Home Grown Entrepreneur

I've had some people actually email, wondering if there will ever be another Dave's Corner. With the holidays here, I began to reflect on family, which led to thoughts of my father.  I could fill a book on stories about him--some day I might.  Here's just a snapshot of what growing up was like for me.  At first, my Life Buddy didn't believe my stories, but after thirty years, nothing I say surprises her.  True, there may be rolling of the eyes or a sympathetic pat, but she now is a believer.  Have fun:

Back in the 60’s, nobody called my father an “entrepreneur.”  In those days, it was called surviving.  He was a union machinist, laid off for eighteen months.  With my mother and two children to feed, he knew the unemployment checks wouldn’t be sufficient and refused to be a victim of circumstances.

Dad drove to the local dump and using whatever money he could scrape together, he struck a deal.  They would salvage bicycles and bike parts from incoming loads and deliver them to our house every other Saturday.  My father and two local teenagers used the deliveries to rebuild bikes that he sold through our newspaper.  It didn’t take him long to establish a growing clientele, primarily through word of mouth.  We were still getting calls for “the bike shop” years after my father went back to work.

Dad was always looking to improve his plan.  If there was a market for rebuilt bikes, he reasoned that he should increase his inventory by buying other bikes that were advertised in the paper.  He drove every Saturday morning to the publishing plant and purchased a newspaper literally “off the press.”  Sitting at a coffee shop, he would scan the ads and begin calling the sellers, offering to buy their equipment sight unseen.  As you can imagine, some were rather upset at a phone call before 5:00am on the weekend.

“Yes, I have a bike for sale, but do you know what time it is?”

Nothing fazed my father.

“Sure, it’s 4:55.  Do you want to sell it or not?  I’ll be by at ten.”

And so he worked his way down the list, purchasing 100% of the city’s available used bikes.  After a short waiting period, he would pa y for a new advertisement, reselling the same bikes with a reasonable mark-up.  Nobody realized what he was doing, although we did have some awkward moments.

In one instance, Dad bought a pair of French racing bikes.  From what he could tell, they were relatively hard to find and built specifically for the enthusiast.  The price reflected that fact, but my father bought them anyway: sight unseen and with a call placed before 5:00am.   After waiting three weeks, he placed an ad and received a call that morning from an excited young cyclist.

“Man, I can’t believe my luck in finding these,” he told my father.  “I saw some in the paper a few weeks ago that were a lot cheaper, but I called too late.  Can you believe somebody actually bought them at five in the morning?” he asked incredulously.

Success in the business often required good acting.  ; Dad pretended to be shocked.

“You’re kidding, right?  Wow, that early?”

From the bike shop, Dad branched out into reselling general merchandise.  We would arrive at a garage sale, and he would approach the owner after mentally calculating the resale value.

“How much for everything?” he’d ask.

They never took him seriously, but after several minutes of negotiating, he and I were loading our truck with boxes and bags.  After doing this for several weekends, we bought a booth at our local flea market.  For a twelve year old, I was making good money.  Dad would tell me the prices of everything, and I received ten percent of whatever I sold.  Additionally, if I could mark up his price, he let me keep the difference. 

I was in charge of the booth, as Dad wandered down the other aisles looking for bargains.  Purchases were wheeled or carried back to our booth, a new price set, and he was back shopping. 

My father taught me to look at every opportunity.  I remember one hot Sunday afternoon at the flea market near closing time.  An old man was looking at Dad’s ancient truck.  From the man’s loving hand that he trailed lightly over the dented fender, I could tell that the vehicle had dusted memories from younger days.  He had closed his eyes, replaying a mental video that made his wrinkly face smile.

“How much for the truck?”

“It’s not for sale,” I said immediately, knowing that Dad hadn’t given me a price.

Since it was closing time, my father was actually in the booth.  He placed a hand on my shoulder, his signal that he was now in charge.

“How much will you give me for it?”

In the end, we had to call Dad’s friend, Jeff, to come pick us up.  Dad had an offer he couldn’t refuse, and we had no other way home.

Dad loved a challenge.  Over a beer—at the time, he also loved his beer—he bet Jeff that he could start with a bicycle and end with a new truck in his driveway by bartering over a twelve-month period.  No cash would be added at any time.  Of course, to my father, “new” meant new to him.  There would likely by a hundred thousand miles on it, but the challenge was still formidable.  The bet was accepted, and the clock started ticking.

That was many years ago, and I’ve tried to remember the order of the various trades, but I can’t.  Nor can I remember all of the various objects he received in his quest for a truck.  However, I do remember some: a hundred fantail pigeons , a sofa, golf clubs, a boat, and Jo-Jo. 

Jo-Jo was spider monkey.  There must be dozens of species, but all I remember is that this one was vicious.  We kept him in our garage for a short period of time, before he was moved four houses away to Jeff’s.  I’m sure that my mother, who had grown increasingly weary of Dad’s schemes, forced the evacuation.  Jo-Jo had only been gone a week, when we received a panicked call from our friend’s wife.

“Quick!  You need to get over here, now!  Jo-Jo is trying to kill Jeff!”

My Dad and I raced down the street to find Jeff in the garage with Jo-Jo on a leash.  Every time that there was slack in the leash, the monkey would attack our friend.  Jeff’s only defense had been to swing the monkey at the end of the leather tie, so that centrifugal force kept the two apart.  Whether it was guilt for the inhumane treatment of a killer monkey or dizziness, Jeff would stop every dozen circles, only to fight off Jo-Jo. Jeff’s shirt was torn almost in half, exposing ugly claw marks on his chest.  The right leg of his pants had been shredded all of the way up to his Fruit of the Looms.  Normally a very calm man, Jeff looked worried.  The noise was deafening—Jo-Jo’s piercing war cries were only muffled by the screams of Jeff’s wife in an ever-increasing crescendo.  The garage was like a bizarre scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Somehow we eventually captured Jo-Jo.  He was immediately traded the next day for a box of handguns.  We all agreed it was an appropriate swap, given the monkey’s volatile history.

Eventually, Dad won his bet.  Before twelve months had passed, we had an old Ford International pickup parked on the driveway, and I had dozens of you-won’t-believe-this stories to entertain my friends many years later.