Chapter 2

The following week the school called my parents in to review the test results. After they completed their review, they brought me in to talk about the next steps. What were the pros and cons of moving me ahead in school? I was already one of the youngest in my class just because of my birthday. The test said I could skip five grades, but everyone agreed that it was a crazy idea to have a now eleven year old in the 11th grade. The compromise was to move me ahead to eighth grade. I would stay at the same school through the end of the year. Then they would decide if I would go to ninth grade or even higher.

During my first day, it didn’t take long for the class bully to start to pick on me. This could have really turned out to be a difficult situation, except one of the other eighth graders that lived next door to me, decided to become my bodyguard. Whenever possible, he and his sister had been using our pool to swim with me. I was also helping him with his schoolwork. So after that first confrontation, I didn’t have too many problems. Some of the older girls thought I was cute, as in baby cute, not hunk cute, but that was fine by me.

When my Grandparents came down for Thanksgiving it was still warm enough to go swimming. At that time, they were around fifty years old, so there were no walkers or oxygen. We all had a great time. I asked my grandpa to come back to my room because I wanted to show him something. Since I was walking ahead of him, when he came in, I closed the door. I went to the closet and opened my cigar box. I reached in and brought out two ten-dollar bills and a one. I handed him $21. He looked at me funny and lifted his shoulders. I told him the twenty was for the two $10 bets and the dollar was to have him on retainer. His eyes got big.

I had already made sure that my school library had a basic business law book. As I laid out my plan, I wanted to refer to it. I told grandpa that I had checked out the book and read about client attorney privileges. I didn’t want my parents to know about the bet or any other “business” we discussed. I held out my hand and said “Partner?” He smiled and shook on it.

We had not been alone to discuss it but the Dolphins were 10 and 0 before grandpa came to town and their schedule didn’t call for them to play on turkey day. Instead, their schedule called for them to play the next Monday night game against Saint Louis. They’d killed the Patriots 52 to 0 two weeks ago but had barely beaten the Jets 28 to 24 during the previous week’s game. Grandpa was getting excited; he was like a little kid grinning ear to ear the whole time he was visiting. Grandma seemed happy as well.

A month later, we were up in Atlanta for Christmas. We visited my Dad’s mom too. She was now living in a nursing home. My Grandfather had passed away from smoking too much and my grandmother lived there because she couldn’t remember anyone. We talked to her for a while and I sat next to her and held her hand while they took a picture, but I was never really close to her.

The Dolphins were 14-0 and would be playing the Browns in the first round of the playoffs on Christmas Eve. I sat with grandpa and watched the game. Dad would watch for a while and then go see what was going on elsewhere in the house. He couldn’t understand why we were so excited about a team that I had only been near for one season and had never seen a live game. They won 15 to 0 and would play again on New Year’s Eve against the Steelers. We watched and cheered and everyone thought we were crazy as we went wild after the Dolphins won a close 21 to 17 game. We were one game away from being millionaires. I had to go back to Florida for school so we all said our goodbyes and flew home.

On the evening of January 20th, when my parents were “playing cards” with friends and I was out by the pool with the babysitter, our phone rang. We both went into the house to answer the phone. It was grandpa so I asked the sitter if she could go outside so I could talk with him. I told her that after I talked to my grandpa, I would be out. It turned out that he was still in Vegas and had two checks in his hand.

“Well partner, what’s your plan now?” He asked.

I told him that I had read a few more books from the downtown library and asked him if he knew anything about trusts. He did of course and thought that creating a trust would be a good way to keep my parents or anyone else from manipulating the money and a great way to protect my identity. I told him that after all of my reading, I wanted him to set it up to allow me to invest in all types of investments. He was quiet waiting for me to finish so I went on. “Stocks, bonds, commodities, metals, gems, land, ADRs, options, real estate, gambling, businesses, venture capital, debt of any rating, tax notes or any other not already listed.” I also added that the trust should be able to trade on margin or borrow money”. I had that all written down. I had to admit that I did not know what all of those were, but I knew about the ones I wanted and I didn’t want to limit myself in the future. I know some brokerages need to have it in writing before they will let a trust trade in a certain type of investment.

I also wanted a prenuptial clause. He asked me why I wanted that. I told him that if I got married I wanted the trust to be the “bad cop” that demanded the “prenup” and not me or my family. We could always get married without one but in that case, the rules of the trust would cut me off from any trust income. In other words, “Don’t blame me, it’s the trust.” He was proud of my research and thought he would set up his trust the same way and insert the same clause just in case grandma or he ever were remarried after the other passed away.

He set up the trust and after taxes funded mine with $1.34 million. Then I asked him to buy silver futures. I wanted to control 2 million ounces at $1.5 an ounce. Silver was currently trading at $1.50 an ounce but he could buy a 12-month contract for $ .30 an ounce. This is like paying $1.80 an ounce against what you sell it for but it is only $ .30 out of pocket today. The rest of the money went into Government Treasury bills. It was the 70’s so 10% was the norm for government paper. Using that percentage, 2,000,000 times $ .30 is $600,000 and the other $700,000 at 10%. In the following year, I closed the futures at $5.80 an ounce. Take away the $1.50 for the strike price and the $ .30 for the contract and I had made $4 an ounce times two million and then $70,000 in interest on the $700,000 in Treasury Bills. My grandpa never asked where I was coming up with this stuff but after taxes we both had around $6 million and it had only cost $20.

I knew silver would flatten out until the end of 1979 but wanted to have a history of silver transactions so it did not look like I had anything funny going on as a first time trader. I was out of silver in ‘74 and the stock market was shaky so I stayed in bonds and cash. In 1977, I had grandpa buy $200,000 a month worth of silver whenever he could get it under $5 an ounce. By the end of 1979, we each had at least 1.5 million ounces.

I mentioned early that we only stayed in South FL for a year until dad went to work for Barnett Bank in Orlando. When we started looking for houses I had grandpa come down to visit us in Orlando to help with the search. My dad was going to buy another cookie cutter house in a cookie cutter neighborhood. How boring. It’s like keeping your money in a safe, low interest, savings account. I had grandpa look at land in Winter Park on some of the lakes. He found three one-acre lots side by side on the lake. The lots were $25,000 each but I knew they would be worth ten times that amount after Disney built their park, opened it, and Orlando burst at the seams. The cookie cutter dad was looking at would only triple in value over the next 15 years.

Grandpa bought all three lots. He had some extra money and gave mom and dad one of the lots and $20,000 if they included a mother-in-law suite for when they came to visit. At $12 a foot to build the 4,000 square foot home set my folks back just $10,000 more than they were looking to spend on the cookie cutter house. Of course that meant that grandpa had to slip them a nice Christmas present every year to help with the maintenance taxes but they could pay off the house in two years, if they took the money from grandpa and paid off the loan.

I had grandpa buy a couple of orange groves south of town and a couple of thousand acres of scrubland that in twenty years or so, after development, Tiger Woods and Shaquille O’Neal would have a nice place to live.

I had continued in school and when we moved up to Orlando, I made a decision to repeat my four years of high school. I really wanted to learn all I could and not just enough to pass the tests as I did my first time. Therefore, at age twelve, I went into my freshman year of high school. I was now two years ahead of the kids my age. I loved to swim and I would swim about a half mile a day out in the lake or in our pool. I also started running in the mornings. I knew that I wanted to develop good habits at a young age. I didn’t want to be 45 and out of shape again. I started running six days a week. It took a few months to build up to five miles at ten minutes a mile, but by the time I was senior in high school, I was running under six-minute miles and still had plenty of energy when I finished each run. I had also worked up to 200 sit-ups and 100 pushups every morning six days a week. I never walked into a gym or a weight room but before 8 am every day I had done enough to keep my body in shape.

One of my hobbies was photography. I took a workshop the first summer I was in Orlando. I advanced my knowledge of photography rapidly and loved to experiment with different techniques. I enjoyed being outdoors and I would take pictures of animals and nature as well as sports. The speed of the action was difficult to capture but with the right film speed and camera settings, I learned how to create some good-looking shots.

My parents had met an attorney that lived a block away that was also an amateur photographer. He had a dark room and after talking, he invited me over to learn the other side of photography. In his darkroom, he could only do black and white developing but I liked the process and would often spend time talking with Mr. Overstreet (John) learning about taking and developing pictures. We would go down to the park on weekends and take pictures of the large Live Oaks and look at light, shadows, composition and then go over to the basketball court and take action shots. Over time, I improved even more to the point where I was relatively good with the camera.

One weekend, when I was taking pictures at the park some of the guys playing basketball needed one more person to even out the teams for a three on three. They asked me if I wanted to play so I stepped in. It was a good game and the boys were all older. I was taller than a couple but they were two to three years older. One guy on my team, named Doug, could shoot the ball well. So I worked hard on rebounds and got the ball to him whenever he had an open shot. We worked well together and won four of the five games we played. After the game, I started walking home and he fell in beside me. He lived two blocks down from me, across the street from the lake. His dad was a builder and did both residential and light commercial work. As we came up to my house, I asked him if he wanted to cool off in the pool.

Doug went home to change into his bathing suit and let his mom know where he was going to be. We hung out the rest of the day, swam in the pool, and talked about the neighborhood and the school I would be attending with him. We became good friends.

Doug was a good athlete and played football, basketball and baseball. I pushed him and myself to work hard at school. I knew most of the material but the first time through, I coasted through high school but this time, I wanted to study hard and learn everything. I did homework every night and tried to stay at least one chapter ahead in the books. Because of that effort, I got mostly A’s with a couple of B’s. I was again trying to establish good study habits. The first time through, when I went to college, I had no clue how to study because I never paid attention to studying in grades 1 through 12.

I was not old enough to play football but decided to help the training staff. I learned to tape ankles and treat minor injuries. Each day after school, I spent time assisting the head trainer. We all called him Doc even though I didn’t think he was a real doctor. We were there before, during and after practices and then the same for the games. He was a nice person. I worked hard and he taught me the ins-and-outs of first aid and sports medicine.

1 + 1 = 2 so I decided to put my hobbies together. I would work after school in my assistant trainer role and then during the games, when I wasn’t busy with an athlete, I would pull out my camera. I would also take shots during the team’s practices to practice my own photography skills. The players and cheerleaders liked the shots that I took of them as well. I talked to the school paper and the yearbook and both took me up on my offer to take pictures for them. I carried a backpack most places with my camera, film, lenses and other stuff inside. I also threw a book in there for when I was bored and added a couple rolls of tape and small first aid kit just in case something came up.

I worked with Doc after school and enhanced that with a class in anatomy and another in sports medicine. This is a class taught by Doc specifically designed and approved for our school. Moreover, it provided me with time to learn another skill. I took classes and worked with him for my first two years at the high school. By my third year, I could handle most minor injuries and know when to call in help for the more serious cases. The first two years were just doing the work and trying to make friends. My social life was slow because of my age, but I made the choice to focus on school and hobbies because my parents were busy with their own social life.

My Junior year of high school started well. I was still working hard to understand all of my subjects, to the point that I could help my friends or even teach the class. I didn’t just want to pass the test I wanted to make sure, when I walked into my first college class that I was prepared to do well. I also looked into taking a college class or two at night. I know that to graduate from college, you need to accumulate 120 credits with an average of around three credits per class. That breaks down into five classes a semester. If I could get four to six classes under my belt before I went to college, then I could take my junior and senior year with only four classes a semester. I was also taking AP American History. If I did well in that class and the exam that may be another class that I could cross off my list.

So I was now a Junior, it was a Friday night and I was at a volleyball game helping Doc. It was at home and we blew the other team away in straight games. There were no injuries so I was ready to leave the gym and go home. I saw Doug heading out and asked if he could drop me off at my house. When they dropped me off, I walked in the front door of my house and after it closed behind me, I heard some rustling, loud whispers and movement in the family room. As I came around the corner, my mom was standing there all rumpled and asked, “How did you get home? I thought you were going to call for a ride.”

Just then, Mr. Peters came out of the hall bathroom and five minutes later my dad and Mrs. Peters came down the hall from the master bedroom with dad talking about some piece of artwork that they had in their room.

Boy, everyone treats me as if I am a dumb kid.

“Doug and his mom were at the game watching Doug’s girlfriend and were leaving just as I was going to call you, so I asked her for a ride.” I commented.

“The Peters had come over for some drinks and they were just heading out.” mom replied.

“They don’t have to leave because of me. I have some homework to do so I’ll be up in my room. Goodnight”

What a messed up family. The first time through, I was so blind to what went on around me. I guess with the times we lived in and the fact that grandpa was giving my parents about three times what my dad made every year, they were enjoying their lives without the worries of middle class life.

Chapter 3 »