More musings from 'Oldest Living Blogger'.....

The blog-site where I had that first blog and used this nickname is now virtually abandoned, and my 'Oldest Living Blogger' handle hasn't been used for a long time. I never was the real 'oldest living blogger' of course. I simply chose that handle to grab a few more eyeballs, and it worked out very well, too. 

Mr. Google today tells us that this is Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. And who is Mahatma Gandhi you ask....he's what every woman wants in a husband: thin, tan and moral. Aren't you sorry you asked?

The other day, over at the First Memorial, while waiting for my advisor to show up, the receptionist and I got chatting about the differences between life today and life when I was a kid away back in the 1930s and '40s. She said that kids today are probably being overprotected compared to back then. I remarked that when I was ten, I had a paper route for the Toronto Daily Star, and I knew almost everybody in our little town, and all of their dogs. Nothing happened around there that I didn't hear about, and sometimes, I helped to make the news myself.

There was one section of the downtown core where my route and my buddy's route were on opposite sides of the main drag, and we often got together along there to help each other out with a difficult customer, or just to enjoy a coffee at the one and only all-night 'greasy spoon' in town. It was a Chinese place, and we sometimes got bones for our dogs from the cook in there.

My buddy had one customer in an apartment block on the main corner of town, in the only building in town with an elevator in those days. This guy had a good job with General Electric, which had its local office on the ground floor of that same building. He lived on the top floor, and he was always about six weeks behind on paying for his papers. So we had to resort to our own special collection procedures to keep the bastard honest and reasonably up-to-date.

He slept with his bedroom window open about three inches, and at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. you could hear a pin drop on the street outside. So one morning, while my buddy is taking the paper upstairs to his top floor door, I removed the valve-cap from one of the front tires on this guy's car, and let some air out of the tire. It made a hell of a whistling noise, and then his window is thrown open, and he sticks his head out and yells at me: "Hey! You little bastard! What the hell are you doing to my car?" I thought it was fairly obvious, but just in case he wasn't wide awake yet, I yelled back, "I'm letting the air out of your tire, you cheapskate. Maybe you should pay for your goddamned papers and then this wouldn't happen." He yelled back, "I'm going to call the cop!" I was absolutely fearless in those days, so I yelled back, "Go ahead - he's on my paper route too!" He paid up the overdue money and all was well for about two more months.

Then, the same old same old once more. So this time, we had another cure. We went to that all-night restaurant, got some bones from the cook, and then each of us rode our bikes around downtown for a while, holding up the bones, until we'd collected every stray dog in town. With these dogs following along, we went to our guy's building, and used our paper bags to block open the outer and inner doors of the lobby, and then we opened the door on the elevator, and held it as we threw in those bones, and all those dogs ran inside trying to get them. Then, we punched our guy's floor, and let it go. We promptly grabbed our bags and headed into the mouth of the alley across the street, to watch the show.

It was beautiful! When that elevator full of barking and fighting dogs got to the top floor and the door opened, dogs took off in both directions down the hallway, and the building began to light up like a pinball machine, from the central elevator shaft outwards. Windows were thown open all over it, heads came out, and people began calling out all sorts of things. One little old lady said, "We're all going to die!" Another guy said, "I'm going to kill the son of a bitch that did this!"  And then our guy stuck his head out the window, and called out, "I know who did this! It's the goddamned paper-boy and his pal." Then he realized that maybe that was too much information because everybody knew he was always weeks behind paying up.

The old janitor appeared at the main entry, holding a dog by the scruff of the neck in each hand, and off in the distance we heard the town's lone cop car approaching, so we got the hell out of there and hid in an empty warehouse until things cooled off about 45 minutes later. The next Saturday, when I went to the cop's house to collect, and knocked on the door, he called from inside "Come in here, you little bugger - I want to talk to you!" He was sitting at the kitchen table in his underwear and uniform pants, and holding his service revolver in one hand, aimed straight at me. He said, "I've a good mind to shoot you right now, you little son of a bitch! Now tell me all about that thing the other morning with the elevator and the dogs!" 

His wife came up behind him about then, and gave him a swat on the head with one of my newspapers, and said to him, "Put away that gun, you idiot - you're not The Lone Ranger, and you're scaring this poor little kid out of ten years growth." He put down the gun, and again asked me "What was that all about anyway?" I told him about that cheapskate with the company car who worked for General Electric but almost never paid for his papers unless we did something to encourage him. He tried not to smile, and said "Next time, and I'm sure there will be a next time, try to pick something that doesn't involve getting me into the act at five in the morning, OK?" I said, "OK - It's a deal, Chief! - and I'll even leave your car alone on Halloween."  - Ah, the good old days.....