It was hard, ciderin'

In 1957 I got a brand new 1957 Lambretta 3-wheel scooter upon which we mounted a home custom made marine plywood box. I was 15 (so we're illegal here already) and the plan was to abandon my bike in favor of this exotic vehicle to ease the delivery of newspapers on the two Seattle Times routes I had gotten myself into (total about 185 daily and Sunday customers).

Well, I did that with some mixed success and you will no doubt hear more later about my paper route adventures. Here, though, a few words concerning one of my after after hours scooter-based initiatives.

In August or September of '57 a bunch of us decided to make apple cider and let some of it "harden". Because the potential reward was very attractive, it wasn't difficult to recruit a teen crew from two of my several social circles. We motored around Kennydale, picked up apples from a bunch of different sources and carried them in the scooter paper box to a central cider press location at the Robels where we conducted a press party. This was in the days when everyone had a few trees and apple maggots weren't yet a problem. So we had a good inventory of quality raw material.

Truth be told, we finished with about 20 gallons of pretty fair fresh cider in old vinegar jugs. Everyone got a few to take home. So that was good. In addition, and more to the point, Oan and I took three extra bottles to ferment and distribute at a later time. Because it was still pretty warm we hid them under some hay in the nesting boxes of an old chicken coop at the back of Nimtz' property (actually, this coop was at the middle of the fenceline across the back yard of Tom Carrolli's cottage -Fred Eckholm's, then - where your mother and I lived from 89/90 to late '93.

Oan's property, the coop, fence, Tom, Fred and the little house are all gone now, but WE'RE ok). Anyhoo... at first we checked almost daily on the cider hardening process and were mildly disappointed with the (non) progress, but later on when the brew rapidly turned green and foamy we figured we had it made, so to speak. Not so. Foul tasting vinegar. As I recall we escaped detection by our elders but had wasted several gallons of hard earned cider and had some explaining to our collaborators to do. It was hard, that ciderin'!