Another TRUE childhood story

Another time when our cousin, Diane, and Mickey and I were abandoned in Platte SD with The Maternal Grandparents, I recall that we three got to pretty much wander about doing whatever we wished. This was LONG ago when folks never worried about child abduction, and other bad things that could happen. Now-a-days, everyone worries so much, children are being bent all out of shape mentally even though the true statistics show there Is ACTUALLY LESS KIDNAPPING THAN THERE WAS BACK THEN!! I am positive the 24 hour a day news coverage is the reason for all the fear as no-one can get away from it, so it insidiously affects the thinking processes. Anyhow, as I was saying about Platte, it was a tiny little prairie town of slightly over a thousand people and many of then Dutch who came over to freely practice their religion which we knew as Dutch Reformed. They were and ARE good people and watched out for everything in their town. "It takes a village" was never truer than in this wonderful place of my childhood.
One day as we three MOUSE-KETEERS (taken from the fact of brother Mickey having the same name as the famous Disney mouse) and WE MADE THIS UP LONG BEFORE THE TV SHOW OF THE SAME NAME BUT WALT NEVER EVEN OFFERED TO PAY US FOR IT!!!
Anyhoo, we had wandered down town which consisted of four blocks of stores on both sides. A unique thing to us was that there were TWO drugstores right next to each other (or there MAY have been one other type of store between--memory fails). Eastman Drug and ????? Drug both had those old- fashioned basements that had windows opening out into a dank pit with a metal grate over it. I found out many years later that these grates could be lifted off and supplies could thus be delivered directly to the storage area in their basements. However, as kids these pits were merely animal traps on the African veldt and held great promise for maybe seeing a lion or a wildebeast or, at least a hyena. We never failed to lie down on our stomachs and peer through the metal grates and dream.
One day Diane poked me in the side with her very bony elbow and said "Look there by the silvery gum wrapper? Is that money?"
"Holy cow! It looks like a quarter, but could be a nickle." Any money to three kids who lived from parental largesse and did not get a regular allowance like kids today was wonderous. Since we didn't know then that the grate lifted off and would have been too heavy even if we tried to do that, we put on our thinking caps, put our heads together, and tried to design a method to reach the aforementioned coin.
Mickey, who was the youngest of we three, but who often had the best ideas, said, "We need a stick--a sticky stick."
"Yeah. Let's go into Eastmans and buy some bubble gum and chew it and put it on a stick." Diane shouted. While she, the only one with any money as Grandpa had given her a dime for picking up all the loose sticks and driveway rocks in the yard before he mowed went for the gum as my brother and I ran to the lunmberyard. We loved this place with the planks, boards, and sticks! It smelled like a primeval forest to us and had great hidey-holes in all the separated lumber sorting cribs. We got the longest sticks we could being sure their diameter was such that they would fit through the grate openings These were just trimmings from other lumber and would be thrown away anyhow. I very politely asked the lumber man if we could have them.
"Fer whut?"
Thinking fast, Mickey said. "Ah, we want to play Africa and try to spear a giraffe."
"Huh! Well, I guess it's OK, but don't make me call your Grandpa that you kids have been throwing these sticks at each other. You'll put your eye out!" I swear to God that is what he said.
So the three of us met up again at the Drugstore grate and Diane removed a well-chewed wad of gum from her mouth. "I chewed three so we'd have enough. They only cost a penny each."
Now three kids lying face down on a city street may have caused a good deal of conversation in some places, but not in Platte and not as far as those Barada grandkids were concerned. We stuck the sticky bubble gum on the longest stick, mashing it on securely so we were sure it could even pick up an anvil . Unfortunately, the stick was too short by a foot or so to reach the bottom of the pit.
"Poo!" I cursed, using what was the worst word I knew at the time. "What do we do now?"
Diane, being a very resourseful girl (more like a boy), said, "Pull it up and we can tie two sticks together. She would have made a great chimpanzee in the Primate Intelligence Test I read about many years later. Mickey pulled one of the laces from his Redball Jets tennis shoes, and then we could reach the coin. Diane pulled up that old coin---IT WAS A QUARTER--not a nickle and we felt like treasure hunters. Man!! What a feeling of power over the forces of nature and being God's greatest creations. I'll never forget that feeling.
We moved leaves and small pieces of paper and dirty stuff around seeking more money, but this only made the gum un-sticky. We were positive there were many more coins down there and this was just one of several store front sidewalk grates. Diane went into Eastmans and bought gum with the last seven cents she had left from her pay from Grandpa. we all chewed two pieces and Diane got three again since it was her work that had earned it.
Tying more sticks together and using all our shoelaces, each of us took over his own grate and had a contest. As I recall, Diane won with that quarter plus a nickle and a penny. I was next with a dime and three pennies, and Mickey only got a nickle. We calmed him with the fact that he was the youngest and had many more years of life than us to find money.
There's more to this story but you have to wait for me to remember the details.