keys: the key to bowling

keys held somewhat importance for me as a kid; not because they unlocked doors, but they helped to go bowling at the new 32 lanes, AMF  automatic alleys. We are back to "up the avenue," hardware store, home of M-80 fire crackers an box of old and worn-out, but mostly miscut keys by somone not to god on the key machine, Back then, the clery put your key in a vice and a blank in another vise; he would then go over the teeth of your key and a cutting wheel went over the blank to make a duplicate.  Today, they just stick your key in a hole and pres a button; presto! you had a duplicate.
For some reason of fascination we were allowed to take handfuls of the bad keys. The first thing was to find someone's door they went into; secondly, using a triangle file we would try to redo the teeth and sometimes we got lucky and it would open the door:)
But the best part of getting a few pounds of keys is we would take them to the junk man  and brass paid more than copper(wire), which paid more than steel.  Most of the time's we wanted to bowl, we went around to all the car garages and took away their old mufflers, pipes, and shocks.And copper wire which we would have to burn of any insulation.  the junk man had piles a scarp metal with a path in the middle leading to his oversize doctor kind of scale in his beat up junk garage. I would take in the garage scraps, he would weigh it, write it down. He then would tell Bill to take it out and throw it on a pile of similar metal. Bill would go out to the pile and kick it around, put the same junk back in our wagon, to be taken out again and weighed. Each wagon load of scrap usually ended up getting weighed at least three times! The man wore dirty old clothes and he would reach into his pants pocket and pull out a wad of money that made our eyes pop out.  he would pay us when he added everything up and then it was hop a bus to the bowling lanes!  Next: Duck pin bowling-a game devised by drunk catholic k of c members to put in their basement meeting halls.  whoever devised this cruel style of bowling must of really hated kids and anyone else with hands smaller than a baseball mitt!