When I was going into the 7th grade in Fort Worth, Texas, I got a job delivering groceries on a bicycle with a big basket over a small wheel, tooling around the southside of the wonderful town. I swept out the store, stocked the shelves, sold candy to the kids to the school kids from the elementary school across the street, learned to cut steaks and cut up the chickens and slice the bologna and work the fresh fruit and vegetables, run the cash register and buy used comic books for 3 cents and then sell them for 5 cents. The gum and peanut machines cost 1 cent from the little machines in front of the candy counter.
What a way for a kid to learn about working.
Those places and the education a kid could get are sadly gone.
I still buy peanuts and such at a big store in Fort Worth from the family of the guy that filled up those peanut and gum machines and split the pennies with the proceeds of those machines.
At a little diary community named Windthorst an hour of so north of where I live now there still is a little mercantile where they will make you a sandwich, sell you nuts and bolts and Levis and chain saws and work boots and jackets and the kids come from the school across U.S. 281 and buy candy bars and Cokes after school lets out every week day. I go through that town 15 to 20 times a day and nearly always stop there at the store that has been there for more than 100 years. In the town of Jacksboro some 30 minutes south of Windthorst you can still buy the best hamburger I have ever eaten from Hurd's which has been in business for more than 100 years. This is the still available in a few places to a now almost 80 year-old man that likes to visit the America that I grew up in. Thanks for this website and to people that share this stuff. Have a great day.