…by Bob Tschida
In the late 1930s when I and my friends from our Tacoma neighborhood would venture toward town, we would always have a gunnysack tucked over our belts. That way we would not lose it or have to carry it in our hands. The purpose of the gunnysack was to make our forays pay off in more than one way. We had to be self-sufficient and self-reliant in those days. There was no such thing as asking your folks for small change. They didn’t have any spare nickels or dimes. And carrying a lunch was out of the question. We were on our own and we accepted that fact.
We always took different routes to town or to the waterfront or the Puyallup Avenue area. We never made any special plans to go here or there; we just went. Sure, we all had more chores to do at home, but during summers we had more free time to roam. We pretty much knew when drivers of small trucks would return to their companies so we would go there and ask if they had any old cookies or damaged ice cream bars. When we were on our way in the mornings we always felt it was our job to watch any major activity — a street being paved with concrete, maybe a city line crew putting up a pole, or a steam shovel scooping up dirt to be loaded into a dump truck, or anything else that caught our attention…