Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for December 16, 2024

I can remember my Mom taking a bunch of eggs to sell.

As kids we collected bottles for the deposit. Two cents, three cents and a nickle sizes. If you ever got a gallon milk bottle it was good for a quarter.

I can remember a horse-drawn milk wagon before dawn.

I can remember when Arlo was a blond.

Remembery is a quite an interesting word choice. Coupled with an unnamed darker haired boy I don’t feel this is an Arlo memory but one directly from Mr. Johnson.

Normally I would object to the slam at fruitcake, but I’m letting Jimmy off easy this time.

My dad used to make me get the nuts out of the soft black walnut pods. My hands stayed black for days! I hated it so I kinda think he paid me to do it.

And they paid him with Monopoly Money

I think kids in those days here collected acorns to sell and a quick google tells me, they still do, they get 15 cents per kilo these days.

My Grandmother would pay me and a friend to pick up pecans.

Look how wrong those boys are about fruitcake.

My wife is making candied pecans as gifts this year. (I think I’ll go sneak one)

I love fruitcake but can’t really eat it anymore with the sugars and carbs. Ultimate survival food too.

What happenned to them selling and moving to gator country?

I remember so many “kid money schemes”. Besides the lemonade stand, you could sell – seeds, greeting cards, GRIT tabloid, chocolate bars. Of course, the bottle deposit thing… We had to call on customers door to door. Imagine a ten yr old walking up to a strangers door now to sell something ?!?? Young entrepreneurs.

Several decades ago, pretty “far down in the fall,” one of my uncles succumbed to cancer. We attended the hard shell Methodist funeral, which was held in a region I call “the old country.” After the obsequies the “mercy meal” was conducted in the church basement. Taking a break from that part of the occasion, I decamped to the church yard. Therein grew a fine old persimmon tree. The area below it was covered with ripe fruit.# It amused me that, in a region which was so insular and provincial, and valued self-reliance and the old ways, etc., these folks allowed such a copious and wonderful harvest to rot unused.

(#) Persimmons are inedible — except maybe for masochists — until they fully ripen and drop, or are ready to drop, from the tree. Then, for those of us who like them, they are a form of ambrosia.

We would collect horse chestnuts and throw them in my father’s brush burns. They would go off like fireworks.

My father did this about ten years ago at the age of 85. He picked up pecans from his yard and filled two small brown paper bag lunch sacks. No red wagon but he took them to our local feed store where they would shell pecans for a fee. The man chuckled at my father and shelled his pecans for free while the others there had several huge 40 or 50 pound sack to be shelled. Thanks for the catalyst for my own remembery Mr. JJ!

At that time in France I didn’t know what a pecan nut was.

What a nice komik. I truly LIKED it.

For me it was the neighbor’s black walnut tree. (The neighbor was a funeral home director who didn’t care for walnuts, especially black walnuts.) We would wear rubber gloves, adult size so floppy, to keep our hands from staining greenish black, and scatter our collection over the driveway so the car would wear off the husk. Then around Christmas we would collect the walnuts (no chance a simple car driving over the walnuts a hundred times would damage the shells) and try to shell the nuts. We’d tire after one or two. Black walnuts are not easy to shell.

When I was a kid, my father would send me to the store to get a pack of cigarettes, and they didn’t bat an eye when selling them to a 9-year-old.

I am at the age where childhood memories of the good old days when we lived a simpler life are more common. Remember the 7 cent bottle of pop bought at the local gas station with a candy counter. 5 cents if you drank it there and left the bottle. Although the facial features remind me of Arlo the hair color suggests otherwise. Hair color can change over time but we have never seen a young Arlo depicted with this color hair before. As for his stated dislike of fruitcake, tastes do change from childhood to adulthood. Weighing the evidence I have to agree it probably is not Arlo.

The Creator was born and grew up in a part of Alabama with pecan trees, so this being autobiographical makes sense.

The feed store that was there when I was a kid is still there. The whole world has grown up around it.

“Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through, just an old sweet song has Georgia on my mind”

Ah, the good ole days! But not for everyone were they so good.

The guy in the second panel looks like a young Gus!

Our family was in the pecan buying/selling business for three generations. My grandfather started the company in Troy, Alabama, and his buying points eventually spread throughout Alabama and into Georgia, the largest pecan producing state in the country. I learned how to grade and buy pecans, and I remember my dad teaching us to treat every single person that sold pecans with the same respect. From the young boys and girls pulling the red wagon and their paper bags, to the county’s largest farmer with many truck loads of #1 pecans, they were one in the same. All of these people were our friends. My dad grew too old to work a few years ago, and he and I retired about the same time. He passed away last fall so this time of year brings back many memories, and panel four today could very well be in our warehouse with my dad making friends with Little Arlo. Thank you.

I share his nostalgia. As late as the sixties we could go bottom fishing in the Gulf for red snapper, catch enough to pay for our trip plus some to give to our friends. Now it’s been so overfished that there’s a short season and severe limits how many you can take home.

Read A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote.

People who don’t like fruit cake usually just don’t like it to have the bitter peel in it. I’m one of those people. Without peel it is great!

A deposit is not a tax? The retailer pays the deposit to the Gov.

Did you grow up in southwest Georgia?

We raked leaves in the fall and shoveled snow when it snowed for Christmas money. We did the bottle collecting also.

This reminds me of when I was a kid growing up in northwest Pennsylvania. Instead of pecans it was a plant we called “ground pine.” We’d walk in the woods and hunt for patches of it growing on the ground among the fallen leaves. We’d fill gunny sacks with the stuff and haul it in to town and sell it to aggregators who worked out of their home garages. The fourth panel looks exactly like my memory of those places.I think we got something like 6 cents a pound for the stuff.

I’m a northerner, but this reminds me of when we’d go pick cherries.

My SO has similar rememberies. SO lived a couple of hours west of where Mr Johnson was born.

I love fruitcake. I have a delicious recipe with carrot cake batter and all the dried fruit and nuts. Yummy!

And what a wonderful world it was. And kids didn’t have to be told to do this, we did it on our own initiative.

As a kid I started my first paper route in 1961 when I was 11yo Grand Rapids MI Press, I got up at 3am and papers arrived between 3:30 and 4am. My route was 2 and a half miles, included stops on the largest hill in town along with 3 houses that were about 1/2 mile out of town. I delivered 32 papers 7 days a week, I read an article in Popular Mechanics on how to make an electric bike. After several attempts and some help from my best friends father who owned a body shop[where I started working when I was 14]I finally managed to make my bike electric, which really helped make my route shorter. Never thought about just throwing the papers in the general area of the houses. Had to place each paper inside their storm doors

The kid with glasses reminds me of Gus.

Did that with black walnuts here in California but into burlap (gunny) sacks, and yes, they were weighed on a scale like that at the seed and feed store. 25 cents a pound.

We had five acres of pecan trees, well we still do. We had tractor that had a shaker we would put on. It would shake the trees and the pecans would fall on the canvas we laid under the tree.

By the way, I will eat pecans, but I cannot stand pecan pie.

If you think you hate fruitcake check out my recipe. Google “paul brians fruitcake” It’s converted a lot of people who share that view.

Remember folks, it’s Pi-CAWNS, not PEE-cans!

My auntie’s house had huge pecan trees. They used to sell them in the autumn. We family members got a few bags free and spent all Christmas season picking nuts out of pecans.

I make fruitcake and everyone who tastes it loves it. All depends on what you put in it. Many are made with candied citrus peel which has a bitter taste. I use candied cherries, candied pineapple, raisins and pecans, along with real butter. Totally delicious!

When I was a kid in Tulsa (1957), every saturday I would walk four blocks to the doughnut shop and load up with bags of six. Then I would walk back to my neighborhood and go door to door. When they were all gone, usually after a few hours, I would walk back to the shop to return the money and get. my cut. Baseball cards/bubble gum and a comic book for me at the local convenience store

Same in KY, but it was a pickup truck bed and walnuts

In Saskatchewan, Canada, people who buy beverages in cans or bottles, pay an extra deposit fee of five or ten or twenty cents ( depending on size) which they can get fully refunded by later returning the empties to one of many collection stations in the province that are operated by SARCAN, an organization that uses disabilities people to run it.

Our church in MIssissippi had 3 pecan trees in the back yard. Our youth group would pick them up, and sell them as a fund-raiser for our projects. Fun times in the fall.

What a memory. I did the same thing.

I remember picking blackberries for my mom to bake pies. Poison ivy must have grown very close to the the berries. I would get it head to toe. It was awful, but didn’t stop me from going back. ☺️

Wayne looks like a young Gus.

Awesome memory.

Labor was directly rewarded.

Country’s time?

Our mail man was Zeke. We all knew his name. When he retired the community held a party for him. The milk mans name was Mr. Crandell & and his horses name was “Joe”. In 1955 he began to use a truck for milk deliveries . He missed his horse because while he was in the back of the milk wagon getting ready for the next house’s delivery Joe would clip-clop to the next stop. Then Mr. Crandell would hop out, deliver the milk and get ready for the next house while Joe clip-cloped to the next stop. Joe loved our carrots and apples and feedi ng him was our delight and Joe grew fat. Post war 1950’s were an easier time; gentler and peaceful. A kid in the 50’s had a quainter, cornier time to be a kid. I’m an old guy now but the memory of those days are as fresh as the days I lived them. Thanks for reading.

If you can ever visit a pecan grove where they grow pecans for sale, see if you can watch the cracking and bagging of the nuts. It is quite interesting.

I too like the 4th panel, except for us in 60’s in WI, it was cucumbers and a big sorting machine in some family’s barn, but those same scales (some more primitive with weights you would shift around), 70 cents for 100 pounds of large cucumbers (No. 7’s) , and maybe 14 dollars for 100 pounds of “No. 1’s”, corresponding to the smallest pickle you would see in a store. Pop machine/cooler, lift the lid, put in a dime and then pull a glass bottle out, and run around and play (if you had any energy left) with the other families there with their pickups full of gunny sacks for the days pickin’s, waiting their turn to unload.

Well, i like fruitcake!!