By Larry Cohen c. 2025
Chapter One
“It was not hard to do”
It was not hard to do. As a semi-precocious ten-year old during the 1950’s, I was a regular at Howard’s Variety store located in my small city in Central New York State Mr. Howard (if that was his real name) sold penny candy along with the usual fare that any normal kid of that era would be familiar with, some items that these days either could not be sold legally or are just not available at any price.
The sun had faded many of these specialty items from Mr. Howard’s display window of his well-stocked store…items such as a rabbit’s foot keychain made from a real rabbit, loaded dice, red wax lips, black wax mustaches and white wax fingernails. He sold imitation Cherry Bombs which were made to look like the real, if illegal, firework but consisted of only a fuse and an explosive looking round device at its end. And, of course, he sold itching powder, coughing powder, handshake buzzers, as well as other odd and unusual items not sold anywhere else in the area, at least the area in which I was allowed to traverse without a parent.
I never knew much about Mr. Howard, the man himself. He had a personality that was neither dour nor pleasant. His bearing and countenance could be compared to that of the character actor Andy deVine without the distinctive Andy deVine voice nor laugh. Mr. Howard never laughed. He always wore a white food service worker’s apron over what looked like drab colorless clothing.
The most insidious item that Mr. Howard sold, however, was none of the aforementioned but rather something inside in the gumball machine, a regular clear glass ordinary penny gumball dispensing machine that Mr. Howard had strategically placed in the center of his well-worn wooden floored store. Buried inside the machine was the mystical “spotted ball” While a gumball was only a penny, if one were lucky enough to win the spotted ball, it entitled the lucky winner to trade it in for five cents worth of penny candy. Even though the spotted ball was made from the same kind of gum as the others, the spotted ball was primarily dark orange with colored speckles all around it as if it were painted by a Jackson Pollack.
A whole nickels’ worth of candy. I could get a large heavily salted pretzel stick, a pack of Chum-gum, two pieces of Double-Bubble Bubble gum and a licorice stick for that one spotted ball. It was pure magic to a ten-year old.
It only took one win for me and I was hooked, a spotted ball addict. On the way home from school I would take a short detour over to Howard’s just to take a chance on the spotted ball. I don’t know what the odds were but I knew, even as a kid, the odds (or as I would have said then, “the chances”) were not good. It would be seven years before I would learn what the word “odds” really meant along with permutations and combinations. Nonetheless, I became infatuated with the spotted ball. On occasion, when I would win the spotted ball, instead of trading it in immediately, I would hide it in my pocket to take it home where I could look at it longer, hold it in my small hands, toss it in the air, laugh that I had won, and wondered how I would spend the five-cents of value that it held in its magical colors.
Maybe, I thought, I would get a chocolate covered malt ball, two licorice pipes, a baseball card that included a flat piece of bubble gum and maybe package of Likamade, which was a sweet flavored powder that, according to my mother, had no social redeeming value, though she never put it in such terms.
In summary, what I took away from all of the time I spent buying penny candy, pretzel sticks, and red wax lips at Howard’s was the urge to gamble on the spotted ball. When I left elementary school and entered high school, my interest waned, however, since penny candy started to disappear from Howard’s as well as the change on my route to a different school, high school.
In high school all of the mathematics that I was fed until my senior year were pretty boring. Algebra, Geometry, “Trig” (trigonometry) , even the pre-Calculus course that was offered in my last semester of my last year in high school. However, because I had entered Kindergarten in January, unlike most kids who entered in the Fall of each year, I had time to take an extra math course in my senior year entitled “Probability and Statistics” which happened to be taught by my former algebra teacher. Now this was a course that took me out of mathematical ennui and into the real world. I had never encountered nor would encounter an isosceles triangle save for the blackboard in Mrs.McCarthy’s geometry class (where, when Mrs. McCarthy once asked me why the isosceles triangle that she had drawn on the board was such, I answered “because it looks like an isosceles triangle”, an answer that sent me into the hallway for the duration of class that day. But, probability…that was real.
Now, at age 17, I realized how important statistics and probability were. It all came back to the spotted ball. It clicked. Now here was mathematics that made sense. We learnt of Bell curves, Pascal’s triangle, and most importantly, odds. We flipped coins to record heads or tails, ran marbles through a triangular wooden board full of nails…it was a real hands-on course with real everyday principles. I saw it as a course full of mathematical principles that I could apply to real life….to real gambling.
To be continued…