entrepreneurial spirit

Years ago, we had a supermarket distributor who lived on our block. As kids, we never gave the guy much thought, until one morning, when walking up the road to catch the school bus, we noticed his trash. Sitting out at the curb, awaiting the garbage collectors, were two cases of Bubble Yum. Huge cardboard boxes, filled with individual boxes of gum.

As a seventh grader, this was like finding a gold mine. So naturally, me and two other kids that lived on the street filled our bookbags with gum. We found out that a normal sized bookbag will hold about 10 boxes of bubble gum, if stuffed just right. We left behind destroyed, and now empty, cardboard boxes and our textbooks which were discretely hid in the neighbor's shrubs. The quest for knowledge had nothing on multiple packs of free bubble gum.

In our seventh grade mindset, we never once gave thought as to why this gum was out on the curb. Does gum go bad? Is there an expiration date for gum? These were questions that only briefly crossed our minds. But after Pete tried an experimental piece and didn't end up dying, the gum got our stamp of approval. And so we chewed gum the entire school day...grape during math, watermelon throughout english, strawberry in social studies, and even snuck a piece while playing dodgeball during gym. When a teacher would notice us chomping away and ordered us to spit it out, another piece was inserted into our mouths the minute we sat back down at our desk.

Our chewing habits became known throughout the day, and with a plethora of gum stashed away in our lockers, a black market gum business took hold. Twenty five cents a pack, in between classes, at one of our lockers. By the end of the week we had cleared about ten dollars each, and were flying high on a major sugar rush.

Every week after that, we dug through that guy's garbage. We even expanded our search to include the trash of our other neighbors. Unfortunately, we never found anything else of value...though my friend Mike did find an old People magazine that had a picture of Madonna on the cover. And despite a small coffee ground stain, he was able to get a dime for it from some kid in his study hall, but our golden gum days were done, our cash cow was gone.

And our entire fortune had been squandered on candy bars and extra orders of fries during lunch. If I could go back, I definitely would have invested those hard earned quarters more wisely. And, of course, I wouldn't have had to go through withdraw from the two pack a day habit that I developed.