The Business Card

As a boy my best friend Alan lived down then street from me. We were together in elementary school and remained friends through high school. But the closest part of our friendship was when we were in grade school.

His father had a printing shop, and he had given Alan a printing press. This was a small hand press, and he could get type set at the shop on the weekends, and we could set the type in the press and sell stuff to other kids.

Now what enterprising idea did we come up with but making business cards.

No kid ever had a business card, and if we produced such an item we could make a lucrative business out of it, and , it would be cool.

We started slowly with cards of our own, for ourselves. We could put what you wanted, and as pubescent boys it was clear that we needed cards, as did our friends, to impress the girls.

We’d have our names, addresses and phone numbers of course, and than we had tag lines that functioned just as business men would have, with our “product” or specialty showing. We had such “cool” things as:

Drinking and Smoking a Specialty,

Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em,

The 4 F’s club (never written out of course, this was the 50’s) Find them, Feel them , F**k them, Forget them

and other tidbits too hard to remember.

We were in the 6th grade and our big business was with Junior High School boys.

A few more “normal” boys wanted magic shows presented, or dog walking done but most of it was adolescent claptrap for sure.

I don’t know what happened, but we just stopped and went on to other things, and there are none left I know about, and I’m not going to find Alan in New Jersey to see if he has any left.

BTW, I don’t think any girl ever ordered any cards.