The Last "Shoe Shine Boy"

Parents today, as they have all through history, had a nasty habit of telling their kids just how hard things were when they grew up. I’m sure you heard this from your parents. “Well, when I was your age we didn’t have it as easy as you kids do today!” And then they’ll proceed to tell about how they had to walk ten miles uphill in snow to school…both ways.

My father told me numerous times about how poor southern people were in his youth and how most days he’d just stick a cold baked potato in his pocket and head for school. Other days he might get a cold biscuit. Forgive me, but the last time I looked at his physique he hadn’t appeared to have suffered much due to his meager diet.

So, I’m not going to be like my parents and tell today’s adolescents how much tougher I had it. Yeah, Right! Face, it the baby boomers may not have had it as rough as their fathers and mothers did, but kids today certainly have more advantages then we did.

Think about it! We actually had to write things out in longhand, sloppy penmanship and all. There were no computer office programs to do things up in a nice neat little package for us. No calculators to help with math home work or cell phones. When we wanted to speak to friends we actually had to do it face to face. Shocking, isn’t it?

And even more unthinkable was we weren’t handed an allowance for doing things normally expected of any child such as cleaning up your room or helping out around the house. If we wanted money we were expected to earn it ourselves.

The first “job” I ever received pay for was one Dad helped set me up in when I was about ten years old. It was the shoe shine business.

He explained that’s how he’d earned money as a kid. He would take his shoe shine box of supplies and go to the bus station, train depot or a busy street corner and set up shop.

However, I didn’t have a shoe shine box. Dad wasn’t going to let me off that easy though…he built me one. It was a pretty nifty little contraption having a foot stand customers could rest their foot on while you shined and buffed their shoes to a high gloss. The foot rest was attached to a lid which opened up as a storage compartment to stow your gear. I was all set.

There were no bus or train stations nearby or busy street corners for that matter, so I was reduced to knocking on doors and asking neighbors if they had shoes to shine. But soon, I got to be known as “The Shoe Shine Boy” around the community and my business grew. I no longer had to knock on doors. People were calling me and setting up appointments. I even had to hire a friend to help out part time.

I didn’t get rich, but I never lacked for things I really wanted. When I hit my teens I dropped the shoe shine business and graduated into bigger things like mowing lawns or shoveling snow.

It took a while but I finally learned Dad wasn’t being cheap by not giving me an allowance. He had learned the value of a dollar the good old fashioned way.

He passed that lesson on to me. It was his way of saying how much he loved me.