This is a story about Johnny. He ceased to exist, except in memory, the day he very solemnly informed his bemused parents that Johnny was an unsuitable name for a young man and he’d prefer to be called John. This is also about a perfect day in the summer of 1958, in Ocean City, Maryland.
Every year, Johnny’s grandfather would take a large apartment on the Boardwalk in Ocean City. The whole family would come down for a month, except for Dad, of course. He had to work, and was there only on the weekends.
Johnny was tall and skinny with horn-rimmed glasses and a crew cut the color of straw. He’d entered the commercial world for the first time the previous summer, selling newspapers on the streets, the Boardwalk and beaches of Ocean City. With experience comes knowledge. By the next summer he’d perfected the process.
The Daily and Sunday Sun were delivered from Baltimore to Ocean City by a sea plane, which took off from Baltimore harbor and landed in Sinepuxent Bay. The plane would taxi to a broken-down wooden dock on 6th Street, where the heavy-set lady in a floral-print dress who had the Sun papers franchise in Ocean City would meet it. She would help off load the wire-bound bundles of papers, still smelling of fresh printer’s ink.
Then the lady would clip the wires and deftly count out to each of the paperboys the number of papers they had requested. It was pure capitalism. Each boy paid three cents, cash on the barrel head, for his daily papers, and sold them for a nickel. On Sunday, he paid 10 cents each, and sold them for 15 cents. (Those prices give you an idea of how long ago this was.)
There was a no-return policy. Johnny would have to eat the loss for any unsold papers. But he was good. Really good. That summer he never had any unsold papers. Day by day his profits grew steadily. At the end of the month he had slightly more than $100.
The first stop for the morning paper was at 7 a.m., at the docks. The men going out for deep sea fishing would snap up papers to read on the long trip out to the fishing grounds. Next, it was a stop at the Coast Guard Station at the Inlet. A hurricane in 1933 had cut the Inlet from the Atlantic Ocean back to Sinepuxent Bay. Now, rock walls held the Inlet open. On the north side was the downtown of Ocean City. On the south side was the tip of Assateague Island, where the wild ponies roamed, occasionally within sight of the City.
The best of the paper boys had special bicycles, with a large basket in front over a half-sized wheel. That basket would hold a hundred Sunday papers. Johnny kept a heavy plastic sheet in that basket too. Rains were sudden, and wet papers were a dead loss.
On this day, though, the weather was perfect. There was a steady, off-shore breeze. Being a veteran, Johnny could ride his bicycle with no hands and fold papers for throwing, at the same time. The next big target for his newspaper sales were the apartments at the other end of the Boardwalk, 21 blocks distant.
It was a simple matter to raise the top end of that plastic sheet and angle it with both hands, so the bicycle would sail like a flying fish, up the nearly empty Boardwalk to the other end, where open sand stretched out, and the round concrete gun emplacements still stood in the sun, unused relics from a war that had ended in Johnny’s lifetime. There were a few people out surf fishing. A few people running their dogs on the beach. An occasional treasure-seeker with one of those metal-finding gadgets. But other than that, a City of a quarter million souls was silent and apparently empty at the break of day.
With the dollars from the fishermen safely in his pocket, and the dollars of the apartment dwellers soon to join them, Johnny knew it was going to be a fine day. On reflection from the man he would become, Johnny already knew the secrets of successful capitalism:
Know your own business as well as you can. Buy low, sell high. And go where the customers are. Not a bad set of lessons for a 15-year-old boy to acquire almost inadvertently on a halcyon day in Ocean City.
