Ralph Henderson (drug store) bought popular pills and witch elixirs in bulk and packaged his own.  He had a standing offer of a penny apiece for salvaged pill bottles.  Mr. Henderson would clean these up and kept hundreds of them in the cement bomb shelter on the alley.  I would go in there and steal a few generic bottles and smear dirt on them to look as though I'd found them.  I would then run around front and sell them to Ralph.

It's funny the things we feel guilty about.  Selling stolen bottles didn't bother me (because I didn't get caught), but this one nags my conscience to this day.  I wanted to publish a 3rd-grade newspaper on the school's Mimeograph machine (gelatin press with colored inks spread on it).  Henderson was a generous soul and made a deal with me — he would provide the ink and gelatin in exchange for a drugstore ad in the paper.  That's silly, of course, because Ralph had a lock on all school supplies, to say nothing of sundries and the soda fountain.  The damn Mimeograph didn't work and the newspaper never happened.  I should have told Mr. Henderson, but was afraid to, and was unable to reimburse him.

That's not much of a story, this one is better.  I gutter sniped cigarette butts, stripped the tobacco out, and saved it in jars.  Bull Durham sacks were stuffed and sold to high school boys.  Profit margin was low because Bull Durham was a nickel/sack and I could only get one or two cents/sack for mine.

There was an ancient display barn at the city park where the carnival people stored stuff.  There was merry-go-round horses, spare mechanical parts for rides, and trunks full of concession prizes.  In one of the trunks was a stash of new rolls of tickets for different rides.  I stole a roll of tilt-a-whirl tickets and another for the ferris wheel and hid them under a floorboard of an unused room, which was easier to break into than the main part of the barn.  At first, I was only interested in how pretty they were as a complete roll.  But when fair time rolled around, a friend and I noticed the same type of tickets being used.  Face value was 10 cents and we sold a few for 5 cents.  We were nearly caught, "Aha, you must be the kids who stole some of our tickets!"  I toyed with the idea of salvaging torn tickets by gluing them together, but that didn't work out.

I think it was the little farm house Johnny West lived in east of Burden.  Annie, I, and some of our cousins decided to trash it.  We pulled that sucker down with our bare hands until every wall and the roof lay flat on the ground.

John Ryan and I broke into an abandoned house south of the tracks on Main Street.  I think the old lady who lived there had died, and the house was still furnished with lots of interesting things.  Our crime was witnessed, and the owner went to our fathers.  We had not broken anything to get in nor taken anything, but Frank and Albert shared the cost of three broken windows, a torn screen door, and a screened-in porch, which disrepair pre-dated our entry.  Daddy called me in and showed me a huge pile of quarters that was equal to his share of the cost.  That impressed me more than a whipping would have.

John Ryan and I were once busted by his dad, who was City Marshall.  Bees built a nest in a crack between building stones at the top of the same iron stairs that I believe you had bombed cars with ice.  We thought we were doing a favor for the civic groups who used that 2nd floor entrance as a meeting place.  We ran up and down the stairs with handfuls of mud to pack the bee's entrance.  We didn't get stung too badly while doing that.  Anyhoo, Frank Ryan locked us in the City Jail cell, and Daddy allowed we should stay there overnight.  Mom and Inez Ryan brought supper to us that evening.  The real punishment began the next day when we were made to clean the mud away from the bee's nest — we both had the shit stung out of us.