Richard Lewis

Remember who checked on you

Can you tell me what this is? I call it Redneck Popcorn👌

His name was Chris Gardner. In 1981 he was a medical supply salesman in San Francisco. He had a wife, a baby son, and about $10,000 in debt he couldn't climb out of. One day he saw a man parking a Ferrari outside a building downtown. He walked up to him. He asked two questions: what do you do, and how do you do it? The man was a stockbroker. Gardner went home that night and told his wife he wanted to become one. She left. He enrolled in a training program at Dean Witter Reynolds that paid almost nothing. He had to move out of their apartment. He had no place to live with his son. For nearly a year, Chris Gardner and his toddler son slept wherever they could. Shelters. Bathrooms. Parks. The floor of a subway station. Every morning he put his son in daycare, put on his best suit, and walked into the office like nothing was wrong. Nobody at Dean Witter knew. He became their top trainee. Got hired. Worked. In 1987 he started his own firm. By the mid-1990s he was a millionaire. He wrote a book. Will Smith played him in the movie. He tells the story in speeches now and always ends the same way. He looks at the audience and says: "The cavalry ain't coming. You have to be your own cavalry."

There is a hotel in the southern United States that employs a man whose official job title is Duckmaster. The position exists nowhere else in the world. Twice a day he puts on a red and gold uniform, takes the elevator up to the rooftop, and walks five ducks down to the lobby. They march across a red carpet to a marble fountain in front of the guests, then swim there until evening. The tradition started in 1933 when the hotel’s manager came back from a duck hunting trip with too much whiskey in him and dumped his live decoys in the lobby fountain as a prank. Guests loved it. A few years later, a former circus animal trainer working as a bellman at the hotel volunteered to look after the ducks and taught them to march. The hotel gave him the title of Duckmaster. He kept the job for 50 years. The ducks now live on the rooftop in a marble palace that cost the hotel $200,000 to build, with their own miniature replica of the hotel inside. The hotel’s French restaurant has refused to serve duck on the menu since 1981.

Wondering if I should open up sales again for a few tile flag signs? Or maybe some custom orders. :) debating