It's time for the Central Washington State Fair and kids all over are scheming and saving their money for fair fun. It brings back a lot of memories.

As my wife and I are taking a look at the bottom line financially and figuring out how to pay for admission and ride wrist bands for our children at this year's fair, it brings back a lot of memories for me.

Growing up in a rural area of the Valley, we couldn't go next door to a neighbor offering to do odd jobs for a quarter to go into our communal fair fund. And there was no way our mom was going to let us set up a lemonade stand along busy SR220, also known as Fort Road.

So, we had to figure out other ways to scrape up a few bucks. Ours was collecting pop bottles in order to get the 3 cent deposit. Back in those days nobody was in to recycling, and people would toss pop bottles out of their cars. Our dad would keep an eye open around town for bottles and throw them in the back of his truck. Or, he would supervise us as we walked in the roadside ditches collecting that glass gold. Then, you could take them to any grocery store and turn them in for the deposit.

We stored our coins in a Jif peanut butter jar, and we all took turns counting the money to see how our stash was accumulating. We thought we were getting rich!

Our family did one day at the fair, and the midway rides is where our pop bottle money went.

It may be a small thing, but that 3 cent bottle deposit paid for a lot of great fair memories.

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