Quarters still mean something today
The countryside is beautiful and bright as I drive around, listening to my favorite Willie’s Roadhouse channel on Sirius XM, instead of the 24-hour news cycle that makes the days dark and depressing. Everything is going along just as it is supposed to go. I never know what will happen, though, just that something will — at least I think it will — and wonder when.
So a while back, J & S Wastewater Systems in Urbana installed a multi-flo treatment system at the farm. Good job, no problem. Works well. They check and service it regularly. I have no reason to contact them, nor them me.
Then one day, they called. What now? I thought. The woman on the phone identified herself and said she had a question for me: “We’re training a new employee and wondered if it would be OK for them to go out to your place and show him how the system works.”
“Sure,” I said quickly, relieved that that’s all it was, and then added, just to be light-hearted, “for a quarter.”
She hesitated a second, then laughed and said, “Uh, OK. … Sure. We won’t be there long. They just want to show him how the system works and how it’s serviced.”
I chuckled to myself when I hit the red button on the phone. When someone asks a small favor of me, I’ve sometimes said I will do that favor for a quarter —jokingly implying that it will cost them something to get me to do even the simplest thing. Because of course I will do it. Why wouldn’t I do a simple thing if I’m able? So I make a silly joke of it. Of course, not everyone who hears it is immediately on the same wavelength as me and my quirky sense of humor. As hard as that it to imagine.
I have no idea where that bit first came from. But I have always had a fondness for quarters ever since I was growing up a hundred miles or so south of the Urbana-Champaign metropolis, as I thought of it back then, in the small village of Bellair — not far from the old Moonshine general store that’s known throughout the Midwest for its great-tasting hamburgers. A quarter was a lot of money for me as a young kid. I mowed yards with a push mower for as little as 75 cents and on up to $1.25.
With that money at the general store, I could buy a 12-ounce bottle of Royal Crown Cola for a nickel and a package of Planters peanuts to put in the pop for a nickel almost every day, if I wanted to, and still have 15 cents left over from each quarter. Sometimes I’d get a Baby Ruth or a Heath candy bar for another nickel. Even that would leave a dime for a double-dip ice cream cone. Or I could choose to get a big milkshake for a quarter at the drug store in Oblong when I could get down there.
When I was growing up, times were different and a quarter was special. It would buy the things I wanted. I had to save some, too, for when we went to town “to do the tradin’.” I’d get a 14-cent ticket at the movie theater for the Saturday night western cowboy shows with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Lash LaRue, Tonto and The Lone Ranger, or The Cisco Kid and others and still have a dime for a bag of popcorn, and a penny left over from the quarter. I fancied myself a financial wizard.
Prices are far different now, of course, and life a whole lot more complicated, it seems. But on that beautiful and bright day a while back, I later stopped at the farm, music still playing on the radio. When I got out of the car and walked up to the door, I looked down and saw a quarter setting right in the middle of the welcome mat and laughed out loud.
Now that may not seem like a big deal, but it made my day. It brought a smile to my face and conjured up some more good memories of days gone by. Can you just imagine a care-free little boy buying a bottle of pop, a bag of peanuts and a candy bar for 15 cents, and still having a little change left over in the pocket of his bib overalls?
He’d drink that ice-cold pop that would almost burn his throat, and add a few salty peanuts to chew with each swallow. When he was done, he’d hop on his bicycle and join his friends to race around the village square, or head off to the Old Crick Bed and fish like Huck Finn, or go down to the one-room schoolhouse to play basketball, or ride out to the cemetery to look at the old tombstones from early settlers or whatever they wanted to do.
That’s not just worth a quarter. That’s priceless.