Collected "coke" bottles for the deposit, mowed yards, odd jobs doing anything. We seined our own minnows and perch dug for worms and trapped crawdads.
Ever heard it called light-bread?
Yup, and also had sweetmilk.

Started Bailing hay at 6
Castrated hogs at 25 cents per at 8
Dehorned cattle at 50 cents per at 9
Milked a 100 head twice a day at 10

I have an 87' Chevy chassis, rearend and bed from a 3/4 ton truck that I made into a trailer. All it is for is scrap steel. When it gets full, I hook it up and go to the scrap yard.

I bag up my aluminum cans and take them every few years. Bout time to make a run.

(I miss steel coffee cans)

I never miss cans. Hit them dead center every time.

Boy you’re bringing back memories, Bill... some of greatest ones I have. When I was a kid my Grandfather and I would go fishing and squirrel hunting whenever I would visit. My parents would load me up on the greyhound from Dallas and I’d ride it to Corsicana for a couple weeks during the summers or spring break. Grendaddy put me to work and taught me how to use a stick to comb through the leaves under pecan trees. You could feel when a pecan would hit the stick. Together we would fill a cardboard box in no time. Then we’d load up in his old baby blue Rambler and head into town to get them weighed. I remember the dash on that old thing was always covered in dust. With our cash from the pecans we would then go next door to the hardware store and buy a box of .410 shells and off we’d go. The best squirrel hunting took place West of Corsicana near a small town called Corbit. There was a huge bottom we would go down in with loads of tall trees and lots of cover for us. He taught me to throw a small log or big stick on the back side of a tree to get the squirrel to turn and face us so we could shoot it... he was real good at squirrel hunting and we almost always had a mess of them for Mema to fry up for us. If we had any money left over from the pecans, we would sometimes swing by the butcher shop on the way home for some bull liver for the trot line that we would spread across his stock tank in the evening. I remember being so excited to lift that line the next morning and see what we got. He had a lot of big catfish and turtles in that tank.

We did dig for worms under the logs behind his chicken coop, but I can also remember loading up snapping turtle intestines on a hook more than a few times if we caught them on the trot line. He was always scared one of us kids was gonna loose a finger, so he would just go get the ax. The grasshoppers and crawdads worked pretty good on the bass... his tank had it all and was stocked pretty good. It didn’t get much action till my sister and I would come to visit, and they were usually pretty hungry. For the crawdads we would tie a small piece of bacon on a string and drop it down the a hole in the bar ditch. Then pull up real slow to get them. Mema would make us sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and put in the black lunch pale Grendaddy took to work every day. (He repaired tractors and was known all over as the best mechanic in the area.) I’d usually carry the single shot .410 and he would carry the poles, and we’d hit probably 6 or 7 ponds/tanks on our normal route. One time we really got into them. Bass after bass and some real big ones... 5 pounders and up if they were a pound. Grendaddy kept saying “Yee...I think I got a hog! I got the hog! He did to... one he pulled out of there was a monster. He told that story year after year, every time I’d see him till the day he died. It was an Incredible day! I’d give anything to be able to go back with him just one more time. He was the best Grandfather a boy could ask for, and I was so lucky he was mine.

Great memories Greg...

Great story and memories!

Light bread and bologna....you guys must have been rich!!!

Collected soda bottles, sold Grit magazine, picked pecans for .50 cents a day, loaded cotton seed on semi's for $5.00 a day, hauled hay. Ate a lot of beans and potatoes and Mom made biscuits from scratch almost ever day. Meat to us was fried salt pork. Venison was a real treat. I have seined mnners, dug worms but preferred fishing with grass hoppers. Of course cane poles instead of rod and reels.

Old habits are hard to break...I still save my aluminum cans, copper wire and keep my short iron and shredder feed separate

Chopped cotton for my grandpa and uncles in the summer, on weekends we picked cotton for them. We also seined minnows at the lake and on the rivers when we fished. The worms we dug them at my uncles worm bed. Also mowed a lot of lawns in town. Then there was the returnable soda pop and beer bottles to collect. The bar ditch south of Tuxedo was profitable area on Sunday afternoon, When we loved overseas, it was mowing lawns and clipping those damned hedges the USAF always planted as a divider between housing units.

Starting at around 5 to 6 years old with my Grandfather's help and wooden traps he made me, I live trapped Possums. He knew local black folk who would buy them for food. Every time I caught one I would put it in a metal trash can with a bed of leaves and "purge" them feeding them good table scraps. My Grandfather would make a call and someone would come by to buy it. I got between $2 to $3 each for them. That was a lot of money for a little kid in the late 1960s. I must have trapped a couple hundred over those years.

Old enough to ride a bike, I rode the streets and alleys with friends collecting bottles on Saturday mornings. Took them to the Busy Bee grocery store and cashed them in. Then used the money to buy bait at the meat market to fish for crawfish in the local creek. And we usually had enough money left over to also buy a round of floats or banana splits at the Rainbow Pharmacy nearby.

Grade School I worked in my Father's auto parts store stocking shelves in exchange for spending cash. "Valley View Auto Parts". One of the perks was the key to the soda machine. My Dad did not pay me much, so I drank all the Mr. Pibb I could handle to get my moneys worth. One of his employees gave me a canoe that I still have and use to hunt and fish out of.

Middle school I bought moulds and liquid rubber for making bass fishing worms. First I tried to sell them at school for fishing. Found out kids were throwing them against the ceiling and walls to stick them there, so I adjusted the cooking time to make them more sticky. After that they sold as fast as I could make them. Another friend was also making them and we got in a price war, so we got together and agreed on a mutual price. We sold hundreds of them in exchange for other kids lunch money. I knew we were in trouble when one day in the lunch room I looked up and saw dozens of our worms stuck to the ceiling everywhere. Then in one of my classes I saw someone had stuck one on the ceiling right over the teachers chair. The whole class watched in anticipation of it falling on her and it eventually did. That did not go over well at all. Later that day the principal came over the intercom asking whoever is selling the worms to turn themselves in, like that was going to happen. Later he came on asking for anyone that knew had a duty to turn us in. My friend got turned in by someone, but I did not. A good friend too, he did not "narc" me out. Still it was the end of my worm selling career.

Starting at 16, I worked my first real paycheck job. I worked at the Elm Fork Shooting Park pulling skeet for $3.50 an hour. I could shoot after hours for free. We were allowed to sign out boxes of shotgun shells and have the cost deducted from our paycheck at the end of the week. I often owed money instead of getting a check. I almost got my toe shot off when a customer shot a hole in the ground just on the edge of my shoe. It was the only time I ever had to tell someone to put their shotgun up and leave. We often had bullets skip the burm on the rifle range and wizz tumbling over our head at the skeet range. Sometimes they hit the top of the skeet towers while I was pulling skeet for customers. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the customers always looked freaked out. That is why that rifle range now has tunnels you have to shoot through.

Some great posts on this thread. I’m glad we grew up outside and not glued to the video games.

Sniper John were you and your family FB ? How far back in FB do y’all go?

Collected soda bottles, raked leaves, mowed lawns; and even weeded flower beds & garden for old Mrs Snow. She would cook me lunch before sending me home - liver & onions! I couldn’t stand it at home, but somehow Mrs Snow cooked it up like magic -ummmm.
Seined shrimp to catch trout ( on coast) - sometimes shrimp would come up so big papa would say - hey, let’s just keep seining till our boxes are full - yee haw that was some good eating.
By 13 I was self-learning electronics, and around 15 was fishing blown stereos & tv’s out of trash to fix- yee haw just 1 fixed = $$ a whole Saturday’s worth of mowing! Learned to do same for computers by about 21 and making $$$$$$ ever since!

I grew up in the old downtown Carrollton Square area. Many of the old Carrollton people of Peter's Colony ancestry where my mentors growing up. I currently live on the same street in FB my Grandfather moved to from Oklahoma in the early 1950s. He bought three houses on the street then and rented two of them out. In the late 1950s my parents bought 3 more houses on the same street and lived in one of them for a shot time and renting out the other two, later selling the one they lived in and moving before I was born. I lived in two of those rent houses during the Early 1980s. Late 1980s I bought yet another different house on the street to stay close to my Grandfather. Him and his house are long gone now, but I still live on the street in my same old house, but updated a couple times now. Many of the old houses here have been or will be soon replaced with new ones. My Dad in the 1950s owned one of the few service stations in FB at or near where the Mobile is at Valley View and Josey. Later he opened Valley View Auto Parts and ran it until he retired. Him and his store are long gone now as well. So yes I have deep roots in FB.

My dad was born in “Fieldcity” and is still there now never leaving the city at 81. I know yoj
Ur parts store when there was a key shop within a few hundred feet across from Turner Hardware. I spent my first 31 years there.
My dads time there and around the Carrollton square are impressive when it goes back to poor etc

used to love to go visit that area in those years.

FB has a,out of history and a lot of history was in the area being the first colony in Dallas

If you never have the Farmers Branch Historical Park is worth a tour

When my wife was just a close friend, I took her to watch the Myers of old Carrollton fame do their 50th wedding anniversary vows in the Gazebo in the Square. Same place they had been married at 50 years earlier. 26 years ago I married my wife in that same Gazebo. Sure hope to repeat our vows there on our 50th too. My wife works at the Finishing Touch antique mall in the Square and my side business in retirement is selling junk from one of the booths there, so I have never really left.

There is a barn at the Historical Park. It was removed from Ray Roberts before the lake filled. I have coyote hunted from the loft of that very same barn, but not when it was in Farmers Branch of course. I have driven to the top of Wolf Mountain in an open Jeep to predator call from and have driven over the Dam there. Crossways! But this is getting too far removed from topic and the rest is best for around a campfire and not public.

As a young child I picked night crawlers at night (an art form in itself) and sold them on the side of our country road...would sit for hours but someone always stopped.
Sold old beer cans, Kingsbury Cone tops etc...in middle school...it was a big craze back then, in Wisconsin anyways.
As a teen shot coons..$35/ea and Red Foxes brought $80 each
In winter I shoveled snow and especially off roofs of commercial buildings...good $
Fixed and sold vehicles in High School as well as other things that were not really legal...shhh.
Still buy and sell everyday at 55 yrs old.

Anyone ever fish with catalpa worms?

Our best fishing hole was the pond at the golf course in Marshall. There was a Catalpa tree right next to the pond so we definitely used the worms. It was also pretty easy to dig worms in the piney woods too. We bought our minnows at 25¢ a dozen by picking up coke bottles.

Yes some of the best catfish bait there is.