The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.
“Dad, can you tell me how to get rich?”
My dad put down the evening paper. “Why do you want to get rich, Son?”
“Because today Jimmy’s mom drove up in their new Cadillac, and they were going to their beach house for the weekend. He took three of his friends, but Mike and I weren’t invited. They told us we weren’t invited because we were poor kids.”
“They did?” my dad asked incredulously.
“Yeah, they did,” I replied in a hurt tone.
My dad silently shook his head, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his
nose, and went back to reading the paper. I stood waiting for an answer. The year was 1956. I was nine years old. By some twist of fate,
I attended the same public school where the rich people sent their kids. We were primarily a sugar-plantation town. The managers of
the plantation and the other affluent people, such as doctors, business owners, and bankers, sent their children to this elementary school. After grade six, their children were generally sent off to private schools. Because my family lived on one side of the street, I went
to this school. Had I lived on the other side of the street, I would
9
Chapter One: Lesson 1
have gone to a different school with kids from families more like mine. After grade six, these kids and I would go on to the public intermediate and high school. There was no private school for them or for me.
My dad finally put down the paper. I could tell he was thinking.
“Well, Son...,” he began slowly. “If you want to be rich, you have to learn to make money.”
“How do I make money?” I asked.
“Well, use your head, Son,” he said, smiling. Even then I knew that really meant, “That’s all I’m going to tell you,” or “I don’t know the answer, so don’t embarrass me.”
A Partnership Is Formed
The next morning, I told my best friend, Mike, what my dad had said. As best as I could tell, Mike and I were the only poor kids in this school. Mike was also in this school by a twist of fate. Someone had drawn a jog in the line for the school district, and we wound up in school with the rich kids. We weren’t really poor, but we felt as if we were because all the other boys had new baseball gloves, new bicycles, new everything.
Mom and Dad provided us with the basics, like food, shelter, and clothes. But that was about it. My dad used to say, “If you want something, work for it.” We wanted things, but there was not much work available for nine-year-old boys.
“So what do we do to make money?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But do you want to be my partner?” He agreed, and so on that Saturday morning, Mike became my
first business partner. We spent all morning coming up with ideas
on how to make money. Occasionally we talked about all the “cool guys” at Jimmy’s beach house having fun. It hurt a little, but that hurt was good, because it inspired us to keep thinking of a way to make money. Finally, that afternoon, a bolt of lightning struck. It was an idea Mike got from a science book he had read. Excitedly, we shook hands, and the partnership now had a business.
10
For the next several weeks, Mike and I ran around our neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking our neighbors if they would save their toothpaste tubes for us. With puzzled looks, most adults consented with a smile. Some asked us what we were doing, to which we replied, “We can’t tell you. It’s a business secret.”
My mom grew distressed as the weeks wore on. We had selected a site next to her washing machine as the place we would stockpile our raw materials. In a brown cardboard box that at one time held catsup bottles, our little pile of used toothpaste tubes began to grow.
Finally my mom put her foot down. The sight of her neighbors’ messy, crumpled, used toothpaste tubes had gotten to her. “What are you boys doing?” she asked. “And I don’t want to hear again that it’s a business secret. Do something with this mess, or I’m going to throw it out.”
Mike and I pleaded and begged, explaining that we would soon
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