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This is a true story as told to me by my father.
A few years ago, he visited his club and met up with an old friend from
his youth named Roy. They sat down over lunch and had a nice long chat
catching up after so many years. My father shared his adventures through
life, and Roy shared his. And in Roy's life adventure was buried an interesting
lesson or two.
It all started back in the years following the Great Depression of the
1930’s. In Toronto there is an area that is now quite an expensive
enclave of Victorian homes that have been restored and are owned by wealthy
people.
But back in the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s it was a very poor area
indeed. It is called Cabbagetown, because the people in those days used
to grow cabbages in their tiny little postage-stamp-sized yards, in order
to have food to eat. It was a rough neighborhood full of rough people
going through a rough time.
My father grew up there in that time. They lived in different houses,
changing almost every year. But always they remained in Cabbagetown. As
the eldest child in a family of nine that could not afford to feed the
lot of them on a printer’s salary, he was sent out to the streets
to make his own way in the world when he was only 15 years old. He was
almost entirely deaf, so it was no longer possible to go to school, and
it was difficult for a deaf street kid to find work, as well. It was a
tough time living on the streets for a couple of years. He made friends
with a less than desirable crowd. Roy was one of those less than sterling
companions. He had taken to sitting on the top of his garage at night
and dropping a brick onto the heads of drunks that wandered by, so he
could take whatever money they had left, drag their body around the corner
into the alley, and then climb back up and sit and wait for the next drunk
to come along.
Finally one day, Roy had the idea to break into one of the huge mansions
of Rosedale and steal their valuables. These are huge mansions and many
were the homes of "old money’ families from England, that had
come over to Canada 150 years ago to settle there. They were the original
aristocracy and wealthy landowners. They were the people who had founded
the country. These were their ancestral homes for generations and generations.
He had heard someone say there was one family going on vacation and would
be away for a few weeks, so he decided to make his strike then. This particular
family did go on vacation as expected, and he broke into the house, searched
around until he found the lady’s hidden jewelry, then left with that
in a bag. He took it home and, for the moment, he stuffed the bag of jewelry
into the hole in the brick wall over his garage, and covered it up.
He met with my father a few days later and told him what he had done,
and also wondered what he should do with the jewelry to keep it safe while
the police were looking for it. Roy was afraid to try to fence any of
the pieces because they were so ‘hot’ still that no fence or
pawnbroker would take them, or if they did, they certainly wouldn’t
give him a decent price for them.
In the end, he decided to place the bag of jewelry in the safest place
he could think of. A bank!
So he went to the bank and rented a safe-deposit box and stuffed the bag
inside it, and locked it away. Now he knew no one would find it nor would
any of his ‘friends’ be able to steal it from him.
With that nest-egg safely tucked away, he breathed a sigh of relief and
turned his attention to making a living. It didn’t really matter
what he did now, because he knew that he was already rich. He was really
just biding his time. He already had the money stashed away in the bank
just waiting for the right time to pull it out one piece at a time and
cash it in and spend it.
He was set for life – he just had to wait a while. Perhaps a year
or so, he thought. In the meantime, he would just pick up any kind of
opportunities he could think of to make a living.
So he tried a variety of several different companies. He brought in Christmas
trees from the country and sold them from a lot in downtown Toronto. That
was profitable, but obviously seasonal. He tried painting houses, but
that was a disaster. He tried to do home repairs, but that ended badly
too. Even his landscaping business was a flop. In fact one homeowner was
threatening to sue. But it just didn’t matter, he knew he couldn’t
really fail. He just tried one business after another while he was waiting
for the right moment to go and get that jewelry.
But then, several months and several businesses later, a funny thing happened.
One of his businesses started to pick up. He had started it by picking
up some scrap metal from a factory and loading onto his pickup truck and
taking it to a metal smelter who bought it off him. Then he went to various
other factories and did the same. He would pick up their old metal scrap
and then take it to the smelter and sell it to them. He became familiar
with all the factories in the whole downtown area. He knew who to see
on what days in order to pick up their scrap metal. To them, he was doing
them a favor by carting it away. But it was worth something to the smelters,
so he always had a place to sell as much as he could collect. It got so
that he needed a place to take it for the interim so that he could sort
out the different types of metal and get a better price for the batches.
So he rented a fenced lot. He would bring the truckloads of scrap there,
sort iot into piles by metal type, and then take one load at a time of
each metal type to the smelter. This little scrap business started to
grow. Soon, he found he needed a second pickup truck and hired a few men
to help. Then a third truck. Then more men. Well, he kept growing it and
growing it. He totally immersed himself in it. The months went by. Then
a couple of years went by as he continued to grow this business successfully.
He met a woman, and got married. He had no real worries about income because
his scrap business was doing well, and of course he still had the jewelry
back at the bank. But for now the business was giving him everything he
needed. By this time, he had come to think of the jewelry as a backup
plan, rather than his primary plan for success. He and his wife soon had
children.
The children grew. The years started flying by.
His scrap metal business had now turned into quite a nice business worth
several million dollars. It was very successful, but very time and energy
consuming.
He realized that he no longer needed the nest-egg in the bank safety deposit
box, so he just left it there for a rainy day. After all, he had seen
rough times and he knew that rough times would come again someday and
he wanted to be ready for them. He just knew that the good times wouldn’t
last forever.
One day the economy might fail, and if it did, his business might easily
fail, and if that happened, then he still had his fallback plan. His jewelry
nest-egg would make sure that his family would always be well taken care
of.
But the economy didn’t fail beyond the normal recessions that come
every decade. The business remained intact – and thrived. The years
went by. His daughters grew up and were married and had their own children.
So far his business was still flourishing. He had never told his wife
or family about the jewelry back in the bank safety deposit box. He kept
it hidden as a dark secret about his youth. He had become an honest businessman.
He didn’t have to lie or cheat or steal from anyone, and he had become
a very upstanding member of the community. He was a wealthy man now. He
employed a large number of people. Lots of people looked up to him. His
wife and family looked up to him. He couldn’t let them know he had
stolen that jewelry. That meant he was a thief. It was his dirty little
secret from a distant past, and he couldn’t tell anyone about it.
It was his secret shame. He had come to wish he had never broken into
that house in Rosedale so many years ago when he was young.
Meanwhile, his business continued to grow.
Finally, one day, when he was 66 years old, he went to the doctor and
the doctor told him he had a heart problem and he wasn’t going to
live much more than a year.
He started thinking about what he wanted to do in that last year he had
left. He had never really been an especially religious man, but, like
a lot of people when they come to the last stages of their life, he found
he had been thinking about God lately and he started to think about what
was going to happen once he died. He realized that that jewelry that he
had stolen as a youth and had kept as his dirty little secret for almost
50 years, was going to be a black mark on his record. It marred his soul,
and that started to eat at him. He started to feel guilty. He thought
about it every day, but couldn’t tell his family or anyone about
it because he had to keep it secret.
Finally, he couldn’t stand the feelings of guilt any longer. He decided
he wanted to make it right. He wanted to make reparations to the family
that he had stolen from. He wanted to wipe the slate clean, and he wanted
it clean before he died – and he was running out of time.
So he hired a private detective to look into the family of that home he
had robbed so many years before. He remembered the address, and gave it
to the detective. It turned out that the house was one of the ancestral
family homes of the area, and that family had lived there for well over
a hundred years. That family still lived there. Probably not the actual
lady of the house at the time from 50 years before, but her children still
lived there.
So he planned a visit to them.
But he thought it wouldn’t be proper reparation if he just simply
handed back the jewelry and said "sorry". He had had the use
of it for 50 years.
Although he never did sell any of it, he at least knew it was there and
having that safety net there gave him the courage and confidence to try
all those businesses until he found one that succeeded. When he really
thought about it, he came to realize that that really was the core of
his success.
Without the knowledge of having that to fall back on, he never would have
tried the things he did to make a business successful. He never would
have made the investments or taken the risks he needed to to survive.
He owed that family more than just simply returning it.
So he sent the jewelry in to be appraised and he planned that he would
give them interest on the value of the jewelry. He started to worry about
that.
He did a few calculations about what the interest would add up to over
50 years. He started to think that perhaps if he just paid them DOUBLE
what it was worth, in todays values – that would be enough of a sincere
gesture to ease his guilt and hive him the open door to heave he was looking
for.
The result came back from the appraiser.
The jewelry turned out to be costume jewelry. It was completely worthless.
When he had taken it, he was young, he didn’t know real jewelry from
imitation jewelry. He just made an assumption that a wealthy woman living
in a huge mansion like that would have real jewelery. All his life he
lived thinking that he had a nest egg there. A safety net. He always felt
that he could not fail and so he didn’t. He did make it work. No
matter what came up, he could always just take it calmly know that nothing
could ever really hurt him.
Now, looking back, he realized that It didn’t matter that the jewelry
was fake. All that mattered in this case was that he THOUGHT it was real,
and so he acted as though it were real, and that allowed him to do what
was needed to be successful. His attitude made all the difference.
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