the chain on the bicycle to break.  A pair of plyers, a screwdriver and spare links were carried all the time so the chain could be repaired.

Another person, whose name I forget, was the dealer for the Abilene Reporter News (an afternoon paper) and The San Angelo standard Times (a morning paper).  I quit Driscoll after about 1 ½ years and started delivering the other papers.  The Star Telegram was by far the most popular newspaper but because of the financial arrangements and costs of the papers I made more money delivering the San Angelo and Abilene papers.

I wore out three bicycles.  Bicycle brakes were something else.  The best were New Departure disc brakes.  The brake mechanism had many thin discs which had to be aligned just right for the brakes to work.  The bicycles then had balloon tires about an inch wide and took 24 to 26 pounds of  air pressure. Some bicycles had a tank between the horizontal upper braces with battery lights and horns built in.

I quit the papers to work in the Owl Drug Store as a soda jerk or soda skeet at its soda fountain.  I made 25 dollars a month.  My hours were after school, all day Saturday and Sunday afternoon from 2:00 to 6:00.  After the store closed on Saturday at 10:00 p.m.  We were required to pick up the planks we had been standing on and scrub the floor and underneath the fountain.  Ice cream came in 10 gallon containers.  As the ice cream became low in one of them we would have to lug a new one from storage in the back of the store, scape the old one out and put that ice cream on the top of the new one.  An ice cream cone cost a nickel.  A double cone was a dime.

I quit that job in early April 1947 to work on an ice truck.  I talked about the ice truck in the second of this series. I worked on the ice truck until sometime in late July 1947.   I left home on July 30, 1947 to go to Love Field in Dallas, Texas where I was sworn in the United States Army Air Corps.  The Air Force at that time was part of the Army.

When I took the physical examination for the Army Air Corps, I did not pass it at first.  I did not weight enough for my height.  The recruiter fed me bananas and water, I took the weight test again and passed.  I will write about my time in The Air Force in another note.