The Beano Hall . . .

. . . TIE Man's Headqarters

Upstairs over the now non-existant Strand Theater one night many years ago I watched my dad open a number of boxes in a back room.

Earlier I'd seen John Maguire, the parcel post man from the post office, carry about a dozen big boxes up the side stairs to the Beano hall and wondered what was happening.

So I went up to the hall and asked Dad what he was doing with all those boxes. He told me they were all full of TIES and showed me a few, blue ones, orange ones, black and white ones, all colors and some with pictures on them.

Dad told me that I was going to be a salesman and I was going to sell TIES along with him. When I asked why, Dad told me that because the economy (I forgot what he called it then) was getting bad, he decided that he had to do a little more to earn money than just working in the post office.

Dad decided people could afford TIES which were very popular about that time and were not expensive and he ordered a few hundred to try selling them.

And then he decided maybe I could help him sell the TIES by going to a lot of my friends and asking them to buy a tie. He gave me about 50 to start and said they cost fifty cents and we would sell them for a dollar each.

If you think I made a mistake in my headline when I wrote BEANO and you thought I meant Bingo, - no, I meant Beano. That was the original word of the game of bingo. When a person played, he or she was using beans to cover squares when numbers were called and when the time was right, he or she yelled BEANO. Nowadays you use ink daubers and yell lBINGO.

Back to my story about the TIES. I got to work right away and the first man I saw without a TIE around his neck was my first customer. I asked him why he didn't have one on and he said because he didn't have one.

Si I handed him one and said now you have a tie and it's only one dollar ---and twenty five cents. He was so surprised he bought the TIE. There was a man with him who decided he ought to have a TIE also.

He picked up a green one and a blue one and asked which would look best on him and I said either one would look good and he could buy both for two dollars and twenty five cents. He did.

A few hours later, after I sold all fifty I had with me, I gave Dad all the money and he said it was more than I should have.

I told him that I sold the TIES for a dallar and a quarter instead of a dollar and also gave some bargains for buying one than one TIE. Dad gave me some of the extra money as "commission."

We sold TIES for a long time and Dad later said "that's why we have meat for dinner more often." and he told me then that a lot of people were doing extra things to have money to feed their families because "we are in a depression."

That back room over the Strand Theater was for a long time the place where TIES were delivered and people called it the TIE man's Headquarters.

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