PIN MONEY

Pin Money

Small things seem so much larger in the hands of a small boy. And sometimes, small things leave big memories. Take pins, for example. My mother was always mending clothing. Often she was “letting out” the cuffs of my shirts and pants as I grew taller. The cuffs had to be adjusted and pinned in place before she would begin to sew. So, it was not unusual for me to find pins on the floor, sometimes on the rugs and often in the cracks between the wooden floorboards. At other times, a pin or two would end up on the sofa bed in the sun parlor where I flopped to read comics. If I was lucky, I found the pin before it found me as I came down on it.

It was not so easy to pick up a pin. There was a science to it. First, you had to press a finger down on the head of the pin. This would lift the point away from the floor. You could then grab the shaft of the pin. At least, that’s the theory. The reality was that the finger holding down the head was not so steady. And because the head was so small, the slightest movement of that finger caused the point of the pin to move about erratically as you reached for the shaft. The result was that the finger reaching for the shaft invariably ran into the point.

There wasn’t much blood. How big a hole could a small pin make in your finger? And actually, while the pin was stuck in your finger you could lift your hand, with the pin impaled and dangling from the finger, and easily grab the shaft of the pin and return it to its proper place.

Then I discovered a better way to rescue wayward pins. I had a small horseshoe magnet.

It was only about an inch or two in length, and it just sucked pins up like a vacuum cleaner. One Sunday, I demonstrated it for my Aunt Sara. Thus began my first paid employment, as a pin rescuer/recycler.

Aunt Sara was my mother’s older sister. She had never married. The family rumor, passed on to me by my romantic girl cousins, was that she had been engaged to a young man who was killed in the First World War. Of course, we never asked our parents about this. We were satisfied with the rumor. No reality could surpass a family rumor.

 Aunt Sara made women’s hats for a living. And not just any hats. She made fancy hats for rich women to wear to their parties and dances, and especially—for her non-Jewish clients—festive hats to march under in the Easter Parade each Spring.

Annually, on Easter Sunday morning, a procession of pedestrians, clowns, and antique automobiles advanced slowly along North Charles Street in Baltimore. The women were dressed in their finest outfits, and this included their fancy Easter hats, many of which were made by my Aunt Sara. As far as I can recall, I only saw one Easter Parade. It must have been around 1940 or ’41. We only went there because my older brother was one of the clowns. I think he came over to us as we stood along the sidewalk watching the passing parade. I was very excited to see my brother marching in the Easter Parade. I thought that he must be a celebrity.

At some point I learned that someone who designs and makes hats was called a milliner. Milliner is not a word you come across much, these days. I checked on it, and the source of the word is believed to come from the town of Milan, Italy, where fancy-clothing artisans worked. Hence, a milliner was someone from Milan who made fine clothing for wealthy people.

Aunt Sara was from Latvia.

In modern terms, Aunt Sara was a highly successful small businesswoman. (She was also a small woman—barely five feet tall.) Her “hat shop” was downtown, on Mulberry Street. On some Saturday mornings my mother and I would take the streetcar to Aunt Sara’s place. Mom would then go off to do some shopping in the department stores, and I would stay and keep Aunt Sara company.

Her shop was tiny—a front room where she met customers and displayed her work, and an even smaller back room in which she designed and made their hats. Her workroom was special for me, because it contained all of her beautiful materials: ribbons, felts in a wide range of colors, and exotic feathers with which she decorated her hats. And the best part of her workroom was the floor, which was littered with small fragments of brightly colored fabrics, snippets of satin ribbons, stray shiny sequins, and small pieces of feathers.

These textures and colors were not a part of my everyday life. I felt that my life was mostly brown and gray. I fooled around in the dirt a lot, digging up ant nests or building miniature roads through forests of weeds. My friends and I played ball on dirt fields. And a lot of our activities were carried out on concrete pavements. For card games we sat on cement steps. Walking into the back room of Aunt Sara’s shop was like the Wizard of Oz movie shifting from black and white to color!

The floor of her workshop was like an art studio. I would pick up the scraps and then glue them to a piece of cardboard to make a colorful collage. Sometimes I would use scissors to cut the larger pieces into small squares, and then arrange them into a kind of mosaic. I transformed the waste material on Aunt Sara’s floor into exotic birds and fish. It was much more fun than drawing with crayons, or painting with watercolors. Unlike flat pictures, my artwork had different textures, and was three-dimensional.

Aunt Sara pointed out that many of her pins ended up on the floor, most of them trapped within the cracks and spaces between the old and worn floorboards of her workroom. And that’s where my magnet entered the picture. With that amazing device I could extract pins that could not be reached with fingers—that could not even be lifted by a vacuum cleaner. With my gravity-defying instrument, I could return her lost pins to service.

At first, my technique was very simple. I got down on my knees, bent over, and I just dragged the magnet along the lines that separated the floorboards. The magnet could hold five or six pins at a time before it became so cluttered that I could no longer keep it close enough to the floor to attract any more pins. When that happened, I would pull the pins off and drop them into a small paper cup, and continue trolling for precious metal. Sometimes I would latch on to an extraordinary treasure: a large sewing needle, for example, or a fancy hatpin. Aunt Sara was especially happy at their recovery, and when I would come to her with my “catch” after ten or fifteen minutes of work she would give me a big hug. For a small woman, she could give a very big hug. In general, I didn’t much like to be hugged, but Aunt Sara’s hugs were welcome and memorable because they were so warm and genuine. I think she liked having a little boy around while she worked.

After some time I came up with another recovery method. I tied a long thread around the loop end of the magnet. Then, instead of crouching on the floor in an uncomfortable position, I could stand up straight and dangle the magnet from the other end of the thread, which I held with a finger pressed to my cheek, just under one eye. In this way, I could “sight” down the length of the thread and guide the magnet to the hiding places of the pins. But this was not as easy as it sounds.

The magnet would swing like a pendulum every time I moved. So I had to develop a technique that let me swing the magnet in line with the cracks between the floorboards. But the motion of the magnet had to be slow enough that as it passed over a pin, there was time for the pin to be attracted to, and adhere to, the moving magnet. This technique developed into a fantasy that made the work more fun—and more exciting—for me.

It was wartime, the 1940s, and we were winning the war against Germany by bombing the railroads in the great industrial centers of Germany and the Nazi-occupied lands. Each Saturday (when I wasn’t working for Aunt Sara) I went to the movies and there I saw newsfilms of the bombing runs. So I imagined myself as the bombardier on a B17, flying through the barrages of exploding German antiaircraft shells, and maintaining my calm, steely concentration as I directed my payload to the targets far below. It made picking up pins seem more noble. I had a job to do, and I wasn’t afraid.

                                

Of course, I supplied the sound effects appropriate to my mission: the growl of the four big engines of the B17, the whine of the bombs as they fell through the air toward the target below, and the explosions as the bombs landed and destroyed the enemy’s railroad yards and factories. I did not think about it at the time, and Aunt Sara never said anything, but I wonder now if any of her customers in the front room heard the sound effects that accompanied the recovery of fallen pins, as I carried out my missions in winning the war against the Nazis.

I was much older when I learned the irony of my aerial missions. Latvia, the land of Aunt Sara’s birth, had been invaded and occupied by the Nazi’s very early in World War 2.

Because Aunt Sara did so much sewing, on so many different colors of materials, she had hundreds of spools of thread. When a spool was finally so depleted of thread that the bare wood showed, she tossed it into a small box. She saved the empty spools for me because I could use them in “projects.”

A wooden spool that
sewing thread was wrapped around

A “project” was an activity in which a small boy spent an hour making something of very little use. I discovered that if you glued several spools together, end on end, you could make…a bunch of spools glued together.

You could stand them up to make towers. You could paint them. You could glue popsicle sticks to them, but these combinations never looked as good as you had imagined them before the actual gluing.

                                                               

There was another aspect of Aunt Sara’s workroom that fascinated me—the animal heads! Aunt Sara trimmed and decorated some of her creations with fur. Sometimes it was just a strip of fur sewn along a portion of a hat. But sometimes the animal’s head was still attached! Against one wall she had a rack of little fox pieces. These were heads, still connected to the fur from its back. The heads had shiny black glass eyes that seemed to stare at you. That gaze made the fox look very angry. If you were careful, you could pry open the mouth a little, enough to see the tiny sharp teeth. I did not understand why women wanted angry fox heads attached to their hats. But this was just one of many things that I did not understand about the world around me, when I was six or seven years old.

What I did understand was that Aunt Sara was a special person, and that spending an afternoon in her shop was an opportunity to enter a magical world of color and texture.