In the early 1950's, my brother Nick and I would visit my cousin Wayne Goode. They lived out near Cole's Pond. We would haul a wooden pop case in a little red wagon from there out across rainbow bridge to the baseball stands at the fairgrounds and where Legion baseball was played. Then we would scour the area under the big wooden stands for pop bottles and if we were lucky, a nickel or two. Then back to Wayne's where we could get someone to take us to cash in our days work. It seems like we got about two cents a bottle. Others insist the REAL big money was to go to the carnival grounds after they left and look for real money, pop bottles, or other highly valuable stuff. Our metal detector consisted of a well trained eye. All I remember is that it was near Mike Gidney's house off of Mill Street. We would go to that field and fly kites all afternoon in the summer. If the wind was right, you could tear up a piece of paper into about two inch squares, tear a notch in it up to the middle, and let the wind propel it up the string to the kite. If I remember right, the kites were 15 cents each and we bought them from the Ben Franklin store out of what you might call an umbrella stand full of the kites, tightly wrapped around the two sticks used for braces. So a quarter would get you kite and string, a sizeable investment. You usually already had the string, wrapped around some smooth old stick, short enough to easily wrap the string but long enough to stick in the ground to hold the kite if you wanted. You had to become a master of determining how much tail (made of strips of rags) to tie onto the kite per that day's wind. Too little and it would just spin and dive to the ground and too much kept it from getting as high as you wanted. It was a cheap way to spend a summer day and I especially remember flying kites with Kent Sutherland and Mike Gidney. That was quite a few years before my main concern was how to not be killed in dodge ball or how to not be the last one picked for a team. Any team.

The only electronic thing I owned was the battery operated horn on my bicycle. It was very high tech, since it had a remote button and a wire that went down to the horn. Pat Hamilton has noted that they actually had pop available to them at home, something I personally never experienced until I left home. Pat:

"About twice a year my Dad would buy a case (wooden crate) of 24 assorted "bottles of pop", my two sisters and I each got an equal number, probably 5, which left 9 for my parents to divide, and you could drink all your share the same day, or ration them out.  I think those pop bottles belonged to my Dad, and he took them back to the store for the refund. You could go to the Sat. PM show (we never called it "the movie" then, did we) at the Klock Theater for the grand sum of 7 cents, so if you could find 6 pop bottles (if we got lucky, our Dad would treat us to the movie), at 2 cents each, you could go to the movie and add popcorn, another 5 cents.  It wasn't too long before the price went up, I don't remember how much.  It was hard to come by 6 pop bottles, as that was a luxury at our house that didn't come around very often."