Prior to the days of automatic pin setters in bowling alleys, they used a rack that 1 could throw the pins into, then push a lever down to set the pins in the correct position. This supplied a fantastic job for young men that liked a small excitement. The pin setter would sit on the edge of the pit with his feet clear of the bowling ball that would come crashing down the alley. Most of the time all the pins would stay in the pit, but quite often they would fly out and if you were not alert you could get hit.
When the bowler would throw the 1st ball, the pin setter would choose up the ball and place it on the return rail, then as fast as he could, choose up the pins and place them in the rack. If the pin setter was too slow and the ball reached the bowler before the pin setter was via in the pit the individual bowling may well throw the ball and catch you in the pit. They normally cannot see you down in the pit, or perhaps they can and like to see you jump! We would find out to choose up two pins in every hand and sometimes a fifth pin between the two hands. If it was a strike, you could then choose up all the pins by only bending over twice, five pins each time. The object was to continually total the action before the ball reached the return rack.
In the course of the slack time and though waiting for the bowlers to arrive, we would gather around the pin-ball machine and see who could rack up the most games. We would set the front legs on the soles of our shoes to the make the ball roll slower, until it would tilt, and end the game. A person figured out where the solenoid for added games was situated in the back and cut a hole there so we could save a nickel by pushing in just the appropriate spot.
This was my initial truly 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 edge of town and on 1 of the lots of lakes there. It was yet another terrific place for a fifteen-year-old, I could swim and water ski. You just had to watch out for the alligators. I meet a most intriguing friend there about my age, can't recall his name. He was a 15-year-old pilot and Ham Radio operator. He by no means took me up in his plane, but I certain enjoyed listening to him talking to the world on the ham radio.
Years later when I was working for Lockheed Air Craft, I took a course on Single Side Band radios utilized in the C-141 Cargo Plane and I thought back about those hours we spent on the ham radio. I was working at Lockheed when the President was shot in Texas.
Now that I had gotten my first job, I felt that I could do anything and go anywhere and make a living. Even so, I was still only 15! School was a difficulty for me, it may possibly have been because we moved so much and I appear to never be able to total a full year at one school. And I believe that I also may well have been bored. I spent two years in the seventh grade, two years in the eighth grade and was beginning on my second year in the ninth, when I gave it up and left property at 16.
There was a different family members in the trailer park that had a dilemma son who ran away a lot and there was a lot of speak about how tough it was to keep young boys at home. I was still 15 when we moved once again back to my hometown of Providence, Kentucky. I was working at a drive-in movie theater at night, cutting school in the day time and consistently on the edge of getting into trouble. The owner of the theater rented our three story home in Providence and we lived in the trailer parked behind the house. My younger sister was acquiring older and the trailer was obtaining crowded, so I was given the basement of the house for my bed room.
I would ride to work with the theater owner and run the projection equipment all night until the last show was over. The movies came in two boxes with two reels of film in each and every box. We would have to wind the film by means of our hands to inspect for bad splices before showing the movie. If you had a bad splice, the film would break or jam in the middle. The image would stop on the screen and a hole would commence to burn in the middle. It would certainly look strange on the screen. Then the horns would commence blowing all the time you cleared the mess out of the projector and re-spliced the film. 1 night throughout the second showing, I created an error and played reel number 1 followed by reel number 3, then number 2 and ended with number 4. No one complained, but if they had been watching, I bet they had been confused. Lots of time I would splice the cartoon or news on backwards and you would see the sound track running down the side.
In the course of intermission time we in some cases would have some kind of entertainment and 1 night we had a group that bought junk cars and would jump them over each other and crash them in the area in front of the large screen. They had trouble getting a 1948 Plymouth began that night and could not crash it. I offered them $60.00 for it and I had my first auto, but no driver's license. You had to be 16 in the state of Kentucky to get a license. After the show that night a friend push me off and we got the car began so I could drive it house. Dad was slightly upset and said that it could just set there in the back yard, until I was old sufficient to get a license.
I was back to walking house immediately after closing the theater. The owners would in most cases not stay soon after the concession stand closed and unless I knew someone that was at the movie I would be stuck with walking the five miles property in the dark. I do not know how quite a few times I walked off the road and virtually fell into the ditch on those nights when there was no moon.
In the storage space behind the massive screen, there had been all kinds of junk and I found some old 16 mm film reels of old b-movies. The owner had stored them there, well I borrowed a couple of of them and at home under our sun porch there was a crawl space of about five feet. I discovered an old 16 mm projector and set up my own theater. For the 50's some of the films had been sexy, and by to days standards would be rated PG. The only problem with my theater was that I employed a lot of cardboard for developing material and soon the termites had been just about every where. Dad made me creosote every little thing that touch the dirt floor. Properly the smell of creosote was just too significantly, so that ended that project. The owner reported to the police that a person had broke into the storage and they questioned me about it. I was by no means positive if an individual else had stolen some thing or if he was looking for those films.
I did drive the old Plymouth 1 a lot more time, some buddies and I were going out to the coal mine strip cut to go swimming. There was a lot of strip mining in west Kentucky and at that time they would just leave the big cuts open to fill with water. They produced fine swimming holes, they were deep, frequently 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 it began. It had rather small compression so you had to get up a little speed just before it would start. After our swim we started back household on the long gravel road and one by one the thin tires started to blow. I continued to drive it on the rims, if I stopped we would by no means be able to push it quick sufficient with two flats to get it started once again. I think that dad hauled it back to the junk yard following I left household.
