A Boyhood Entrepreneur

I will occasionally discuss my childhood business forays with those interested in the science of free enterprise. I'm talking about my early childhood business ventures, early childhood beginning even before I was old enough to earn six bits by mowing a neighbor's lawn. That was a long time ago and I must confess that sometimes I have wondered if my memory, combined with my imagination, have worked to distort the reality of those days. However I have recently uncovered childhood photographs, and I'm starting to think that I have been recalling those days accurately, though I must admit, those recollections might be a little hard to believe despite being supported by pictures.

My business partners at our lemonade
 stand (post dog turd incident)

In 1958, when I was 7 years old, a friend and I opened a curbside lemonade stand, selling a glass for a nickel. Little did we know until later was that our competition was a Kool-Aid stand up the street that had as its proprietors what were popularly known as "big kids"; i.e. 12 year-olds. They did not like out lemonade stand cutting into their business and so they trekked down the sidewalk and attempted to strongarm us out of business by putting dog turds into our pitcher of lemonade.

What the big kids did not count on was that as they were assaulting our business, a couple of teenage boys were making off with their entire pitcher of unattended Kool-Aid. What a break for us. All we had to do was fish out the turds from our lemonade supply and reopen our business, our nearby competition now gone. We did feel badly about selling tainted lemonade so we reduced the price to 2 cents a glass, which much to our joy, tripled our business.

Me as a casino/treehouse operator

A year later I had become a more sophisticated man of business as I began taking book on the school playground during recess. This prove highly profitable. So profitable that I soon opened my own casino/treehouse where buying into a game of Candyland cost the young gambler 10 cents, winning earned anywhere from 15 cents to a quarter, depending on the number of participants.

Perhaps the highpoint of my childhood business ventures came at the age of 10 when a thirteen year old neighbor boy shocked and horrified my friends and me by explaining to us the facts of life in graphic detail. Among other specifics, we were told that men prefer big boobs to small, and women prefer large penises to the more diminutive variety. We were also informed that for safety sake, a man should always use a condom. That final piece of information was immediately followed by an explanation of what a condom was.

My business associates and I (second from left) 

displaying our merchandise, oversized condoms.

When the shock of what we had just heard began to ebb, our young, business-oriented minds took over. What was to follow was an establishment that used colorful party balloons stretched to look like attractive condoms for the man of girth. Any 16 year-old customer immediately received a reputation not only as sexually active, but well-endowed.

Recent photo