It was a much simpler time during the 1950s when publisher Mike McGarry grew up in a small village in upstate New York, where young children played outside all day during the summer, returning home only for meals.
His first entrepreneurial venture came about at just 5 years old. McGarry would walk throughout his neighborhood, pulling his little red wagon behind him, knocking on neighbors’ doors asking for used-up rags, old bottles and old newspapers.
“They seemed to have an inexhaustible supply,” McGarry said.
“When I was a kid, we really recycled,” he added. “There was a junk man who had a shop downtown, in a little alleyway. It was the way you made your buck. You would walk a couple of blocks to this junk man, an older guy with big jowls, smoked a cigar, to get your 35 cents — a few pennies — but you were like a millionaire back then.”
It was also a time when children were expected to earn their own spending money at a very young age. “If you wanted something, you went out to earn it. Even for a soda. There was never money to get sneakers. If you wanted a new baseball glove and didn’t get it at Christmas time, you had to earn it. That was the way it was. No one expected anything from their parents at all.”
He had to sell a lot of junk to raise the 25 cents it cost to go to a movie or 10 cents to buy a soda or a candy bar. McGarry really had to hustle if he wanted to buy new sneakers, which cost about $3 at a local department store.
When he turned 11, he gave up collecting household items for the junk man and began delivering newspapers after school to about 30 homes for $1.65 per week. He also added a few more part-time jobs to his resume, including shoe shine boy, where he worked for 65 cents an hour. By the time he got to middle school, he added a third gig, loading a soda truck one hour before school started each morning.
His working-class upbringing influenced his conservative political leanings, he said. “Anybody can make a buck somehow and you shouldn’t rely on somebody else to back you up. There is always a market out there for someone.”
When not working his three jobs, McGarry recalls avidly reading history books.
It was his childhood experiences that influenced him to eventually run for public office and to get into publishing.
An Irish-Catholic Republican, McGarry ran for city council four times and won three elections, serving from 1993 to 1999. He also unsuccessfully ran for mayor.
Today, he writes a weekly political column for the Hartford News and publishes the Greater Hartford Magazine, a glossy promotional magazine.
