The Stuff You Find

Our house cleaning continues. As it turns out, we hadn’t thrown out financial papers in… well, we’d just never thrown them out and we’ve been married for nearly 23 years!

Helaine stopped at Staples and bought a small shredder. She’s been working her way through our papers, a sheet or two at a time. I pointed out, we could have just thrown them in the fireplace and lit a match!

Here are two interesting pieces of paper – neither of any real value.

The first is the receipt from sending an audition tape to Mike Sechrist in New Haven. This little $9.35 investment turned into my job of the last 22 years. Pretty decent ROI!

The second is a receipt from PEOPLExpress for $23. It was the first real discount airline. You paid for your ticket on the plane! Often, they would board through the ‘normal’ and rear stairs.

Yup, you’d climb in through the tail!

Though it was good, in that it led to lower fares, PEOPLExpress is also responsible for cattle car crowding (and they did it on old DC9s), hub and spoke routing, less than scrupulous adherence to a schedule and the end of gracious service onboard.

I once saw a comedian who said the two most spoken words at PEOPLExpress’ Newark terminal (and old, non-air conditioned hangar) were, “Never again.”