Free Enterprise

By Gary White (CVHS, Class of 1955)

As youngsters growing up in Cedar Vale, Kansas, my friends and I were indoctrinated into the capitalist system at an early age. We were, in short, good young American citizens. We understood the advantages of buying at wholesale and selling at retail to make a profit and were anxious to enter into the wonderful world of retail sales.

When I was 8 years old we were living in a house on Highway 166, on the southwest corner across from the telephone office where my mother worked. The high school was diagonally across the street and a larger, stone house occupied the other corner. That house was later occupied by Mrs. Morris, vocal instructor at the school, but that was many years later. There was an open lot on the south next to our house, where my father planted a big garden. At the back there was a tool shed that was mostly used as the kids playhouse. Across the alley was the Oltjen house, with my friends and playmates Patty and T. D. Patty was a year older than me and T. D. was several years younger.

The first commercial venture I remember was a company I formed with Patty and T.D. The Oltjen’s mother planted a large flower garden every summer, and my father had a large vegetable garden on the lot beside our place. Late in the summer Patty, T. D., and I harvested hollyhock and morning glory seeds from the Oltjen garden and green and lima beans from my father’s garden and set up our seed company. To add to our stock, I had found a number of booklets called “Dawn to Dusk,” which my father would give out to his farm customers as he traveled around the countryside selling gasoline and oil. These books were clearly marked “Compliments of your Standard Oil agent,” but that didn’t deter me in the slightest. The booklets were a treasure trove of practical information useful to farmers and their wives, and they proved best sellers for our budding seed business. We loaded all this stuff in a wagon and walked around the neighborhood selling door to door. This business went bust when my father found out that we were selling his “free” booklets and forced us to return all the money we had earned.

Undeterred by that business failure, our next venture was the fur business. It seems that the Oltjens maintained two or three rabbit hutches. They butchered the large white bunnies for meat. That gave us a ready supply of rabbit pelts. We hit upon the idea of nailing them up inside the shed at the back of my house to dry out for fur. We thought that we would probably be able to sell the pelts, since there actually was a fur business not more than a block from our houses. This second business failed when the odor from the shed attracted the attention of my mother, who cleaned out the mess and thoroughly fumigated the place.

Most of my early businesses were totally legal, but I did once stray into an extortion scheme. This event took place several years later, when I was a teenager living in the western part of Cedar Vale. T. D.’s older sister, Patty, and her friends, Donna and Janice, had taken photos of each other at a slumber party. These were “cheesecake” photos that showed a lot of arm and shoulder and just a hint of cleavage. They had printed the names of their current boyfriends on their shoulders in lipstick. T. D. had obtained the negatives some way. He presented them to me, since I had a photo darkroom in a closet at my house and we hatched our plot. We printed several copies of each of the photos and began distributing them to the girls, hoping for some profit or perhaps just to get a rise out of them. The girls were totally outraged that we had those suggestive photos and ratted to our parents. Both T. D. and I were severely punished. That put an end to my short life of crime.

All this free-enterprise training served me well as I grew older. I sold subscriptions to Grit magazine from door to door, actually making a profit. Later, I obtained a catalog containing all sorts of household articles. I could sell these items at retail and order from the company at wholesale and make a nice profit. In later years, my door-to-door training served me well when there were school or church sales of magazine subscriptions, candy bars, and the like. I had already learned how to knock on doors and present an attractive sales spiel, so I was well prepared to pursue the great American dream of financial independence and a well-paying job.