MARCH 14, 2023 – Today I put the dismal science aside in favor of a true story about funny money. It has nothing to do with economics but everything to do with human nature.
The setting was Rutherford, NJ, hometown of my great grandparents and two subsequent generations of our family. During ancient times my great grandfather had constructed big, brick warehouses along Park Avenue in the center of town. A variety of leased-out storefronts lined the sidewalk level of the warehouses. In the late 1980s one of these retail spaces was rented to a young, new entrepreneur in town, Cliff Witmyer.
Cliff was tall, shaggy-haired, gregarious, former semi-pro hockey player turned rock band leader whose favorite holiday, Halloween, coincided with his favorite film genre: horror. At the intersection of luck and chutzpah, Cliff’s band wound up playing warm-up at an Arrowsmith concert. If Cliff’s band sound was adequate, his tongue-in-cheek approach to costuming was such a hit with Steven Tyler that following the gig, the Arrowsmith leader asked Cliff to outfit the A-band with equally outlandish apparel.
One thing led to another, and soon Cliff was in the costume rental business in Rutherford, NJ. After brisk sales leading up to his first Halloween in business (and before he branched off into related, lucrative enterprises), Cliff encountered the inevitable downturn in traffic.
Never one to sit idly by as the world passes by and being a person as defined by humor as by “horror,” Cliff decided to deploy an old prank to draw attention to his store—and his inventory of Santa Claus rental outfits. He squeezed some epoxy onto the tail of a shiny Kennedy half-dollar and glued the coin to the sidewalk just outside the entryway to his store. Behind the plate glass he stood furtively, waiting for a passerby to go for the bait.
Soon a well-attired gentleman came along. Cliff recognized the man as a resident of one of the well-appointed Victorian residences that lined the residential street behind Park Avenue. The gentleman apparently espied the epoxied coin just as another pedestrian approached from the opposite direction. The sharp-eyed gentleman took an extra-long step then stopped abruptly with his foot on top of the coin, hiding it from the view of the other person striding toward it. Standing immediately inside his shop but protected from sight thanks to the reflective quality of the plate glass storefront, Cliff howled with laughter. The affluent gentleman wasn’t about to lose out on a financial windfall, however minor it might be.
After the other pedestrian had passed by, oblivious to the coin, the finder stooped to claim what was his. The head of the fallen president, of course, wouldn’t budge. Frustrated but determined, the man picked at the coin, then with the sole of his well-shined shoe, tried to break Kennedy’s tenacious hold. Nothing worked, and as Cliff’s laughter was absorbed by the racks of fur-cuffed Santa outfits inside the shop, the gentleman moved on. Cliff noticed, however, that the fellow turned back in the direction from which he’d originally approached.
Cliff remained stationed just inside the plate glass window facing the sidewalk. He waited patiently for the next passerby to see the epoxied coin and attempt to remove it. About 10 minutes later, he saw the man from before returning up the sidewalk. After slowing gradually, the fellow stopped just short of the epoxied coin and looked slyly up and down the sidewalk to make sure the coast was clear. Cliff, however, remained unnoticed behind the plate glass.
In reaction to what happened next, Cliff covered his mouth reflexively to contain his laughter: the gentleman had evidently gone home to retrieve a Swiss Army knife, then returned to do battle. There was nothing neutral about his countenance or intentions. He opened a blade, then bent over to scrape the well-glued coin off the sidewalk. But the epoxy had formed such a powerful bond, coin and concrete were now one. The gentleman picked and pried without success, yet his failure drove greater effort. The objective, it seemed, was no longer to pocket enough free money to cover a single shot of caramel on the next Starbucks run. The goal was to prevail.
But JFK prevailed against the Swiss Army knife: eventually the blade snapped. In disgust, the defeated money man mouthed an unmistakable expletive and left the scene of defeat.
For Cliff, it was strictly funny money.
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Ó 2023 by Eric Nilsson
