Before the days of automatic pinsetters in bowling alleys, they used a rack that one could drop the pins into and then push a lever down to place the pins in the correct position. This provided a good job for youngsters who liked a bit of excitement. The pinsetter would sit on the edge of the pit with his feet away from the bowling ball that would come crashing down the alley. Most of the time all the pins would stay in the pit, but sometimes they would fly out and if you weren’t alert you could get hit.
When the pitcher would throw the first ball, the pinsetter would pick up the ball and place it on the return rail, then, as quickly as he could, pick up the pins and place them on the rack. If the pinsetter was too slow and the ball reached the bowler before the pinsetter passed through the hole, the bowler may bowl the ball and catch him in the hole. They usually can’t see you in the hole, or maybe they can and like to see you jump! We would learn to pick up two pins in each hand and sometimes a fifth pin between the two hands. If it was a hit, you could pick up all the pins just by crouching down twice, five pins each time. The objective was to always complete the action before the ball reached the return grid.
During downtime and while we waited for the bowlers to arrive, we would gather around the pin-ball machine and see who could rack up the most games. We would put our front feet on the soles of our shoes so the ball would roll more slowly, until it tipped over and the game was over. Someone figured out where the solenoid for extra sets was located on the back and cut a hole there so we could save a nickel by pressing in the right spot.
This was my first really paying job and when I got my social security card. We had just moved from Englewood, Tennessee to Lakeland, Florida. We lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of town and on one of the many lakes there. It was another great place for a fifteen year old, he could swim and water ski. You just had to watch out for alligators. There I met a very interesting friend of my age, I don’t remember his name. He was a 15 year old pilot and amateur radio operator. He never took me on his plane, but I enjoyed hearing him talk to the world on ham radio.
Years later, while working for Lockheed Air Craft, I took a course on single sideband radios used on the C-141 cargo plane and was reminded of those hours we spent in ham radio. I was working at Lockheed when the president was shot in Texas.
Now that I had gotten my first job, I felt like I could do anything and go anywhere and make a living. However, he was still only 15 years old! School was a problem for me, it may have been because we moved around a lot and I never seem to be able to complete a full year at a school. And I think it may have bored me too. I was in seventh grade for two years, eighth grade for two years, and was starting my second year in ninth grade, when I dropped out and left home at 16.
There was another family in the trailer park who had a troublesome son who ran away a lot and there was a lot of talk about how hard it was to keep young children at home. I was still 15 years old when we moved back to my hometown of Providence, Kentucky. I was working at a drive-in movie at night, skipping school during the day, and always on the verge of getting into trouble. The theater owner rented our three-story house in Providence and we lived in the trailer parked behind the house. My little sister was getting older and the trailer was getting crowded, so they gave me the basement of the house as a bedroom.
He would commute with the theater owner and man the projection equipment all night until the last show was over. The films came in two boxes with two rolls of film in each box. We would have to roll the film in our hands to inspect if there is a bad splice before showing the film. If you had a bad splice, the film would break or get stuck in the middle. The image would stop on the screen and a hole would start to burn in the middle. It would really look weird on screen. Then the horns would start beeping the entire time you cleaned up the projector mess and re-spliced the film. One night during the second screening I made a mistake and played reel number 1 followed by reel number 3, then number 2 and ended up with number 4. No one complained but if they were looking I bet they were confused. Many times I would splice the cartoon or the news backwards and you would see the sound track running off the side.
During the intermission time we would sometimes have some kind of entertainment and one night we would have a group that would buy junk cars and jump them on top of each other and crash them into the area in front of the big screen. They had trouble starting a 1948 Plymouth that night and couldn’t crash it. I offered them $60.00 for it and got my first car, but without a driver’s license. You had to be 16 years old in the state of Kentucky to get a license. After the show that night, a friend pushed me and we started the car so he could drive it home. Dad was a little upset and he said he could just sit in the backyard until he was old enough to get a license.
I walked home again after closing the theater. The owners usually didn’t stay after the concession stand closed and unless you knew someone who was in the movie you would have to walk the 5 miles home in the dark. I don’t know how many times I went off the road and almost fell in the ditch on those nights when there was no moon.
In the storage space behind the big screen there was all kinds of junk and I found some 16mm film reels of old B movies. The owner had kept them there, well I borrowed some and at home under our porch solar, there was a crawl space of about five feet. I found an old 16mm projector and set up my own cinema. By the ’50s, some of the movies were sexy, and today the standards would be rated PG. The only problem with my theater was that I used a lot of cardboard as a building material and soon termites were everywhere. Dad made me creosote for anything that touches the dirt floor. Well, the creosote smell was too much, so he ended that project. The owner reported to the police that someone had broken into the warehouse and they questioned me about it. I never found out if someone else had stolen anything or was looking for those movies.
I drove the old Plymouth one more time, some friends and I were going swimming in the coal mine. There was a lot of open pit mining in western Kentucky and at the time they just left the big cuts open to fill them with water. They made good swimming holes, they were deep, usually over 100 feet, and had steep banks that we could dive from. We pulled the old Plymouth out onto the road and pushed it down the hill until she got going. She had very little compression, so she had to speed up a bit before she started. After a swim, we headed home down the long gravel driveway, and one by one the skinny tires began to blow. I continued to drive it on the rims, if I stopped we could never push it fast enough with two flats to get it going again. I think Dad took it back to the junkyard after I left home.