Soap powder Cloyce

Yesterday I spoke about a particularly tight character whom I called Cloyce, just to give him a name. His cheap ways went beyond drain snake repair.

He himself admitted to me Pops that he couldn't let his own wife go shopping on her own. "Oh, Bill, she'd spend a nickel too much on soap powder (non-liquid laundry detergent to those too young to know what soap powder is) if I wasn't right there to watch her," he explained one day to the old man. Granted, a nickel meant more in 1968; you could still get nickel Hershey bars then for example, even though those paled next to the nickel chocolate bars of thirty years before that. 

Pops just shook his head at the admission.

Yet despite how hard he held the dollar legend had it that old Cloyce could be known to go nuts with his money in one place: a carnival. We never heard it from Cloyce of course but from other plumbers who knew him. Several such common acquaintances told me Pops that Cloyce would actually spend wildly at fairs on games of chance. He could not get enough of the wheel of fortune, apparently.

"Big Six wheels would have Cloyce all starry-eyed," said one drain cleaner. "He'd keep betting quarters until his old lady fetched him home," another told Dad. Bet that cost him a lot of soap powders, thought me Pops to himself. 

I guess we all have our devils. Cloyce apparently had two.