Uncle Jack opened the very first (and last) BBPBJ Stand in
the garage behind his house on Mortimer Street. I can’t
tell you how much he spent on a splendid sign, constructed with replaceable
numbers. It read, “O’Dooley’s Beer Battered PBJ - 0000003 SOLD.” He placed it
out in front of his house near the curb and hoped to siphon Mortimer
Street traffic to his business.
The neighbors
were excited to have an entrepreneur amongst them… excited, not pleased.
After a month of very few sales
, Jack became convinced he needed more publicity. He called me up one night to
discuss the problem. At the time I was
the only member of our family crazy enough to listen to him. He had worked his
way down through the family’s age groups before he found my sympathetic ear. I
thought Uncle Jack was interested in my
entrepreneurial skills. I’d had some
business success with my paper route in high school. I recommended he move his
sign down the street to the corner of a busier thoroughfare. The next afternoon
I helped him drag it to a new location next to the dry cleaner on South
Street. Two days later it was gone.
“Taken by someone who is going to
steal my idea,” he moaned over the phone when he called.
Not really. While Jack was out, the
dry cleaner had called Jack’s house to complain, intimidating my Aunt Alice. She telephoned me with an offer of $5 to take
the sign in my father’s car to the dump. In truth, I transported the sign to behind
our house. It seemed too nice to just throw away.
“Don’t say a word about this,” my
aunt whispered over the phone when I called to say the deed was done. “Maybe
he’ll forget about the damned thing.” I didn’t tell her I had the sign in my
back yard.
Uncle Jack was inconsolable. I felt
so bad I was the cause of his sorrow, especially when on the third call to me
that evening he was close to tears.
“Without that sign,” he sniffled,
“no one will ever know of my creation.”
“You could have another sign made,”
I said.
“That sign cost me all the spare
cash I’ll have for months,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “why not put an
ad in the paper? Offer a reward and maybe the culprit will put the sign back on
the corner.” And hopefully farther away
from the dry cleaner.
The ad appeared the next day in
the newspaper. “Reward: For the return of my sign ‘O’Dooley’s Beer Battered PBJ
Emporium – 0000009 SOLD.” I put the sign
back on the corner late that night. No one collected the reward, of course.
Because of the ad, a local
reporter showed up two days later with a photographer in tow and the result was
a big spread in the Sunday newspaper’s Neighbors section. 000009 almost immediately zoomed up to 0000187.
Uncle Jack was back in business. Practically
everyone knew of him and his sandwich now, including the City Health
Department, the State Business Practices Board, the Alcohol Board of Control, the
Internal Revenue Service , the nearby Third
Avenue Baptist Church
and even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. More than one of them offered him a
deal he couldn’t refuse. No one ever
heard of his sandwich again.
Years passed before Aunt Alice would
have anything nice to say about me. At my wedding she told my new wife, “Don’t believe
a word he says. You never know what he’s
hiding in the back yard.”
“I guess I’ll find out,” said my
new wife.
“And he never gave me back my
five dollars,” she said, shaking her head.
copyright 2013, David Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
dave@windsweptpress.com
