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Here recently I began a record of my life to see how far back I could remember things in my life. Good bad and everything between. When I am just setting around kicking back I have began thinking about my life. Funny how CRS works. I realized that I can remember things all the way back to age 5 but can't remember a lot of what I did yesterday. I can remember getting my first polio shots and as small as I was back then it took 3 people to hold me down while the doctor stuck me in the arm. I was 5 and had to have them before I began school. I was 6 years old when I got to catch my first fish on an old cane pole the old man that lived next store to us had. He was 85 years old and lived in a 2 room cottage next to us. He owned about 5 acres next to us and had 3 big buildings full of stuff. I don't think he ever threw anything away. We had a couple Black dirt ponds about 5 or 6 acres in size about waist deep behind the house where we lived and they had Carp, Bluegills, Bullheads and Grass Pickerel fish in them and once in a while the old man or I would catch a Bass. I can remember that old man like it was yesterday. We became good friends and my mother was cooking for 4 growing boys with me being the youngest plus my father when he was home. He was a truck driver and not home a lot. Mother always cooked a little extra and every evening my mother would send him a plate of food for his supper. He had these beautful Flower gardens every year and people would drive out of Chicago to buy plants and flowers from him all summer on weekends. He also taught me how to catch snapping turtles from the dirt ponds with turtle lines. He built me a few cages to keep the big turtles in and people would come and buy them to eat and I could make extra money selling them. The bigger the turtle the more they paid and there was some I got 5 dollars for but they were almost as big as a number 8 washtub. Most of them I got 2-3 dollars for. He also showed me how to catch night crawler worms after each rain at night with a flashlight. He built me a worm bed of black dirt and screened bottom so we never had to dig worms when we went fishing. Just go get some out of the bed and go fishing. He also taught me how and when to catch the baby painted turtles which I was able to sell to pet stores in the area got 25 cents each. He taught me several ways to make money back then. On weekends African Americans would come out of Chicago to fish in the Desplaines River that ran through my hometown and they would buy night crawlers in Chicago and paid a dollar for 10 crawlers. I went up there where they were fishing and began selling them night crawlers 25 in a can for 50 cents. All the people on my road I lived on would save cans for me and soon the people would begin bring back their old cans and I would just swap cans with them for 50 cents. Oh well I know ya'll are tired of reading about my life as a child. You might find it fun to just see how far back you can remember in your life when your sitting around just kicking back............JMHO