When I was born, a savings account was created at a local Savings & Loan. I think it started with $500 or so. I think all of us had one. It wasn’t until I really started saving money. By the time I was in my late teens, I had $7000+ in that account. It would make college a little easier for me. My sister had saved even more money than me. In today’s money, it would equal $40,000. And an estimated total of all us kids would amount to $360,000! That’s a lot of money.
All that money “suddenly disappeared.” I had seen the little passbook, that contained all the relevant information from time to time. That’s how I knew how much I’d saved over the years. I was never told that the money was gone or how it had vanished. There were lots of times in my life over the years, when I thought about that missing money and how I could have used it back in the day.
Anyway, one day my father mentioned to me that if I had to do a deposition, just say “I knew nothing.” There was no explanation why or what was going on. I had no clue what was going on. My guess today is that my father used all that money for whatever business scheme he was working on. But the bottom line is, he stole the money from all us kids and never bothered to repay us. Nor did he bother to tell us. More on the business ventures in another blog.
My younger brother is 4 years younger than me. My brother must have been around the age of 13 when this incident happened. `My brother either broke into a garage, or the garage door was open and he walked in. In any case, there was a refrigerator in there and he walked in and stole some beer. My brother did get caught, though I’m not sure to what extent the police were involved. My father found out what happened and “took care of it.” There was no punishment from my father, nor from the police. My father being a former judge and him knowing the chief of police personally, meant nothing would come of it. And no consequences would occur. This was particularly true for the males in the family.
Males were treated much more favorably than the females in the house. If you were a guy, you were golden and could get away with a lot of things. My father was there to bail them out.
More accounts of my father being the fine upstanding member of the community in the next blog.