When I was in about the third grade, three or four neighbor boys and I came up with an idea of how we could make some money. We would build a hamburger stand out of our backyard sandbox. We were getting a little old for the sandbox anyway, so we might as well turn it into a money-maker.
We decided to nail some two-by-fours into each corner of the sandbox then nail boards across the top to tie all of the corner posts together. We could put some plywood on top. Since the plywood wouldn’t be exactly level, we figured the roof would likely shed rain water off one side.
We ended up with a small room with open sides. We built a counter along the front, where we could sell our hamburgers. Mom had a two-burner hotplate in the basement, which we could plug into a garage outlet and use to cook our hamburgers. This provided everything we needed for our business, except the bread, meat, mustard, ketchup and pickle relish. But we had a plan for that.
More Scottsdale history: The dangers of having fun as a 1940s farm kid
Remember, this was in the 1930s when everyone had iceboxes. They were located in little rooms off of the kitchen with outside doors so the milk man and ice man could make deliveries without disturbing the homeowner.
One Saturday morning, my friends and I chipped ice from several neighbors’ iceboxes and put it in an ice chest. We got hamburger meat, bread and all the spreads and other supplies from our parents’ homes and put them in our ice chest. Looking back, we must have had 8-10 pounds of hamburger and several loaves of breads of all kinds.
We were ready. All we needed was to send some of the younger sisters and brothers door-to-door to tell the neighborhood about our hamburger stand. It was late morning when this solicitation started, and most of the adults were both hungry and a little intrigued by what was going on.
Within minutes people started coming by, gladly laying out a nickel per hamburger. We fried the hamburgers as fast as we could, and our production line converted the patties into hamburger sandwiches with great speed. We sold out a couple times, but local kids ran home getting more supplies for us.
I don’t remember how much we made, but it was a lot of nickels. We closed up by mid-afternoon when we could not get more supplies. A few parents began to ask about the sources of our supplies. They were as surprised to find the answer to this question as we were to find out that using our own families’ hamburger, bread and other supplies really was not honest.
We felt since everything came from our own homes, it was really already ours. Maybe that was why the profit was so good?
In 1939, when I was a little older, I started another food business. I sold popcorn door-to-door, which worked out well until I tried to sell popcorn to local W.P.A. workers. They put me out of business because they said I didn’t have either a health or business license.
Reared on a local dairy farm, former Scottsdale city councilman (1971-76), state legislator (1979-85) and honored oral historian Paul Messinger founded Messinger Mortuaries in 1959. He can be reached at 480-860-2300 or 480-945-9521.
