Saratoga News

Big Basin Way in the 1930s, shown during an era before the word "prestigious" applied to Saratoga.

Saratoga Stereopticon

WILLYS PECK

Saratoga was a good place to be poor

Once upon a time, before the words "prestigious" and "Saratoga" were permanently conjoined in real estate ads, this was a pretty good place to be poor. I am aware of the inverse snobbery implied here, as in, "My folks had less than your folks," but that isn't my point. What I'm getting at is the fact that, in the era encompassing the Great Depression, everyone
was pretty much in the same boat.

One of the plus factors was housing. There were, to be sure, well-to-do people who had permanent and summer homes here--Glen Una was synonymous with "high-rent district"--but there were houses available all the way down the economic scale. In the 1920s, the $15 monthly rent my parents paid for an old but comfortable house at the end of Marion Avenue probably was about average.

In an era of modest means, and even more modest expectations, it was axiomatic that kids would have to work for their spending money. If you wanted to support a bicycle, buy model-airplane material or have an occasional Coke at the Saratoga Drug Store fountain--even get something special in the way of school clothes--it was pretty much up to you; the folks had enough to handle in just getting by.

Those who grew up on the prune and apricot ranches of course had their work cut out for them. The rest of us had to find other employment. I entered the labor force at the age of 10, watering the garden and raking leaves at the home of a family friend for 15 cents an hour.

Yard work was one source of income. A Liberty magazine route was the other. Magazine routes went out of style a couple of generations ago, but in the 1930s, boy salesmen, as we were euphemistically called, went door-to-door peddling magazines such as Liberty and the Saturday Evening Post.

These were not subscriptions; these were weekly deliveries of a publication that cost 5 cents a copy. Of this, the boy salesman was entitled to a commission of 1 l/2 cents. I never really hit the big time, and I think I maxed out at something like 30 cents a week, but that was 30 cents I wouldn't have had otherwise, and there was yard work on top of that.

One of the main lures of a magazine route, though, was the array of premiums over and above the princely commission. These were awarded on the basis of coupons: For each five magazines sold, one got a green coupon or greenie. For five greenies, one would get a brown coupon, or brownie.

The merchandise available in exchange for brownies was described in a catalog that ranked somewhere between those of Neiman-Marcus and Blue Chip Stamps. The object of my desire in this book of dreams was a hand-cranked, 16-millimeter Keystone movie projector--a toy, really, but a workable toy.

To get it, I had to accumulate 95 brownies, which meant 2,375 magazines delivered. I had just shot my roll of brownies on a Pocket Ben watch, but I was determined to get that movie machine.

It took about a year and a half, but I saved up those 95 coupons and got that projector. My pride in it knew no bounds, and I still have that machine in my collection of audio-visual memorabilia. That collection now includes a hybrid Symplex theater projector that had been the spare machine at the old Saratoga Theater.

One of the collateral pleasures in having that machine came from showing a 100-foot reel of film on the coronation of King George VI in England. One of the scenes was of the Royal Family on the palace balcony, a group that included Princess, now Queen, Elizabeth, on whom I had already developed an eighth-grade crush.

Hometown employment progressed from yard work through house-cleaning and reached some sort of culmination in driving a grocery delivery truck at 30 cents an hour during my senior year in high school and the ensuing summer. With a 60-hour week, I looked on the $18 pay as not too shabby.

Prating about "when I was a boy" experiences is a sure formula for boredom, but I think it isn't entirely amiss to summon up a time when people in an idyllic setting looked to hard work, simple pleasures and the companionship of friends in the same boat in getting through a difficult economic period.