Madison Street Lemonade Ltd.

38. Madison Street Lemonade LTD.

I was involved in a number of entrepreneurial endeavors during my youth. I sold my services as a lawn mower and shoveled snow when I could. I earned a small allowance for jobs around the house and I worked in a hatchery once in awhile when they had a chicken hatch. I didn’t like working there very much because the owner never wanted to pay me when the work was done. I always had to go and ask for it a couple of times and I hated that.

One summer, after the county fair, the Madison Street Gang decided to have its own carnival. We didn’t have rides or shows. We just had the carnival games like the penny toss and the bottle knock over. We had other games of skill that we charged other kids in the neighborhood to play. We gave out cheap prizes. I don’t remember what they were but I am sure they weren’t much. We made a fortune!

We divided up the booty at the end of the day and had over two dollars a piece to take home. By five or six o’clock that evening when the parents had figured out why home piggy banks had been broken open our phone began to ring. Most of the parents were pretty upset and I know we had to give some of the money back. I really didn’t think we had done anything wrong but the other kid’s parents did.

Another time we opened up Madison Street Lemonade LTD. The business operated for about a week quite successfully. We specialized in lemonade, of course, and once we had accumulated some capitol, we added gum and candy bars that we would buy from the store. We raised the price a nickel and sold out all we had, mostly to ourselves. We thought we were ingenious.

Cement trucks would sometimes stop twice in one day. Many passersby would stop and buy something just because they thought the whole idea was cute. My poor mother had to make and pay for all of the lemonade. She soon grew tired of that and the business closed after a week. That was my first experience with a supplier cutting off a business for lack of payment. Since we ate most of our profits along the way we didn’t have much to show for our week’s work. I suppose it did keep us out of other mischief for a while.