I even won some money on scratch-off tickets. I tried to buy one or two scratch-off tickets whenever I went to Polly’s Brookville Drive Thru. To my surprise I got 5 numbers out of the 6 drawn and won about five hundred dollars. With five kids in school, I am sure the money helped our budget.
But budgets can be wrecked without gambling on winning the Ohio State Lottery.
When Patty and I first got married, I thought I needed a brand new car every year and I bought one. Troutwines, in Arcanum, loved to see me wander in because they knew I would end up driving out another new car.
The old NCR Credit Union on Brown Street in Dayton was the lender of choice when we lived in Gordon but I did buy new cars financed by the Arcanum National Bank.
My father-in-law was at the credit union and I asked him how much he made. He told me, and I answered that I just got a raise and was now making a whopping $200.00 for a 40-hour week.But I also wrecked our budget buying artist’s easels, tubes if oil paint, brushes of all shapes and sizes, canvas to stretch over stretcher strips, and canvas panels in standard sizes. On top of the paints I had to have an artist palette and a palette knife and linseed oil and turpentine.
Bert L. Daily, Art Supplies, on Third Street was my first choice of places to shop for artist supplies but they went out of business. Then Ken opened his McCallisters Art Supplies at 300 Salem Avenue in Dayton and sold supplies of all kinds and did framing.
My life changed once I decided to become a painter. I spent endless hours painting to make extra money. I attended all of the area art shows and some, like the annual one at Salem Mall, awarded ribbons and prizes. I sold a lot of my work there in front of Rike’s glitzy department store.
Artists from all over the area attended Art Shows, at the University of Dayton, the Dayton Art Institute and Sinclair College. I met new friends and their shared experiences enriched my life.
Making and selling art people will buy, for me, meant I kept up on trends in furniture design and home construction. If “Country style” was in I painted country themes. If Danish Modern was a big influence, I tried to exhibit oils those people would want.
On July 20, 1969, when I was painting moonscapes, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldwin, in Apollo 11, landed on the Earth’s Moon. I began to sell my black and white oil paintings of the LEM on the moon at an exhibit at the Salem Mall. I sold out and was left with empty display racks.
Life itself is a big gamble. I gambled on a lot of things including quitting my regular job and going into business for myself. I had no hospitalization and no paycheck. It worried my father-in-law to death because I had left NCR where he worked and then left my career as a school teacher and was selling what I loved to do throughout the world. It was long before computers — that makes me wonder what my life would be like today if I had the computers that I have today, back then.