EdKingCartoons

  NO EMERGENCY! By Ed King Every Friday evening in the summer of 1972 my buddy Munchy and I would work our way up the East Side of Manhattan from 42nd Street to 59th Street and Third Avenue. We were street peddlers and we carried with us our little folding tables and old-fashioned suitcases filled with our wares. “Handmade Moroccan sheepskin wallets!” we would shout out when we stopped and set up on a corner that looked like it might produce some paying customers. We had to keep moving because the New York police were under strict orders to chase and harass and ticket any unlicensed peddlers they could catch (and there were a lot of us). There were licenses available, but they restricted the holder of the license to selling in areas where there were not any customers, like 12th Avenue near the West Side piers, where the only people you'd be likely to run into would be drug dealers and pimps.) Not like 42nd Street and Third, where the secretaries would pour out of the...

 

        Scholl's Cafeteria In the summer of 1973, I operated a fruit and vegetable stand at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and K Street in downtown Washington, DC. One day, a well-dressed elderly gentleman came up to the stand and asked if there were any good restaurants in the area that I might recommend. Without hesitation, I told him about Sholl's Cafeteria, which was right up the street; about its great food and low prices and good service and on and on, sounding like a paid ad for the place. When I finally finished, the man reached into his pocket and handed me his card. "Here, have lunch on me." It was Evan Sholl, founder and owner of Sholl's Cafeteria, who walked around downtown Washington in his later years buying lunch for anyone who gave a good review to his restaurant.                                      Evan Scholl, his son, wife, and mother.

Ed King S e p t e m b e r   1 1 ,   2 0 1 5    ·  Shared with Public A Peddler's License in Washington, DC By ED KING I arrived in Washington, DC from Boston in the fall of 1972 intending to start a street-peddling operation selling handmade Moroccan sheepskin wallets from my supplier in New York. Street-peddling in New York and Boston the previous two years had been a free-wheeling, anything-goes sort of affair, but I soon found out that Washington was a little different. Attempting to play by the rules, I went to the government office where they issued street peddlers' licenses. I filled out the application I was given and turned it back to the clerk who told me that it would take three or four weeks to process my application. She didn't seem moved by my story that I had just arrived in town and needed to get out on the street right away to start making a living. I looked around the office and there must have been fifty workers sitting at their desk...