Gumball Machine by Darren Maurer

5" x 7"
When I was growing up in Grand Island, Nebraska we had a grocery store about four blocks from our house. By today's standards this grocery store was on the extreme small side of things. My mother would do most of our grocery shopping at that store and my younger sister and I would usually be with her. There were two things at the grocery store that I looked forward to more than anything else there. One of the things was a mechanical horse that you could ride for a penny, the other was the two or three different gumball machines that also cost one penny. We would ask for a couple of pennies each to ride the horse and buy a gumball while the clerk manually hit the keys on a cash register the total the groceries. (No scanners back then!) I'm not sure why I always think of that little grocery store when I see one of these old gumball machines but I always do. The little grocery store is long gone and so is the mechanical horse ride for a penny. I found out that most of these old gumball machines are also almost long gone. I have wanted to paint one of them for my Painting A Day Series for a long time now and it took several days of looking before I ran across one of them. This is painting 123 in my Painting A Day Series. Painting Sold