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.
