I spent the wonder years, freshman-junior high school years in Hawaii. We lived in the town next to Schofield Barracks and before I could drive we had to bike from town to the post. Not far but a ways. There is a commissary on a military base that is the same as a supermarket for use of the military families at a significant savings over civilian markets. I suppose because of the lack of state taxes and military supplier contracts. On Saturdays the commissary allowed youngsters to serve as bag boys at the checkout lanes. A young G.I. Would be in charge of assigning boys to work at each of the 9 or ten lanes on a split shift, AM and PM.
We would all show up about 7 AM. The shifts were from eight to One and from one to five. The first lane was the fast lane ( 15 items or less). Lanes two to about 5 were always open even on slow days. The remaining lanes opened if needed but maybe never. The GI in charge would write the lane numbers for both shifts on slips of paper and we would draw them out of a box. If there were 20 work opportunities and thirty boys, the appropriate number of blank slips would be included. Pretty fair recruiting method actually.
If you were me and my friends, and you rode all the way from Wahiawa It was a great disappointment not to get a job and even worse if you drew lane one or one of the low potential end lanes. Payment for your work only came in the form of tips from the folks who let you help them load the groceries into their cars. You had to hurry because you wanted to get back to your lane before the next customer was ready to go. No tips could be expected at lane one (more about that later) and of course no tips from an unopened lane even though you had to hang around in case it did open later. On an average day your five hour shift could provide five to ten dollars. Not too bad when other kids were paid 50 cents an hour to do other jobs. Month end Saturdays could go even higher. Enlisted mens wives were more generous tippers than officers wives and wives were better tippers than the their husbands.
OK so what? I mentioned this was a sought after job with more kids than jobs every Saturday I also mentioned the disappointment of not getting a job. So, how to mitigate those issues.? My friends and I discovered that the GI in charge was almost always dragging on Saturday morning because there was a Friday night beer garden that sold nickel beers. By Saturday morning he would just like to rest, and he always complained about the chore of making up those little slips of paper. It came to our minds that we could help him and maybe help ourselves if he would let us. We wouldn't ask him to let us cheat, and really all we wanted was a little advantage over the others. Finally we told him we would be happy to prepare the lane number tickets for him if he wanted.
We wanted to have some assurance of being able to draw a "good" lane on almost every draw. We knew we would have to be able to see in the box, and the papers couldn't be obviously "different" from each other, like folded different or dog eared or what ever. The plan that we came up with, and the one that worked for as long as "our" GI stayed on that job was relatively simple and obvious only if you knew the clue.
At home on Friday we took a sheet of common loose leaf notebook paper and cut it in strips top to bottom after cutting off the holes on the left. that left about 4 or five equal width strips, two of which had a red line running through the middle. Then we cut the strips into equal sized squares on which we wrote the one through ten numbers for each shift. The "good" lanes ( 2 thru 6) we wrote on the slips that had red lines on them and the others on plain white paper. And of course 10 or fifteen blanks to balance out the number of participants present. We told our GI that if everyone could see in the box the drawing would go quicker and more efficiently and since the papers were all exactly the same size nothing would be lost in secrecy. He agreed because holding the box over everyones head did slow the process down. From that first Saturday, my friends and I always got the good lanes.
I mentioned that the fast lane was not desirable because one never got to carry out the one single bag for anyone. Another enterprising lad , knowing that a GI wasn't assigned to bag on lane one, put a cup down by the bagging area with a couple quarters in it and began bagging groceries for the customers. When he would hand them their bag he would ask if they needed help. They would of course say no but drop a quarter or two in the cup for the bagging help. As it turned out, a quarter from each customer in five hours could amount to more than the other boys were getting on the other lanes. So we began including lane one on the red striped papers.
am and PM
