The White Stuff and the Spirit of American Entrepreneurialism

January 14, 2019 Michael Olesker

The two pipsqueaks arrived early Sunday morning to do the work of men. I call them pipsqueaks out of respect, for they are elementary school lads who awakened to see the streets covered with snow and, in the grand tradition of entrepreneurs everywhere, declared, “From this, we could make money.”

And yet, and yet …

“Sir,” said the older boy, perhaps 10 years old, as I opened my front door, “would you like your sidewalk shoveled?”

I thought of winters past, and the money that was asked by teenage boys, or by grown men, who offered to shovel my sidewalk and unfortunately knew the actual value of a dollar. Twenty bucks or much more, those young men invariably wanted.

And having no alternative at my age, I paid.

So with a sense of dread Sunday morning, I asked the two pipsqueaks, “How much do you want?”

“A dollar?” the older boy said.

It wasn’t so much a statement as an inquiry, as though worried he’d priced himself out of the market by asking a figure so preposterously high.

“A dollar?” I said, not quite suppressing a smile. The older boy must have spotted it, and immediately upped the price. “For each of us,” he said, his voice now a little more confident.

“A dollar for each of you?” It felt like 1955 all over again.

“If that’s not too much.”

“Have you shoveled anybody else’s walk?” I asked.

“This is our first.”

“Ah,” I said, with instincts of larceny flooding through my head. “You got the job.”

And I sent them forth to learn the true value of the American dollar. But what is that value?

Naturally, I wasn’t going to pay them a mere buck or two. Who am I, Scrooge McDuck? The job looked pretty easy, as my walkway isn’t so grand, and the snow was pretty powdery, and the job wouldn’t take very long. But even under those conditions, a buck apiece was far too low.

I remembered my own schoolboy days, when such snow meant a chance for great enrichment. At a buck a house. In the 1950s.

“Tell you what,” I hollered their way, as they zipped pretty quickly down my front walk. “Let’s make it $5 apiece.”

I felt like quite the big shot now. Couple of pipsqueaks, got lucky with Mr. Benevolence.

Only at some point, I remembered the cold. Today’s cold, and yesteryear’s, when I’d come home after a few hours’ shoveling with something that felt like frostbite.

“Tell you what,” I hollered toward the pipsqueaks now. “If you clean off those two cars” – my wife’s, and my own – “how about if we make it …”

OK, so I raised the price again. By the time they were finished, and I watched them shovel the walk and wipe off the two cars (at least, the parts they could reach), my heart went out to them. I slipped them the kind of money some older fellows would have wanted.

Problem is, next time it snows and the pipsqueaks show up – this time, they’ll really know how to bargain.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.