Brad’s Gambling Life – Part 4, the Early Teens

Once Brad turned 13, he found better opportunities to increase his discretionary income, and therefore increase his gambling bankroll.  First he took on a paper route, and that $5 net profit a week made him “rich” beyond his dreams.  And at Christmas time, when most of his customers gave him a present, his pleasure grew, especially if it was a one-dollar bill and not a handkerchief in a fancy box.  He graduated from throwing pennies against a wall with his younger cronies to throwing nickels with the other older paperboys.  He had more money to spend at the carnival.

By the time he was 14 and had grown taller and stronger, the carnival provided not just exciting entertainment, but became a real moneymaker to boot.  He would hit the fairgrounds the minute the carnival trucks arrived and would be hired at the amazingly high rate (for l946) of $1 an hour to help unload and put up the equipment and the tents.  Then when the fair was over he could get the same hourly wage taking down everything and loading it back in the trucks.  It was a hot and dirty job but one that Brad looked forward to every summer, when the carnival came to town around the 4^th of July and again in August for the county fair.

At this time the carnival caused Brad to “jump the fence” to the other side of gambling.  He was making friends with many of the midway booth carnies and got the job of assisting them in running the games and watching the booth while they took breaks.  In this job, he learned why the “house” always won.  Like in the booth with all the milk bottles that you could never seem to knock over enough to win a big prize no matter how hard you threw the baseball – no surprise.  Some of the bottles had lead in the bottom.  It was here on the midway that Brad developed a healthy suspicion of any game that looked easy.

If loading and unloading the carnival trucks was hot and dirty – and if the corn rows in his family’s garden seemed long when he was weeding them at age 8, his next job was off the charts:  detassling corn.  This was a 3-week killer job in the middle of the summer, walking through endless rows of corn for 8 to 10 hours a day in the hot sun, removing the pollen-producing top part of the plant, the tassel.  (An interesting discussion of detasseling details.) The mostly teenage workers lived for the 3-week job in rough dorms near the cornfields and earned 50 cents an hour. Many could not endure such extreme conditions and went home early.  But Brad was determined to last and get the retroactive 60 cents an hour if you stayed the whole term.  And last he did, and when the check for $100+ came a week or two later, he proudly went to the bank, for the first time, to cash it.  And then he took $5 and bought his first billfold, a beautiful leather one he had been eyeing for months in the window of the cigar store.

With that billfold holding more money than he had ever had at one time, he knew he was ready for more “adult” gambling even though he was only 14.  Fortunately for him, back in those days entrance to bars and places where there was gambling was easier than it is today.  There were laws, of course, regulating where minors could be, but they were largely ignored.  Brad always looked older than his age, and he and his friends would slick back their hair and wear “old men” long coats and never had trouble being in the cigar stores, rum houses, and bars in Connersville, Indiana.  And if they had money, they could join whatever game was going on, usually Brad’s road game, Tonk, in which he was already an expert, now with 9 years of experience.  He was playing with a lot of older men, but many had never developed any card sense even though they had played for years.  Needless to say, Brad was very successful in these small-town games.

He and his friends didn’t limit their adventures to small-town Connersville.  They found a way to head to Cincinnati or Indianapolis.  If an older friend didn’t have a car, they would take a bus, or, if they didn’t have much money, hitchhike.  In Indy they could take in a burlesque show.  Brad well remembers his first trip to Cincinnati where he and a friend took the boat out to Coney Island.  On the boat was a mechanical horseracing machine on which they could gamble for a nickel a race.  However, the strongest memory was sitting down at the bar on the boat and ordering, at 15, his first beer – for a quarter – and was served it with no problem.

While he was 15 and 16, he was often in Cincinnati with his friends and they sometimes went across the river to Kentucky, where in Newport and Covington, illegal gambling and prostitution was wide open.  They would visit one of the notorious 3-story buildings and sit at the bar on the ground floor.  They knew the whole 2^nd floor was a huge gambling operation, and some of the boys wanted to go up there and explore, but Brad held them back.  His carnival experience and natural good sense warned him that there would be a high likelihood that they would be cheated there, something which later police investigations bore out.   So they had be content drinking a beer and watching the pretty girls go up and down the stairs, trying to entice the men at the bar.  All the teenage boys knew what was on the 3^rd floor, but they didn’t have the nerve to even think about checking it out!