Pin Money

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

1960

“Genie… here’s a quarter. Now run down to the corner and get me a Hershey’s from the store.  You keep the extra coppers for pin money.  Don’t tell Big Gene.”

My father’s mother was sneakier than any of her twenty-one grandchildren when it came to copping a candy fix in broad daylight.  A final stage diabetic, her pancreas barely running on fumes, Grandma Petro somehow managed, through simple fear of the Lord and all that His wrath might subsume in the afterlife beyond, to squeak out a few extra years of existence in the back bedroom of my uncle’s Levittowner before slipping away forever one snowy afternoon in front of  the 13″ black-and-white that rose above the medicine bottled landscape of  her night stand.  The last words I remember her telling me shortly before she died were,  “Remember Genie, God did not put us on this earth to be happy.”  I looked around her tiny room and dwelled on the thought as she prepared in her own way to pass away. I’ve tended to resist the pundits, across the board, ever since.

I was  the only youngster in the clan she trusted enough to routinely make the street corner run and actually return with her chocolate dope; the few copper coins from the grocer, a meager compense for my silence. “Pin money,” she’d insist. Whatever that meant.  The woman terrified me and loved me at the same time.

For half a generation, eight people lived under the pitched roof of that modest three bedroom, one bath tract home just north of Philly and across the river from Jersey.  Grandma occupied the tiniest room in the back; my aunt and uncle, the largest; the five children of varying ages and gender split the square footed difference with blankets and pillows strewn in every remaining  corner of carpet.  By 1968 the family finally added another bedroom and bathroom to the tax rolled address along with three more kids and a foster child.  Life trickled on.

1980

On occasion of the long anticipated and touted Mortgage Burning Party celebrating the last and final payment to the Savings and Loan, the soggy, ragged hovel barely teetered on its crumbling concrete slab as it rested on the residential shelf  alongside volumes of other Post War War II life stories in neighboring burgs with names like Violetwood, and Bristol, and Fairless Hills.  There stood Dogwood, to be precise.

Still, to this day, it’s the only house  (and owners) I’ve ever known of whose original loan actually ammortized without re-finance, equity loan, or line of credit over a thirty year period; $122  per month, one payment at a time,  for 360 months. That’s exactly $43,920 paid out over a thirty year period for a house that originally sold for $9,999 in 1950. Plus of course, the apple tree,  garden hose, and ‘grape vine on lattice arbor’ as advertised in old man Levit’s brochure.

And true to the original actuarial projection, the house was worth around $50,000 at the time of that  final payment.  When the last remaining grantee on the original deed passed away in April of 2008,  it sold on the block  for $132,000 and three years back taxes.  After the auctioneer’s cut, attorneys fees and funeral expenses,  the surviving children, numbering ten by now, all adults and with Levitowners and multiplying children of their own, pocketed about $6200 apiece.  Pin money.

2009

It was shortly thereafter I had occasion to ask  my 83 year old father, Big Gene, what the term actually meant—that cryptic monetary family saying. I’d been wondering about it for years in the back of my mind but somehow, the thought never materialized enough to make it past my tongue. Now, as we watched CNN together one afternoon, I needed to know once and for all.

“Pin money?”  I inquired during a commercial break. “What exactly is that?”

My father thought for a moment before answering, silently mouthing the question aloud to himself through his own personal filters and analog gatekeepers of facts and fictions…

“Spending money for….you know…at the bowling alley.  You pay the boy to set up the pins after each frame. Or you earn money for setting up the pins, if you’re the boy.  Either way,”  he told me.

“Set up the pins?”

“At the bowling alley. Your Grandmother’s brother used to own an alley with a bar back in Pittsburgh during the Depression,”  he continued.  “Tomko’s Bowling Alley. She used to serve drinks in the beer garden. She also worked at a distillery during the war. And at a brewery, too after that. You paid a kid to set up the pins. Or he made pin money setting up the pins…”

He sat in his leather reclining chair staring at the new flatscreen in the family room—a present my sisters and I all pitched in to buy a few Christmases ago— as his own mind wandered between decades; centuries now, really. Medicine bottles were lined up in order on the folding table beside him, their labels all facing the same direction awaiting their turn in the queue. Crossword puzzles, cut out from the daily newspaper and clamped to a foreman’s clip board, sat on his lap alongside the remote control; everything within easy reach. We watched together as the talking heads waxed prosaic, in the family room of a  townhome that has been refinanced with an Interest Only Arm at least three times in the past ten years at 100% LTV.  To be sure, there will be no Mortgage Burning Party in that household; not during  his lifetime— or mine either, for that matter.

I make a mental note to whisper in my own grandchild’s ear, if such an event should ever one day arise, before I pass into the  dark cool wrath clinging to my own fearful soul…

2030

“Remember, Little Geno,  God did not put us on this earth to  hold clear title to our primary residences.  I know.  I used to work as a Realtor during the last Depression in 2010. Here’s a sawback. Now run down to the corner and bring Pap Pap back a lottery ticket and a Snickers bar. You can keep the change for pin money but stay away from the bowling alley. And don’t tell your mother.”