Selling
chances was a good way to get a prize. The chances were sold by children who
were too young to get a job. A man would come around and give the child a big
cardboard with many names on them like Gertrude, Ella, Rose, Cynthia, Josephine,
and many, many more. They were all girls’ names and it seemed that mostly the
girls would do the selling. Droozy
and Fanny would go from house to house to ask if the person who answered the
door would want to buy a chance. If they did they would punch out a name on the
board. A small round circle would come out and in between the circle would be
the amount of money the buyer would have to pay for the name. It didn’t cost
too much - anywhere from a penny to a quarter. One of the circles would be the
winner. You couldn’t see that from the outside since the winning punch would
be in the middle of the circle between the two thin layers of cardboard. The
winner would get a big five pound box of chocolates. The sales person would also
get a big box of chocolates. It
took a long time to sell a whole card’s worth of little circles and to collect
all that money. Droozy would have to spend a month or two visiting two or three
hundred houses before she was able to collect her prize. She hated doing it,
begging people to buy chances from her. Often they would get mad and slam the
door in little Droozy’s face, or they would scream at her and tell her to go
away, or they would just not open the door. Worst of all sometimes a dog would
come out, bark and try to nip at Droozy’s leg. It
didn’t take long before Fanny and Droozy had an idea. They decided to sell one
card of punches between them. They carefully punched out the circles until they
found the one that said “winner” in the middle. Then they replaced the
punches, except the winning one which they kept. They sold all the rest. That
way each of the girls got a five pound box of candy. Of course, the customer
that bought the punches won nothing! The candy was so delicious - creams, nuts, raisins, nougat, marzipan and toffee were in
the middle of the pieces. Droozy’s
favorites were the nut-filled ones. She would eat so many that she got sick. All
the time she was eating them she was afraid she would be found out for having
cheated the people who bought the circles from her. When one of her customers
asked her later who had won the box of candy, Droozy had to tell her. The
customer suspected what had happened. From then on Droozy was afraid to face
this person and hid every time she saw her. It taught the child never to do that
again, but oh, that candy tasted so good! |
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