My last post got me thinking about my grandpa. My grandpa was quite a character. People either loved him or hated him (most loved him); there was no in-between. His real-life personality closely resembled Rodney Dangerfield’s character in the movie Caddyshack.

Sometime in the late eighties he came up with this idea of having “pads” (like pads of paper) made from one dollar bills. He’d stop by the bank on his way into the office and bring back several thousand dollars in crisp newly-printed singles and have his secretary make pads of $50 with a cardboard backing. He really enjoyed seeing people’s reaction to being tipped with currency torn from a pad. Many people would question it’s validity. Once, a convenience store owner in Florida refused to accept it as payment because he thought it was counterfeit. As a side note here, I carried his “wallet” (a camera bag stuffed with five thousand singles in pads) through Europe on a trip with him in 1992. In return for this good deed, I was almost strip-searched at the airport in Gdansk, Poland.

Once the novelty of people’s reaction to that (the bills, not the near strip-search) wore off, he began picking up two dollar bills from the bank and padding those into pads of $100. Since $2 bills are somewhat less common, he received an even bigger reaction. Then after a while he began signing his name on them! In the last few years of his life, due to his failing health, he spent a decent amount of time in the hospital. He’d have us go down to the hospital gift shop and buy out their candy supply so he’d have something to give the nurses and doctors when they stopped by his room. The hospital staff would make a point to stop by often to grab some free candy and a signed $2 bill.

During one particular hospital stint, he started telling the nurses that if they folded the bill they’d become pregnant. Depending on their individual circumstances, some would intentionally fold it, some would do everything they could to ensure it would not get folded. Word of this travelled through the hospital and nurses and other employees from other wards would specifically seek out my grandpa to get a signed bill so that they could fold it.

My grandpa was known everywhere for this one and two dollar bill thing, and as a way of showing their respect for him, the guys who worked in our engineering department created a limited edition commemorative brake (a main product of one of our companies). Below is a photo of the original version of the Pro III brake that we sold at that time:

The teal part is called the anvil. On the special edition for my grandpa, they anodized the anvil in “money green” to represent the green sport coat that my grandpa always wore to tradeshows. It was another one of his trademark items. All the text and graphics are laser-etched on the brake. Sorry for the poor quality of the photos, they were taken with my first digital camera (a VGA Casio) almost nine years ago. The green was actually not so lime in person; it was much darker. I think they made a hundred of these brakes and distributed them to our best and oldest customers. I wonder if anyone ever actually used one of these for work?

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This is a photo of me and a good customer in 1997. That seems like a lifetime ago. Close observers will notice that this is the only photo of me on this whole site. Wow, I look like a dork there. My hair resembles Big Boy’s.