A License?  I Can’t Drive!
by C.L. Halvorson 

We got an allowance as children.  A whole twenty-five cents!  Now, in the early 1970’s twenty-cents was way more than it is today, but it still wasn’t much.  Therefore, we needed to supplement our incomes in some fashion.  Oh, we could do extra chores for a nickel or a dime here and there, but that always seemed to be too much work for too little return.  What we needed was a good Get Rich Quick scheme.

Texas has tons of pecan trees.  Every house in our neighborhood had at least one.  These grand old trees are a magnificent sight.  They offer cool shade in the hot Southern heat and you can’t beat the sweet meat of the nuts they bear.  They’re also very messy.  Pecans grow inside a thick leathery husk which is shed when the nut ripens.  Every year when the pecans become ripe the husks and nuts fall to the ground.  A body can’t put a foot down in the autumn without stepping on a pecan.  The delicious morsels also draw birds for miles, which is another mess all its own. 

Mama always harvested our pecans.  She would spend days shelling and cleaning them, readying them for the freezer.  Pecans are very expensive, even in Texas.  Mama was all about stretching the budget.  Most of the neighbors, though, just left their pecans on the ground for the birds or grumbled as they raked them up over and over again.  This set off a light bulb in my little brain.

I realized there could be big money in pecans.  I could offer to pick up the pecans in all the neighbor’s yards and sell them.  My heavens!  No one should be that brilliant at eight years old!  I would need a staff, though.  This would be heavy work.  My sister, Sara was not interested in my little business proposition.  She was hosting a very important tea party that day.  Mrs. Beasley and the stuffed bull would be arriving any moment. 

So, I conscripted Diana, the youngest.  Diana always was a good sport.  She’d try anything.  Diana and I headed for the garage to round up a few cardboard boxes.  Hmm, no empty boxes.  Well, it was almost Christmas so Mama wouldn’t need those boxes filled with decorations.  We could use those.  We unceremoniously dumped the Christmas decorations out of a couple of boxes and hit the sidewalk. We started knocking on doors offering to solve the homeowner’s pecan proliferation problems.  We were only turned down once by a fellow who harvested his pecans like Mama.  

Before long both of our boxes were filled to capacity.  It was all we could do to drag them back to our house.  Now, we were faced with the issue of how to unload all these pecans.  We went into the kitchen and grabbed the stack of small brown paper bags Mama used for Daddy’s lunch.  Back out in the yard, we began filling each bag with what we assumed to be about one pound of pecans.  We had noticed that the supermarket sold them by the pound, so we would as well.  Once we were done filling the bags we had around thirty of them ready for sale.  We put the filled bags back into our cardboard boxes and dragged them to the corner where the four-way stop signs were.  Good traffic there.  I ripped one of the flaps off my box to make a sign reading “Pecans for Sale” using the Magic Marker I had brought for just that purpose.

In less than five minutes we had our first customer. 

“How much?” the lady shouted from her car window.  We hadn’t thought about a price.  We needed to have a sales meeting and quick.

“How much are they at the Safeway?” Diana asked.

“I think 89 cents a pound,” I replied.

“Wow! That’s a lot!” Diana exclaimed.

“Yeah, it is.  How about 50 cents? That way we each get a quarter.  That’s like a whole weeks allowance for every bag we sell,” Diana said this sounded fair to her.

“Fifty cents for a one pound bag,” I told the lady.

“I’ll take two,” she handed us a dollar bill and we gave her two bags.  Wow!  A real dollar!  This was definitely my most brilliant idea ever! 

Business was brisk and we found ourselves nearly sold out in no time at all.  We only had four bags remaining when the policeman arrived. 

“What are you girls up to?” asked the policeman.

“We’re selling pecans.  How many bags would you like, sir?  We only have four left,” I beamed at the officer.

“Best prices in town,” offered Diana.

“So, do you gals have a license to sell on this corner?” he asked.

“A license?” I asked.

“We don’t need a license.  We can’t drive!” Diana objected.  The officer chuckled.  He was becoming quite amused.  He knelt down to look us in the eye.

“Not a driver’s license.  You need a special license to sell on the street.  You have to ask the city’s permission,” he explained.  We didn’t have a license.  “Where do y’all live?”

We pointed in unison to our house three doors down.  The officer gathered up our boxes, the remaining pecans and our sign then led us toward our house.  He knocked sharply at the door.  Daddy opened the door with a look of horror on his face.  I am sure he had envisioned such a scene in his nightmares.  One of his daughters hauled home by the police, but I am fairly certain he expected it to be much later in life.  Clearly, he had been woken from his afternoon nap on the couch by the policeman’s rap on the door.  His glasses were slightly askew and his red hair was a rumpled mess. 

“What did you do?” he demanded of us through clenched teeth.

“Nothing.  We were just selling pecans,” I explained.

“He made us stop,” Diana pouted.

The police officer then reminded Daddy that a peddler’s license was required to sell on the street corner.  Daddy professed no knowledge of our enterprise and apologized profusely to the officer while glaring at us.  Daddy finished up with the officer and dragged us into the house where he ordered us to the sofa.  He paced in front of us for a few minutes before saying anything.

“Why were you selling pecans on the corner?” he demanded.  He seemed quite angry, but for the life of us we couldn’t figure out why.

“To make some money,” I offered.

“What to you need money for?”

“Just to have some,” Diana answered.  For someone who worked for money most of the week, Daddy was having a terrible time understanding our motives.

“You can’t sell things out on the street,” Daddy sighed.  “It’s against the law.”

“Well, that’s just dumb,” I protested.

“Dumb or not, it’s the law!” Daddy roared.  His face softened as he looked at our clearly confused expressions.  Obviously, there was no explaining what we had done wrong.  He sighed again and asked, “How much did you make anyway?”

“Thirteen dollars,” I answered, pulling out a fistful of cash.  Daddy stared wide eyed.  He looked rather impressed.

“Give it me,” he ordered.  I begrudgingly handed over our earnings. “I’m going to keep this.  That’s your punishment for what you did.”

Guess that’s what they mean by overhead.