I said I have a lot of really small pieces of junk, and in a bigger box, gotta keep them smaller pieces of junk from flying around, getting destroyed or rolling down a heater vent where they stay forever until a newer but junkier furnace is installed in the name of efficiency.  I can't lose such treasures as you're about to see like a taped up dice or a stereo knob. Gee, I'm selling the fun of this post aren't I?

Show Me The Money! Silver nickels and golden dimes, all you hear are the devils chimes. Arcade tokens have no value, so maybe I should throw that in the trash. It's a ROUND TUIT however. Get it? Nothing to see here. Silver dollars and fifty cent pieces. I guess when I got one of these odd coins I put in in an "odd coin" box. Move along.

...and a non coin oddity. $2. I guess I thought it was odd to have a two dollar bill, nothing more to see here. The poker chip with a rubber band is a reminder that I had a good night gambling. Or not. Now, we'll get good.

I used the fiddy cent piece to hold down the wrapper. Here's the real crux of the junk blog. This stuff is truly junk. Junk with a story. Junk that should have been tossed when it was used up. Each piece has a story. Interesting to me only. Are you still here? Maybe I should post about another camera like the good ol' bad ol' days of the junk blog. 

Long long ago when I was still just a shaver, I would do anything to try and make a buck. It was so I could buy the latest Al Jaffee or Don Martin paperback from MAD.  When we got a new washer, I got the box. Large boxes were like gold when you were a kid with no money. I had the bright idea to put the box out on my front porch and open a store where I sold whatever I had to sell. I just needed to make that fiddy cent piece. One weekend, I went with mom to a really far off drug store chain called Cunninghams. It would soon become Grey Drug and then CVS Drug Or Revco Drug or, awww hell. It was there I bought several multi packs of Zeno brand grape bubble gum sticks. I think it was a 10 pack for 39 cents. I could sell them for 10 cents a pack, it was a tasty gum, and I'd double my money. This is a wrapper I have saved and somehow it's still here. Yeah, there is a history around Zeno gum which you can search on, but it seems like it started as a Chicago thing. I begged mom to take me back to Cunningham drugs so I could get more of this profit machine. However, i realized that it was so cheap because it was on close out and they didn't have it any more. Thus ended my profitable days as a Zeno Gum reseller.  Later I destroyed that box sitting in it under a water outlet as it disintegrated. 

As for the Daredevils... We all know Willy Wonka. When the "Everlasting Gobstopper" came out, it was disappointing because it didn't "Everlast". However, to a kid, it was good candy. Everything is a good candy to a kid. Funky marshmallow flavored chalk sticks that you licked and dunked in bad fruity drink mix. That was FUN! Well,  the Wonka company came out with fireballs that had a cool down ring before becoming fireballs again.  Tasty! I loved them. I took a pocket full of them with me on a trip to Florida. Mom would make us dress up in suits so there were a lot of pockets to store crap. She still believed that like the 50's and 60s, we should be wearing a suit when doing something special like flying some place. Hot and itchy when we went down to Florida, torture when we came back in a nice sunburned condition. So, as we stood at the Cleveland Hopkins airport baggage turn style, I popped my last Daredevil in my mouth and well, as a itchy, hot, pained child wearing a suit, the only fun I could think of was to place the wrapper on the belt and see if it would be there if we didn't get our luggage before the conveyor went around. For some reason, considering the belt went outside and I didn't set the wrapper under anything, it came around! I picked it up and smiled knowing that 40 years later, I'd make a junk blog about it.

Here is another worthless memory more familiar to denizens of Cleveland. In the early 80s' we had television ads akimbo for Ed Stinn Chevrolet who used to parade his cars through his smallish lot. We had Commander Ray's West Park Chevrolet. He wore an admirals get up and pimped Chevys from his little lot. We had C.Miller Chevrolet. A guy that always blew a kiss at the end of his commercials. Then we had the GIANT John Lance Ford, who was more known for his radio spots than TV spots. So, when I went to buy a second used car, I went to John Lance and bought a 1979 Chevy Monza originally purchased from Commander Ray's Westpark Chevrolet. I won't say I got ripped off on the deal, but I shouldn't have bought the damn Monza in the first place. My brother had a used 1976 Monza and it was a rust bucket when he owned it. Mine fell apart, and it was my first time financing and learning all about used car dealers that see ya coming. Every car has been new since, mostly. 

Roger Rabbit. An incredible move. One of those films that I saw more than any other film. I just went to the movies with anybody who would go with me. I just thought it was state of the art animation and at the time, it was a masterpiece. Watching it now, it seems a really dated film, but that's because the cartoon is now standing next to you now. No need to draw it using ink and paint. Eh Rokkit? Eh Groot? Then a CM premium that still makes me laugh. Why not promote your movie "D.O.A" with Aspirin? What were they thinking?

Here's an oddity for me. I'm sure that my manager Rich smoked his cigs in the back room and used this ashtray.  When NWS got their fingers into what was a Radio Shack like store in the 60's and 70's, it was a shadow of it's former self. All we sold was re manufactured crap, Gemini speakers and DJ equipment, old GTE 70's dial phones and Citizen pocket B&W televisions, Verit Cordless Phones and TNIX VCRs.  Junk. Nifty ashtray though.

Another long shuttered car dealership. Pontiac is long gone and now it's a Honda dealership exclusively. My mom purchased a Pontiac 6000 which was the brother of the Chevrolet Celebrity. It was also an Iron Duke 2.5 L 4 Cyl engine. It drove like a truck and handled like a Slurpee. Mom was given a few of these key holders and I got one for the racing keys I had for my Chevette/Monza. I think this got put away when I bought my brand spanking new Dodge Omni America in 1989 and it came with two fancy leather like Chrysler pentastar disc key chains. Of course, I used this whenever I went for late night "joyrides" in mom's car before I even had a license. Yep. Long story. "Yes officer, how do we get back to Avon Lake?" 

Now, the play toys thing. I think the dog is from Oliver and Company. It may have been a McDonalds happy meal toy or just something I got years back as a grab bag from a thrift shop. Ahhh, but the center robot. This is a genuine TOMY wind up robot. Still works. We were poor. Really poor. So to get something like that, it was a BIG thing. So stupid to think that playing with a wind up mini robot was that much of a thrill, but memories as a kid...when cardboard boxes were entertainment for weeks. The square headed toy is from a Playschool fire fighter play set. Fisher Price had the more popular round "Little People" so Playschool battled back with SQUARE people. I had a McDonalds play set, and you could jam the fake food trays in that space between their head and body and make them "carry" their burgers and fries. Yep. It's what we did before the internet.

So there's a bit more junk here, so I'll tell you that if you don't have a DIE, you can simply put white masking tape over a set of "Dice Bowling" dice and you have a horribly off balance "fake die". What was I thinking? The two knobs with the blue centers are from the 'free" Soundesign component stereo I was given when a neighbor moved away. It was before Soundesign started making those "all in one" stereos with the 10,000 band EQs (3 settings, 10,000 silver sliding bars). It was an 8 Track, tuner and amplifier with a separate BSR turntable and two speakers. I remember it very fondly because it was my first real piece of "HIFI" equipment. It sounded like hell and broke a few years later like the cardboard mess that it was. There is a sheered lug nut that I likely found on the street and some sort of battery door that must have been for something or why would I have kept it. Right? RIGHT?

More stubs from the movie Roger Rabbit. It's to prove that I really did attend that movie more than anyone should. Hey, when you work on the weekends and go to school during the day, you have a lot of time to kill. So, you try to open your own business. Here's an idea for a really good business. Get yourself a box, fill it with swabs and VCR cleaning crap, and sell VCR cleaning for 19.95, Get a business license and some name tags and advertise on those green "Good Neighbor" notices for yard sales and pets for sale in your local grocery store. You even get an office and office furniture which you split with your best friend and band mate. You convert one room to a studio and record many a song there. Your partner pulls out after two weeks and you lose interest in the job a few weeks later, but you keep the studio for two years and pay for the rent out of what little you make at other gigs. All the better to travel to "The Amazement Park" with your friends from McDonalds. They have a new exciting ride called "Toboggan Run" which becomes your first "roller coaster" which makes you think that if all roller coasters were as lame as that one, why were you afraid to ride them in the first place?

Finally, the flat stuff. The "WGCL" sticker came when I won a "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" movie prize pack. I was listening to WGCL late at night and they gave it away and I was lucky caller 9. Yay! It was two tickets to the movie "Girls Just Want To Have Fun". Gee, a movie based on a song title? It was in the theaters for two weeks? Good golly, glad I missed it. The prize pack also came with two five function LCD watches which were dollar store quality with "GJWTHF" inserts over the generic "5 Function Neon LCD Watches" advertising.  It also came with two plastic "jackets" that had the movie sticker placed on the back and spots where the WGCL stickers could be placed in the front. It was true garbage. I think I used one jacket without the stickers for a rain coat but it shredded quickly. 

I also have a duplicate of the sticker we needed to place on our mirrors when we parked at the high school and a "pride" sticker given out by my principal when rather than buying computers. She spent money on a stupid school colors banner down our hallway.  The blue stickers were from one of the best experiences of my high school years. My choir was invited to sing in Downtown Cleveland at the Terminal Tower center. This was before they redeveloped the whole place into "Tower City". Care Bears were a product of American Greetings in Cleveland and they made Public Square into "Care A Lot" square. We set up and sang in the bowels of the Terminal, and it was a terminal. Dirty, smoky, and unchanged for years. A mish mosh of retailers and a food court with a McDonalds where I had a Quarter Pounder With Cheese purchased with a book of 50 cent gift certificates that we were all given. To see that place in it's original form was awesome. What a hole. The way that mass transit used to be. I had one of these stickers on my coat that I wore for three more years until it was too worn. The next two years they changed the entire place and made it a modern mall with huge fountains and a big theater and food court  and a huge record store with a pink Cadillac inside the door. We sang in the classic Arcade for the next two years, which was also a great experience, but not as memorable than the old Terminal. Finally, another dumb "the artist is in" sign when I sat at my desk and wrote/created. I used it a few times....eventually, it would end up on a JUNK BLOG. -Ric