Chapter 4: The Problem of Money

Money is an idea. In order for it to work people have to have faith that a paper bill, for example, has value greater than its selfsame paper and ink. This is nuts! The intrinsic value of fungible currency (oh, let’s say a one dollar bill and a hundred dollar bill) is the same. But with the one dollar bill I can’t even buy Hank a collectible plastic head filled with sugar at the checkout line. With the hundred dollar bill I can take the whole family out for a nice dinner where they won’t finish their food, ask for doggie bags, and store the remains in the refrigerator for several days before I throw it out. That’s value!

So for money to work we have to have faith. I believe that this c-note is worth more than its one dollar counterpart, which, as you will recall, has just the same amount of ink and rag content in it as the hundred. This, I repeat, is nuts.

The only entities who understand money appear to be men in suits who wear neckties slightly too long. These entities are brokers. They’re not really living beings; rather, they are supernatural dolls with strings that one can pull to hear them intone, “invest for long term.” They never vary this advice. Millions of Americans pay them to say the sacred words over and over again. We never tire of hearing it. We always act like we’ve never heard the words before. “He’s a good broker,” we tell our friends. “He told me to invest for the long term.” I am persuaded that they may be angels. They do not have free will as we do.

Without going into great detail, it seems obvious to even the meanest understanding that money is a god. Dealing with this god is religious in every sense. Conclusion? There are no atheists. This is the faith that moves mountains, every day, and builds condominiums. But I stray from the remarkable incidents of my childhood.

My father taught us that it was dangerous to do business with family members. To punctuate his lesson he would be sure to stiff my brother and me at every turn. He bamboozled us, for example, into razing our old two-car garage for a whopping seventy-five dollars (American). Being teenagers constantly jolted by massive infusions of testosterone, we accepted the challenge. After paying the junk man sixty-five dollars to haul away the rubble, we split the remaining loot between us in anticipation of our grand summer trip around the United States.

Gasoline, in those days, was thirty-five cents per gallon. I know this because we refused to pay forty-seven cents per gallon at the station near Monarch Pass in Colorado. The ancient truck we were driving held eighteen gallons. With the treasury amassed from my father’s beneficence, we could buy a tank and a half! Fortunately, our mother paid us twenty-five cents per window (including screens and woodwork) that we cleaned at home, so we were in high cotton most of the time. Our allowances in high school were fifty cents for me and seventy five cents for Bayne. Clearly this was pure gravy.

The problem, as you math majors have already determined, is that we were driving through thirty-eight states. Food wasn’t a big issue since we didn’t eat. Well, we did have a footlocker full of those small cereal boxes that Bayne had lifted from his college dining hall day after day. I brought along a fifty pound bag of rice. We made ketchup soup several times. We picked apricots and thinned pears in the Yakima Valley of Washington to make some cash, were pursued by the homosexual bank president that got us our migrant worker jobs, and hightailed it down the highway.

I would never allow my children to make such a journey. Two months and two days is how long we were gone. On the other hand, I wouldn’t allow my kids to knock down a garage. This is the same garage, with its steeply sloped roof, that we would climb upon with gallon after gallon of water during winter. After several hogsheads had been poured down the slope, we had a pretty good sliding board that ended twelve feet higher than the snow pack below. The snow pack was usually about two inches. We would zoom at mach speeds off the roof and then slam into the earth. No one had a better childhood.

Our parents didn’t want us to think about money. They didn’t want us to have jobs. We had to sneak them. “You’ll be working the rest of your life,” Mama would say. This was small consolation when the allowance wasn’t even enough to take Hot Lisa, for example, to the drive-in. I once concealed an early morning paper route for over two months before being found out. I lied, of course, and claimed that I was just helping my friend Lanny. But it was my route.

Norman Landolt Schott (Lanny) was raised by his grandmother, great grandparents, and great aunt. He and I were always up to something, never terribly bad, but Mama was suspicious as I recall. The weirdest thing we did was to modify an old riding lawn mower and drive it all the way to the airport at speeds approaching 9 miles per hour. We did rebuild cars from the ground up, made elaborate photographic darkrooms, and once welded together a homemade go-cart that achieved a record-breaking 68 miles per hour. The cars that we rebuilt and sold made us enough cash to go to Florida once. On our way down the Western Kentucky Parkway the engine in our Corvair Spyder blew and we had to hitchhike home. Back in town, but still ten miles from home, Dad passed us on the highway. “I think I saw Hank hitch-hiking,” he reported to Mama. He was often befuddled this way.

We made the trip in his great aunt’s luxurious Electra 225 anyway. On the way I was robbed, we were caught in a hurricane over on the Gulf, and I was called upon to rescue three people in the ocean near New Smyrna. Two of them lived. I performed artificial respiration and chest compressions on the sixteen year old girl, but she died. I was sixteen years old, too.

I also made money on the sly by selling penny candy at school. This was demonstrably frowned upon by the school authorities, but my friend Ken Brautigam and I came up with an ingenious solution. We would tell nosey teachers and principals that we were raising money for MFU. They believed it was some sort of Methodist youth group. MFU stood for “Money For Us”.

Once I worked for a brief time as a telephone solicitor, claiming that donations made would provide a busload of orphans an evening of fun at the Bluegrass Fair. I never really knew for whom I was working. We were paid in cash.

So during my high school years I never really had a job like real kids do. I am now “working the rest of my life” and find it very rewarding. Most days I can’t believe that I’m actually paid to be a headmaster. I love schools. I love the kids. I have been in school buildings continuously since I was five years old, except for one year when I drove an 18-wheeler. This might be some sort of record.

One of my favorite school memories is of sitting next to Cathy Cooper in typing class. My father made me take typing because my academic performance was just shaky enough to suggest that when I was drafted I would be sent to Viet Nam. “If you can type,” he told me, “they won’t put you where you’ll be shot at.” Thusly motivated, I achieved 85 words per minute on a manual Royal. To this day I believe that touch typing is the most important thing I learned in school.

Cathy’s father was also a doctor. He was a proctologist. I spent a great deal of time in typing class wondering if this embarrassed her. I imagined what it would be like to study a never-ending succession of anuses day after day. I asked Dad, whose specialties were easy to brag about, why anyone would choose such a career path. He explained the power that great teachers have in causing their students to become excited about a certain branch of knowledge. It started me thinking, like most of his statements do.