The Banana Flip Story

My story as a young boy back in the early 1930s:
Coming from large family of twelve, we never had anything extra. We had to work hard for everything we wanted. One of my older brothers and I made our spending money by mowing lawns or shoveling snow or coal. One autumn day we decided we would go to this lady's home to shovel her coal (she had the stoker type of furnace then).

We approached the door and my brother, Gene, said "Well, dummy, knock on the door." I did and we waited. A minute was too long of a wait for two hungry kids, but we waited.

Finally, she answered the door. We said we were there to shovel her coal and she told us where to go to do the job. We thanked her and went to the screened-in porch where the coal bin was located under the porch floor. We lifted the cover from over the hole and climbed down.

It seemed like it took about an hour to get the job done, but we finally finished and came back to the lady's back door. Again my brother said, "Okay, ya dummy, knock on the door". I did, and the long wait happened again. At last she opened the door and we told her we were through shoveling her coal. She said something we didn't want to hear again; "Wait a minute".

Soon she came back to pay us. She paid each of us a dime. We were disappointed, but thanked her and made our way to the General Store.

The store, with a not-too-clean wooden floor, was in the little town of Franklin, Michigan. We went to the counter and looked over what they had that was good to eat. We bought what was then called a banana flip-over, a small marshmallow-filled cake. We started to take off the wax paper, and as we did so, in through the door came this tall farmer in bib overalls. He ordered some things and while he was paying for this I began to open my marshmallow cream banana flip and squeezed it too much and out came some cream and it hit the floor. My brother told me to pick it up.

By this time the farmer was on his way out the door and this was my chance to throw the cream out the door. I reached down, picked up the blob of cream, and threw it into the air where it made a couple of flips and landed between the farmer's right ear and cap. We began to laugh softly to ourselves while the farmer never looked back, never said a word, but reached with one finger and scooped the cream from his ear and threw it to the sidewalk and went on his way. We rolled on the floor with laughter and felt that we had gotten our 20 cents worth and were well-paid that day. We thought that the farmer thought that it was bird poop.