My Twenty-Five Cents

All this talk of my two cents got me thinking about when I was a kid and how two cents was a lot of money to me. It got me remembering when I was actually pretty good with my money management. This was when my allowance was a quarter and I remember how I had to strategize on the usage of all 25 of those cents.

When I would get my allowance I would walk the two blocks to the closest neighborhood store, Beans' Market, run by an old guy named Beans. I don't recall if that was the actual name of the store, but it sure was what everyone called it. There was always a big glass pickle jar containing money on the counter with an old beat-up cowboy hat next to it and a sign that read "Help buy Beans a new hat" (years later they built a Circle-K across the street from Beans' Market and ran him out of business).

Anyway, I would take my 25 cents to Beans' once a week. I would get one comic book for 12 cents (usually a DC); Beans' had two of the rotating comic racks so I always had a good selection to chose from. With my remaining 13 cents I would buy a bottle of RC (Royal Crown) Cola. RC was the only 16-oz drink you could buy and it cost 15 cents a bottle (the same as the other 12-ounce drinks). However, if you drank it at the store and gave them back the bottle, you didn't have to pay the three-cent bottle deposit, so it was only 12 cents. Some weeks I would buy two comic books, but most of the time I needed that RC badly.

This left me exactly one penny to buy bubble gum with. I usually went with either a Bazooka, because it came with a Bazooka Joe comic strip, or a piece of that red, cinnamon-flavored Hot Dog Gum.

I was never once tempted to put the extra penny in the jar for Beans' hat as he had needed a new hat for as many years as I had been going to the store and I had a suspicion that Beans used that money for something other than a new hat. Beans, he drank a bit.