Between the two of them, my parents taught me everything a carny kid should know about money, the be-all and end-all of our life on the road. Mom showed me how to press the wrinkles out of bills with the flat of her hand long before she gave me the chore of ironing Daddy's handkerchiefs. And when I finally learned how to break a big bill, Daddy taught me how to make sure it wasn't a counterfeit.

"Here's how you test it," he said as he held a double sawbuck in both hands. "Don't be afraid to give it a good tug." If the bill made a flapping sound, it was the genuine item. If it ripped in two, I was supposed to give both halves back to the mark as fast as I could.  

 

My first job was picking up darts and waiting on customers in Mom's balloon game, where it cost 25 cents to play in the 1950s and ‘60s. Hard and soft were flung, slammed, pushed, and shoved across our counter. Quarters were like quicksilver pouring out of people's pockets and purses into my outstretched hands. When I reached into the pockets of my money apron to make change, the coins made a jingling, jangling sound that meant I was doing good business.

My hands got filthy from touching so much cash. Mom had a saying: "The blacker the suds, the better you've done tonight." After the carnival closed, we took turns washing our hands in basins of soapy water. Then we spread yesterday's Boston Record on the table in our trailer and dumped out the contents of our money aprons. All kinds of coins rained down and rolled around. The pennies got pushed to one side, my side. I heaped them into a mountain of Lincoln's heads, brown peppered with gray, because in those days there were still quite a few wartime steel cents in circulation. Counting and wrapping quarters and halves was a grown-up job, but I was allowed to help with the nickels and dimes. I stacked them into towers of ten, ready to be picked up and funneled into rolls of colored paper.

 

I'm finally able to look back at these scenes and consider the paradox that confused me as a child: Mom said we went on the road to make money. Daddy's philosophy was we made money to stay on the road.

"I taught you how to make money while your father taught you how to spend it," Mom liked to say.

 

It's true that I squandered my salary of 25 cents a night and all the pennies on jukebox tunes and comics. Daddy dropped considerably greater sums on an air conditioner for the trailer, a tape recorder with an amp that broadcast his voice calling people in, and C.B. radios to keep in touch on night moves. 

 

Mother referred to Daddy's purchases as "expensive toys that he bought for himself." Daddy couldn't persuade her that he bought every one of these modern conveniences to make life easier for us on the road. My frugal mother bought nothing for herself. She hoarded quantities of Mercury dimes, Standing Liberty quarters and Walking Liberty halves. She was betting that the price of silver would rise or the coins themselves would become rare and valuable.

 

Today, I open cloth bags printed with the names of banks along our old route—the First National Bank of Boston, the South End Bank and Trust of Hartford, and the Cape Cod Trust Company of Harwich Port and Orleans. Out tumble coins that came across our counter when I was a child, before the inundation of copper-nickel alloys. The silver exudes a familiar, almost forgotten scent. When I mention it to a coin dealer, he nods knowingly, "Old silver oxidizes and gives off a gas." The scent of it takes me all the way back to carnival lots where Mom couldn't get a good night's sleep unless she went out looking for money after the show had closed. She'd grab the flashlight and shout over her shoulder to Daddy, "We'll be back in a little while."

 

As we went out the door, Daddy's eyes were fixed upon our rolled-up money aprons, heavy with hard and cushioned wads of soft, that lay on the table waiting to be unpacked and counted. For Mom, the lure of lost money was stronger.

We hoped to recover coins that had flown through the air earlier in the evening when the arms of the Loop­O-Plane swung and simulated inside loops, and the arms of the Octopus flailed and its tubs spun, making marks' stomachs turn upside-down and inside-out, shaking the loose change right out of their pockets. 

As we wandered from one darkened thrill ride to another, Mom's four-battery flashlight illuminated a trail of coins: "A lucky streak," she called it as she scooped up a quarter, two dimes, and a nickel with a practiced hand. I danced in delirious circles around her. My white sneakers got green stains from poking aside wet blades of grass, but all I found were bits of discarded prizes and silvery paper from cigarette packs.

 

I felt ashamed to go back to our house trailer empty-handed. Mom knew it, too, because she pressed the coins into the center of my palm and closed my fingers around them. It was my little fist, fifty cents rich, that rapped on the door in a series of knuckle beats that let my father know it's us. When the door swung open, I rushed in and plunked down what we'd found, though the table was already laden with the money that Daddy had almost finished counting and wrapping by himself.

"Did you find all of these?" Daddy asked as he carried out a mock-serious inspection of the coins.

"Mom did," I had to admit, "but she gave them to me."

Instantly, I regretted what I'd said because all trace of amusement vanished from his eyes. Daddy shook his head and said to Mother, "Why do you have to run around looking for nickels and dimes when you outgross everybody else on the midway?"

Mom was quiet. It wasn't until years later that she told me, "When I was young and married to my first husband, plenty of times we had no money for food, or gasoline to move to the next spot. Then I used to comb the lots for lost money and nine times out of ten I'd find some." Mother never got out of the habit of looking. When I was little, we went for the fun of it, even if Daddy, who never missed a meal in his life and never coasted into town on an almost empty gas tank, disapproved.

 

I suppose that the glittering spectacle of all that money laid out on our table like a banquet fit for King Midas made me think that we were rich. I was, after all, a spoiled only child. I got the newest toys for Christmas and the prettiest pastel outfits for Easter. How could I have guessed that we were poor?

"You didn't find out until you took the college entrance exam," Mom tells me. "We had to check off our income bracket on the application for financial aid."

Daddy filled out the questionnaire as earnestly as he did our taxes. He provided the numbers, rounded off to the nearest dollar, from last season's ledger: how much we grossed minus deductions for privilege, stock, gas, and repairs on the road. What was left was very little. Mom took an October-through-April job at Woolworth's to see us through the winter. Daddy loafed because loafing was proof that a showman was telling the truth when he "cut up jackpots" about having had a fantastic season.

 

Now it seems to me the fact that we never accumulated a big bankroll proves that Daddy's philosophy wins out over Mom's. It was the carny way of life rather than the carny livelihood that compelled us to go on the road every spring and continues to exert a powerful pull on me. I'll never dispossess myself of the feeling that I was rich.