Summer Entrepreneur

Sunday's column (feel free to critique content or style)

Summer's carefree days: fertile ground for entrepreneurs

I was a kid at a time when parenting was sort of a hands-off process. Kids were left with lots of free time to do as they wished — ride bikes, play ball, build bombs, whatever.

Our parents had moved to the city from farms, where they had grown up butchering chickens and slaughtering hogs and other activities that would bring social services to the door today. But once in the city, no one had chores. It didn't occur to parents that their kids might need guidance since they had never needed any. Unless you count getting their backsides tanned when they neglected their chores.

Besides, these newly urbanized parents were preoccupied learning to be mod, which for men meant growing pork chop sideburns and for women meant growing beehives on their heads — which by the way, was the strangest of all the strange fashions America has suffered through in two centuries. In fact, it was their parents' weird hairdos, not Vietnam, that inspired teenagers to rebel in the '60s.

If parents felt a twinge of guilt for failing to deliberately parent, Dr. Spock was there to reassure them that the happiest kids are the ones left to do as they pleased. And so in the summertime parents would leave for work and stay gone all day with no worries about what their kids might get into during the day. That strategy might actually work today, since today's kids, when left to themselves, choose to sit for hours at a time cramming junk food down their throats in front of the latest electronic device until they fade into a sugar-induced trance that lasts until supper time.

But in those days, with no computers, no electronic games and nothing interesting on TV, we kids went outside looking for something to do. That meant getting together with other boys in the neighborhood, where we proved the long-established social science theorem: the wisdom of a young man's decision making is inversely proportionate to the number of boys in the pack.

The nearest thing we learned to responsibility was to set aside the last hour before the parents came home to erase all the evidence.

In truth, the mischief we got into was pretty tame by today's standards — climbing the neighbor's fence to steal green apples off his tree, blowing up our sisters' Barbies with firecrackers, tossing cats into the swimming pool. You know, the usual stuff.

But occasionally we unsupervised kids actually channeled our energy into something useful, something entrepreneurial even. Of course, a fine line separates the entrepreneur from the scam artist.

It started with fake Kool-Aid. Desperate for cash to spend at Pennington's Ice Cream Parlor, we decided to set up a Kool-Aid stand. Unfortunately, we had no Kool-Aid mix.

So we invented "Cool-Aid: a refreshing new taste." Cool-Aid consisted of water, ice, sugar and food coloring. Note the absence of any actual flavoring.

We sold pitchers of it, one paper cup at a time. No one ever suspected a thing. Even after we could afford the real thing, we didn't bother. Why alter a winning formula? If customers asked what flavor they were drinking, we would ask them what it tasted like. Whatever their answers — cherry, strawberry, raspberry — we confirmed it with "good guess," which was not exactly a lie.

The Cool-Aid stand expanded to include frozen Cool-Aid treats made in ice trays, then popcorn, and eventually hot dogs, slices of watermelon, pickles, freshly butchered rabbits (that was actually an attempt to salvage another little business venture that was not working out too well; I'll save that story for another day) and whatever was on the 10-cent table at the neighborhood market, which we would mark up 200 percent.

My job — sort of unofficially — was food tester. Left to my own, I must confess, I would have eaten up all our profits. Fortunately for our shareholders, my older brother assumed the task of inventory control, which consisted of pounding my head when the product disappeared faster than the cash box filled.

It was nice to have a few coins in our pockets. But I admit I always hoped we wouldn't sell out. Disposing of the unsold merchandise was my favorite perk of business ownership.

When the parents came home and saw what we were up to, they all beamed with pride at their little geniuses. They would even drop a few coins as customers before retreating into the house. That gave us just enough time to disappear before they found the remains of Barbie and Ken.