Valuable lesson

My Nintendo was similar to the one seen here.

My first lesson in economics, in the end, was worth $75.50.

Or $125.35 if I wanted store credit from 2nd & Charles in Hagerstown, Md.

Let me bring you up to speed. Jen and I have been consolidating boxes we've moved from the garage of our old house in Clarks Summit to a storage locker in the Chambersburg area.

In the process, I came across my old Nintendo. You know, the 8-bit. Up, down, up, down, B, A, Select, Start.

My Dominator was similar to the one seen here.

Along with it and the original controllers and gun, I also found about 50 games, plus "The Dominator" — a large joystick-equipped controller that worked using infrared.

The hours Nick, Stephen and I would spend playing these games. A lot of brotherly bonding… and fighting. Still, that Nintendo entertained us through much of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Despite pangs of guilt, I knew it was time the old NES and I parted ways.

To be fair, I had tried to do that once before. I offered to give the unit to a coworker in Scranton when Jen and I moved up there. I even brought it into the office. But for one reason or another, Big Jim never took full ownership. The system languished in a file-cabinet drawer for months after the sports department got its fill of playing Bases Loaded and Tecmo Bowl.

When I departed The Times-Tribune, I pulled the equipment and games from the file cabinet and put them in a milk crate in our garage.

There they sat.

Through two floods.

Now, they were off the ground. And the NES itself was not near any of the water. But some of the games were sprinkled. All of mine, however, retained their black plastic sleeve and thus were protected. Because I took care of my Nintendo games and system.

Because it was mine.

It was, indeed, the very first thing I ever bought with my own money.

As a boy, I begged my parents for a Nintendo, one just like all my apparently spoiled friends had received from their apparently rich parents who were apparently growing money on trees.

Seeing the opportunity to teach me the value of a dollar, Mom and Dad said I could get a Nintendo, but that I had to buy it. They drove me over to Chesapeake Federal Savings and Loan on Joppa Road and set me up with a passbook savings account. 

I don't recall the interest rate, but I know it was better than the passbook savings account Jen and I set up for Sophie last year.

I stashed away nearly every nickel and dime I came across, either through the exchange of services (I mowed a lot of lawns) or found on the sidewalk. 

Every few weeks, I'd pedal my bike through the neighborhood, up and down hills, dodging the dangers of Old Harford Road to deposit my spoils.

I'd wait anxiously as the bank teller would slide my passbook into her printer, the piercing DOT Matrix whine updating my growing financial empire.

TMNT II arcade version.

Meanwhile, I searched every circular put out by Toys R Us, Montgomery Ward and Circuit City for a unit that was less than $99.99 in hopes I might reach my conquest sooner. (A few years later, I received a coupon from Nintendo of America Inc. to make up for the price-fixing scheme.) 

But once that unit came into our lives, my brothers and I felt like normal kids. We could talk with the other kids at school about the secret mushroom extra lives on Super Mario, or how you could throw a bullet pass from Jim McMahon to Ron Morris in Tecmo Bowl if you ran McMahon back to his own end zone, switched the receiver to Morris, then passed. 

Original TMNT game.

I was too cool for school when I eventually received the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II Arcade game. I also had the original, less fancy TMNT game.

Through it all, though, the experience taught me the valuable lesson: If I work hard and save my money, I can get what I want.

In today's dollars, that lesson's value had depreciated to $75.50.

But in my heart, it's one of the most valuable ones my parents ever taught me.