'NED'-MY THIRD MILLIONAIRE ENCOUNTER-PART 1

'Ned" was a tall,thin bespectacled guy,who was addicted to placing bets on race horses, at tending race tracks, baseball games, card playing, games of all kinds, and a number of ordinary pastimes....he also liked to drink and socialize,and, on occasion, mock autority in subtle ways..... Intelligent, of course, with a strong grip from his years of violin practice,he would sometimes indulge with some very strong guys in arm/wrist wrestling. He and I were assigned to the same military outfit doing 'confidential' work and found that we shared an itnerest to some extent for ancient manuscripts, Asian Art & thought, Zen at the time,with some discussions of Jack Kerouac in that time. Ned had a brother who had majored in anthropology, and also, I believe, married to a Japanese lady...Their mother was alive but their father was dead...Ned was an upstate New Yorker, along with several other guys in the outfit and that tends to make clearer the distinction between 'Big apple Boys' and the rest of New Yorkers which often excapes those not from either place. The other guys were from Brooklyn and Long Island with a sprinkling of Jerseyites: some were Jewish, Irish, German, and Italian...I was the Yankee,so to speak, but these designations are merely for convenience and not for actual state-of-being... Ned and I often had dicussions,even arguments,which sometimes became rather heated at times and laughable at others....but I must say that to a lot of people in and out of the outfit, I appeared to be 'aloof,arrogant, and self-contained'...which I attribute to these two reasons: the sheer boredom and monotony and regulation,regimentation,restrictions of 'military' affairs that has alwlays gripped the US since WWII to this present day,while the other one was merely to contain my emotional reactions and states, which were intense at times and kept for for my own personal analysis at later or future dates....of self-examination and remembrance... One day, Ned provoked me, for some now long forgotten reason,possibly over some documents or 'data' we were examining or anlyazing in the course of our duties, or more likely something merely trivial but nonetheless emotionally charged enough to arouse my ire....maybe just his tiresome annoyance and teasing... I was standing in my work area and holding a sharp,pointed pair of steel scissors used in the course of our duties, when he began his tirade and verbal attack, so I told him to shut up, lay-off, to stop,cease and desist, but, as might be guessed, he persisted to press his points and giveme a barrage of his comments, so that I warned him that I would, if he continued, throw thesse scissors at him, but he merely laughed at this 'idle' threat to him and continued to taunt me to do so... The scissors that I threw, not at him, but past him, hit the wall and stuck in rather deeply..... He got the point.....

'JP'- my first millionaire 'encounter'

'JP' was the first millionaire who came to my attention simply because he noticed me when I noticed him and vice versa....those who are still alive and remember him,as he was a very shrewd business man,whose mansion still sits in a prominent area though he and his wife, who had no children,are long dead. Nowadays, the magnificent mansion sits vacant and surrounded by the inevitable development of condos, houses,etc. so that passersby do not get the full glimpse and visual impact the mansion once had..... When I was in the seventh & eighth grades I often walked to school or rode the bus and then in high school, I had to walk to and from school since bus service only was granted if you lived beyond a certain mileage and I was short by several feet...... At any rate,'JP' had a block up town named after him and his wife had a business which sold cakes, pies, doughnuts and on weekends,'baked' beans. the drivers that worked for his large bakery on Maple Avenue also rented his apartments and so he gained back some of the wages he paid them, no doubt, and this was during and after the Depression....many people worked on and off in this establishment...including my mother at one time.....I worked in the building when it was sold to another owner and operated under another name in the '70's...it is now defunct but the building became a flea market and then that went out and now it is supposedly being rennovated by someone or some group but that has been going on for several years now....and only some small signs of progress are showing... A friend of my grandmother's worked at the mansion and she related, that 'JP' and his wife,being frugal as most millionaires are apt to be, took home the unsold products, usually the beans and brown bread and ate them for supper Saturday nights,etc... 'JP' drove a bit Cadillac and usually had a large cigar in his mouth as he drove to and from the large bakery.....when he was going opposite to the direction I was walking, he would always wave to me and acknowledge my presence, but when he was going the same way as I was walking, he never noticed me, at least not overtly, and,of course, never offered me a ride in his Cadillac, for which I am most grateful since my walking,running, bicycling in those days have apparently kept me in fairly good health,etc....But I suspect something else in his waving to me....perhaps he was merely encouraging me to eventually consider working for him in the bakery or else he mistook me for one of his night shift workers going home at that time from his bakery.... When I did work at the bakery for about one year, I worked on the bread slicing machine which had razor sharp blades that when running and slicing could hav easily cut or sliced off fingers MY JKOB WAS TO PUSH LOAVES OF BAKED BREAD FROM THE OVENS INTO THE SLICER on a moving belt...and the first day I began it, everyone in that area took bets I would not last but,to their surprise, I went for a year and quickly developed ways to move my body and arms etc and put loaves in a group, as many as I could hold, rapidly...the only time they had to stop the machine was to bandage my fingers from the blood that came from teh sharp crust that cut under my nails and bled onto the bread, which they threw away,etc....I learned a lot about bakeries and bread, prices and various things that I will sometime discuss when I have more time.

MEETINGS WITH MILLIONAIRES

Those of you who may occasionally read some of my many blogs on blogspot.com and follow some of my postings and comments on FaceBook, may be slightly surprised that I have had some brief, minor,insignificant, and occasional contact with millionaires since childhood and even one before I was born.........In regards to this latter, my late grandmother, Vera Lucy Savage Jones, the mother of my father,was one of many heirs to the 'fabulous' CONKLIN ESTATE somewhere in New York estate, as were a great many others, and the inheritance amount when finally received, to just a few dollars and cents...with, as might be expected, the lawyers getting the biggest cuts of all...for their fees...well, they did have to write numerous letters(postage was around 3-4 cents or less at the time).... I once had the letters that she wrote about it to others in their search for heirs to receive whatever money was available...but they are now lost, except for one I found recently.....as I understand it all, the stipulation in the will was that all possible heirs and relatives had to be found before the will could be carried out,etc.......one of my grandmother's brothers,Archie Savage, apparently received a violin from the estate somehow which my grandfather,Frank E. Jones, received from his widow when Archie died...the violin went to my cousin who is also deceased after my grandfather died. My grandmother had a saying,concerning some people: 'THEY HAVE MILLIONAIRE IDEAS ON A POORHOUSE POCKETBOOK" and this saying has several variations,of course...too numerous to discuss here probably... In my time I have met millionaires and also a number of people who would just as soon shoot you as look at you. I can say this: I have not been corrupted by the millionaires I ahve met and have survived the other types thus far........ When in fifth or sixth grade, I enjoyed reading stories by an author whose name may have been Gray or whatever, who wrote stories about farmers and millionaires, or rather, a particular old timer and a particular millionaire who needed lessons in practicality and common sense,etc. and these were very amusing and interesting, especially when the millionaire seemed to get into difficulties and the farmer/old timer,etc. had to bail him out or help him in some way.. When I was in college and discussing millionaires and the like with my roomate, who also was my best friend since Jr. High,High, and College, and who is now deceased, I used to tell him if you want to be a millionaire you need to be where they are and also learn their 'psychology'...that is, hobnob with them...and find out what they do and how they think.....and being around millionaires one could always hope that something would rub off of them and you might absorb such....needless to say, despite his major in business and his later career, he never became one....... I have also met and worked with a guy who nearly became a millionaire through his investments,etc. but who lost it all when the stock market went down and a recession of sorts set in , around the 80's I think....I told him, that if he had asked me, when the market was high that I would have told him to sell and not hold out...but he held out, of course, and he did not ask me.....I did not have any stock in the ones he had....but he looked at it philosophically,sort of, that in the long run, the market goes up and recovers...and a lot of people do believe in that, claiming history shows this......bu right now, I suspect a coming Depression might change that notion for reasons I have gleaned from history...namely, the first 25 years of each century:18th,19th,20th.....