I was brought up in small towns in Massachusetts. My father worked in road construction so we moved from town to town as he got jobs. We were poor because he was an alcoholic and would drink away most of his wages. As a child, we didn’t have Christmas like other families. My parents didn’t even put up a tree most of the time. When I was 12 we ended up in a small country town that had a regional dump near the river. All the garbage trucks from several well-to-do towns would come on Saturday to empty their trash in the dump.
One Saturday I went down to the dump to watch the trucks come in and dump their loads. As I was standing there I noticed a bicycle frame get dumped out onto the ground. Once the truck left I went over to check it out. There was little damage to the frame and it even had a rear wheel attached. That’s when I got hooked. I realized that if I would put the effort in, I could have anything I desired. I brought the bike home and decided to go back and look for a front wheel. In one of the piles of garbage from the week before I found it. There was a bike with a damaged frame and rear wheel but a front wheel that was in fine condition. Waalah! Now I had a complete working bicycle. I re-painted the frame, patched the leaking tire tube and had a perfectly good working bicycle. Now I had to learn to ride it. From that day forward, I became the richest kid in town. I would go to the dump every Saturday morning early before anyone else was up and wait for the trucks.
There was a scrap-man that lived down the street from the dump. As a younger man, he would go over to the dump and gather up the metals. Now he was old and preferred my getting it for him. He would buy aluminum, copper, brass items from me as long as they were clean. I would spend the morning gathering any scrap aluminum, copper, or brass and sell these to the scrap-man. By the end of the morning, I would walk away with $10 to $20 pocket money too. For a 12 year old, that was good money in the 60s. I learned early in life that if you want something bad enough, you had to work for it. Now I was a middle-man gathering up used goods and re-selling them. Some days I would find a boxes full of magazines and comic books and even toys. Sometimes I would even find jewelry, like rings, bracelets, etc.
Of course, like any young man your priorities shift with age and you find your interests change. At 15 years old, I was beginning to be more interested in girls and would spend less time at the dump and more time with the girls in town. Eventually, I no longer had the interest in my weekend excursions and like always, my family was on the move again. This time the family fell apart. My mother left my dad and my siblings went their own way. Soon after that I moved too and started a new life in Connecticut staying with one of my sisters until I got my own place and a real job. I have to say, that time of my life was the best. I learned how to make and manage money. I learned how to repair just about anything and become independent. That was my training ground for my future successful career as a maintenance technician.
Farr Files 