FUTURE COP TRAINING

 What kind of little boys and girls grow up to be cops? All kinds. I always liked to hire to ones who'd lived in the real world, knew how things worked, and were familiar with the system. Street wise. No one was gonna pee down their back and tell them it was raining.

One of my favorite cops, Byron Tomlinson, made money in high school by injecting oranges with Vodka and selling them to other students. Is there not some element of genius here?

Had a few others who were Crackers. To keep the old belly full in their youth, they'd skinned a few gators, sold a few hides, and taken several deer out of season. And fishing limits? Forget it. 

Long as we're fessin' up, I have to make a few myself. Growing up post depression in Charleston, WVa, you forgot about trying to make a buck. A few pennies would do. To accomplish that, I used to go all over downtown stuffing toilet paper up in the coin return slots. When the change and returned coins dropped, they remained up there atop the plugged slot. End of the day, I'd go by, remove the toilet paper, and collect my bounty. Which could be very good for a ten year old. Later, the phone company got wise and installed that rocker device in the coin slot to prevent stuffing it.

Then there was the bottle return thing. You got two cents for soft drink bottles and five cents for a Canada Dry ginger ale bottle. Five cents! Why you could by a candy bar, or an RC for five cents. Five more and you could add on a Moon Pie.

So I'd look for stores that stored their collection of returned bottles behind the building. It was usually fenced in but that was no problem for a kid. The processes was simple. Climb the fence, liberate a few bottles, then, later, sell them back to the same store. Course, we spent the ill-gotten gains in that store so the owner didn't get hurt too badly.

Then there was the old Coke machine trick. Remember the old machines that looked like chest freezers. Had the drinks in there hanging on sliding rails. You slid the drink to the end of the row, put in a nickel, and pulled it up through a lock thing.

All that work wasn't necessary. Look for a place where the machine was out of sight--usually a service station--pop the cap on one of the Cokes with a bottle opener, insert a straw, and empty the bottle. Ah, the pause that refreshes.

Then for my favorite. Michael Jackson did not invent the moonwalk. Young folks like myself did. At movie theaters they usually had two sets of doors. one set for folks to enter the movie, another for those exiting. We'd wait by the exit door until the movie ended and the crowd was flowing out the doors. Then, we'd step into the crowd, and moonwalk backwards into the theater. Never failed!

Hope the statute of limitations has run out.

Thanks Gail for your help.