Two blocks north from there, at Ninth and Clarke, was another landmark of the neighborhood that we familiarly referred to as the “nigga store”—not in any pejorative sense but because the owners, unlike most of the white-owned businesses, were black. Any money in my pocket, I was out the door to Ninth and Clarke to pick up a dollar’s worth of candy and a bag or two of Okey Doke cheese popcorn.
The challenge for me, starting at the age of seven or earlier, was figuring out how to get that money in my pocket. Most of the older kids and all the adults I saw seemed to have similar concerns. Everybody, on some level, was looking for their particular hustle, their angle to get over. My cousin Terry, Bessie’s thirteen-year-old son, was a ringleader of a group of cats I followed around some-times—they provided me with the fundamentals of being an entrepreneur, 1960s ghetto style.
Opportunity came knocking when the City of Milwaukee began building a stretch of Interstate 43 right down the middle of our neighborhood between Seventh and Eighth Streets. Since all the residential and business properties on Seventh Street were being evacuated and prepared for demolition, Terry and his cohorts figured they’d try their hands at junking.
Eager to join in, even though I had no idea what junking was, I tagged along and helped the older boys literally tear apart places that had been condemned, looking for materials—fixtures, lead, copper wire, window weights, old clothes, rags, even paper. This wasn’t stealing—or so Terry would have argued—because we were really just helping the city to tear down condemned houses. And instead of the demo guys having to cart the stuff off, we helped by piling up shopping carts and rolling them all the way to the east side of Milwaukee, just short of where you crossed the river before hitting the lake. This was where Mr. Katz, a Jewish entrepreneur who bought this stuff by the pound, ran his junking business.
Wanting to increase our profit margin, we tried to be slick a few times, but we were no match for Mr. Katz—he had invented this game. Our silly ploy was to try to weight down our load—before he put our junk up on his scales—by wetting the rags and hiding them under milk cartons buried at the bottom of our heaps.
Mr. Katz knew all the tricks, backward and forward. He knew, almost instinctually, when the weight was too heavy for what he was seeing, as he immediately began to yell in Yiddish and start digging for the wet rags. It never worked. Nonetheless, we didn’t fare too badly in the junking business with Mr. Katz as our regular buyer. That is to say, Terry and his friends didn’t do too badly. My take of five or ten dollars was much less than each of their shares. Still, I was more than happy to spend my money on a few little things I wanted, without having to ask Momma for money for the movies or candy. It also introduced me to the main operating principle of any marketplace: supply and demand. The demand was obviously somebody out there who paid Mr. Katz for the junk we supplied. Not such a shabby deal.
