Difference between revisions of "Jim Sutter Interview"

Latest revision as of 07:14, 21 July 2011

Interview: Jim Sutter (Jrs2) Medium: Audio and Video Tape Date: Sunday, May 8, 2011 Place: Home of Jim and Nedra Sutter, 3022 Blue Heron Trace, Marion, IN 46952 Collected by: Jessica Snyder (Jrs1)

Jrs1: What’s today’s date?

Jrs2: Today is a the 8th day of May. Two oh one one.

Jrs1: And um what is, where are we at right now?

Jrs2: We are at a my home at Blue Heron Trace 3022.

Jrs1: Ok.

Jrs2: I’m looking out at the lake and the Canadian geese right now.

Jrs1: Can you state your name?

Jrs2: James R. Sutter. S-u-t-t-e-r.

Jrs1: Um, your birthdate.

Jrs2: 12/9/34

Jrs1: Is there anyone besides the two of us viewing this interview right now?

Jrs2: I don’t think so.

Jrs1: What years did you attend MHS?

Jrs2: A, again, 49, 50, 51, and 52.

Jrs1: Where were you living at the time?

Jrs2: 809 W. 4th Street.

Jrs1: Um, can you describe your family, like brothers, sisters, parents.

Jrs2: Uh, four children, uh, my older sister has passed away, my older brother has passed away, Jack, and my younger sister, Susie, lives in Kansas.

Jrs1: Ok, can you state your parent’s names?

Jrs2: John and Naomi. John G. Sutter and Naomi L. Sutter.

Jrs1: Do you remember your classes, teachers and classmates, any specifics?

Jrs2: Well, I remember, I think, going through grade school at Horace Mann, I can tell you all of the teachers and uh, I could tell you a lot of my classmates. Uh, uh, like I said, I enjoy history, and I enjoy personal history. But uh, I will say this, I know that uh Oak Hill has just had a $25 million bond issue that was shot down 7 to 1 or 8 to 1 and um, I know they were complaining about their schools, the conditions of their grade schools. And I made a trip to Kokomo. Now, Bill may not want it, because he probably doesn’t feel the way I do, but, but I made a trip to Kokomo, Thursday or Friday of this week to see their grade schools, uh, Pedit Park, Bonhair, Elwood Haines, and their schools were no better than the grade schools at Oak Hill. Uh, Sweetser, I think Swayzee. Uh, and I delivered ice cream to those schools in 1960’s starting in August 6th, 1960, and I delivered ice cream, and those same schools are there today, so those same schools are over 50 years old, and they are still using them, and as far as I know they are not planning on, they may shut some schools down, but not for brick and mortar reasons. Now I went to Horace Mann, and Horace Mann had wood floors, it had filled-in fireplaces, uh, the floors creaked, uh, uh, uh, and that, Horace Mann was a crumbling school. Clayton Brownlee, Clayton and Brownlee, and most, uh, junior high schools were pretty good, Martin Boots, McCulloch, Washington. But uh, I went to crumbling grade schools, but I still got a really fine education. Uh, all women teachers, always wore uh, pretty formal, uh, some of them wore suits every day. Uh, women in suits. Most of them were not married. But the, the, the, the school was an old school, but the education was a pretty fine education. So, um, I think, I don’t really believe, I think the money that the people of a school district have a choice. They either put the money in the classroom and give it to the teachers, or they can spend it on brick and mortar. I think that when the United States is facing 9% unemployment, or 10, that there should be no brick and mortar projects. None. That should, that money goes into brick and mortar, now, I’m not talking about highways and bridges, and super structures, uh, I’m talking about buildings. I don’t believe we ought to be building a lot of brick and mortar additions right now, until we get our unemployment back down to 5 or 6% and get our teachers up to a living wage that will help us find and, and adequately compensate good teachers for doing a good job. I think that’s far more important than going out to see how much money we should spend, $25 million dollars, plus $25 million dollars in interest, $50 million dollars. Where a man in a $100 thousand dollar home is going to pay $700 more than he’s paying now? That money, that’s $700 that money can go to the teachers and whatever’s necessary in those classrooms, not more. And then what do you do with Sweetser?

Jrs1: Mmhmm.

Jrs2: What have we done with these schools we’ve closed down? You get $50 thousand for that brick and mortar. And, so anyway, I don’t know how we got to where we’re going, but, to me, that is the story of future education in America: is to put the money where it will really do good. Not in the, uh, not into, uh, building a lot of new fancy buildings, that are really questionable to how much they add to the education of the kids.

Jrs1: What was your most important experience while at MHS?

Jrs2: Uh, probably, uh, well, there weren’t too many. Uh like I said, uh, I went because I had to go, uh, I uh, I enjoyed playing in the orchestra, I enjoyed all of the after school activities and the noon time activities. But uh, I was probably uh, just a totally average student who was really just waiting for the bell to ring so I could go down to the Dairy and work. That was my, that was probably my most interesting experience while I was in junior high school and high school, was, was working for my dad. Most kids don’t have that opportunity and most kids can’t appreciate that opportunity. Uh, and I think it’s a shame because to some extent, if they could just get a taste of it, it would really help them to understand America. And I think it would, people have got to you have to have school teachers, policemen, firemen, milk men, convenience store operators, restaurant owners, you have to have everyone to make the thing work. But, it, to just have a taste of entrepreneurship and just take home a few pay checks, with those, what I call big numbers on them, I think it would really help our country.

Jrs1: Um, what did you do for fun?

Jrs2: Again, we had a bunch of guys I ran with, probably 15. Some of them, uh, uh, my best friend was the senior class president. Uh, one of my best friends, second or third, was the best baseball player that ever played baseball for Marion High School, Howard Herring. Um, a bunch of really good guys. But we, uh, were more into, um, Ping-Pong, basketball, um, YMCA activities, intermural activities, going to the movies, firecrackers, and same old stuff. We didn’t get into the girl part of the thing until I went to IU, but I don’t want to talk about all of that.

Jrs1: (Laughter in agreement) What was Marion like then?

Jrs2: Different. Uh, it was a whole different deal. Uh, I went to the movies, and all my friends, I went to the Saturday afternoon movies, and I walked from the 800 block I walked almost three quarters of a mile down at eight or nine years of age, and my sister, Susie, went with me, six, seven years old. We were never bothered. Uh, very low crime. We would go to the movie and there would be a row of bicycles of kids that rode in from South Marion and North Marion, some of them had locks, some of them didn’t. Um, very seldom did one of those bikes get stolen. They sat outside on the sidewalk, and the movie was filled with kids. Twelve cents got you in to the movie, a Coke with a nickel or dime and popcorn with fifteen cents, but twelve cents got you into the movie. But uh, uh, Coney Island Hot dogs were two, two for a quarter, fifteen cents, two for a quarter. But uh, uh, there was, you, most cars were not locked, uh, there was some crime, there were some serious crimes. There were some murders, some one or two policemen were shot, and there was some of that, but it was extremely rare, much less than it is today. Uh, most families only had one car, uh, most family’s wives, housewives, didn’t even drive , uh my mother didn’t drive. Uh, uh, we ate at home, there were no McDonalds, no Wendy’s, we ate a lot of mashed potatoes, and we had a lot of roast beef, and a lot of lettuce with French dressing, and I think I ate as well as anybody, but there was a lot of meat and potatoes, but we always the seven of us, my grandmother, sat around the round table in the sun room and then on sun, sun, on Sunday we sat around the dining room table after church and we had a woman that came in and fixed fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and my mother didn’t usually have to fix dinner on Sunday. But uh, it was a very structured, it was a very secure, uh, even during the war, my brother being in the army, having the bronze star in the window. Bronze meant that we had someone in the service, silver star meant that we had somebody who had been wounded in the service, a gold star meant we had somebody killed in the service, and I do know peop, kids, in Uncle Jack’s class that were killed, over in the Netherlands killed in planes, killed on the battlefield. And, in spite of the Second World War, and Adolf Hitler, and Japanese and all of that our life style on 4th Street was very quiet, very secure. My father had a lot to do with that. My dad was a quiet, serious, reverential, uh, type of a guy, but, but didn’t believe in spanking, I did get one spanking, he didn’t get upset, but he did get, he just had a way about him that you knew, you just, I just didn’t have any reason to not want to obey my mother and dad. They never really gave me a very good reason for not obeying them, just like you are with your mom and dad. Um, it was a very quiet, comfortable, uh, life, life that we had at 809 W. 4th Street. Again, if the average American kid could grow up in the family setting that I had, uh, the whole world would be a different world, today, and I realize that I’m in the top one, two, three percent of the kids that, that oh, I’m going to say that really there’s 20% of the kids that grow up in very, 35% of the kids, or 40% of the kids grow up in very secure homes. The divorce rate in those days was nil, it was, I remember one person in my class that, two, two, in my, out of 36 that their mother and their dads had gone through a divorce. I know, I can give you exactly their names, uh, and, and they were really good kids, didn’t affect them, really good students, smart, but they still had had, but very rare did we have that happen. So, today I think that it is close to 50%, back in the old days it would have been seven or eight percent, so that gives you an idea that, that is a pretty good stati, it tells you the difference in home life in the 40’s versus today. Now, when I refer to the dairy, I refer to the Sutter’s Dairy. And, and it was the only bottling plant, uh, after I got out of Indiana University, it was the only bottling plant in Marion we had one other, Deer Creek Dairy, that bottled up until 1953. But uh, anyway, it was a large dairy. We sold milk all over North Central Indiana, we had branch outlets.

Jrs2: Is this alright?

Jrs1: Uh hu

Jrs2: Well, we went through the process of what I did while I was in the dairy.

Jrs1: Uh hu

Jrs2: And the bottle washer I was on and the glass line I was on, and a the glass line would run about 50-45 a minute. And a a again a they came past fast and the glass line generally fired up about 6:30- 7:00 in the morning and would run to about 2:00- 3:00 in the afternoon, about 2:00 in the afternoon. Then you had to clean everything up everything was cleaned up before we went home at night. We never waited to clean up the stainless steel. But a anyway, the a, a Sutter’s was the first or second dairy in northern Indiana to have a paper machine after WW2. All these soldiers had gone out all over the world and they were in all these army camps and in the army camps they were serving in paper, so when these soldiers came back home they were wanting to buy milk in paper. They liked that throw-away carton. So anyway, that brought the paper back in. And as I said before, we bought for about 7 or 8 dairies for anywhere from 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, to a year and a then they eventually got their own paper cartons. Then about 2 or 3 years later here came the half gallons of paper and that called for another machine and a so we were the first or secondary in northern Indiana, so we went back to bottling for the same dairies again. so we were not only bottling for ourselves, but we were bottling for 6-7 other dairies. But I worked on the glass line, worked on the bottle washer, worked in the cooler, worked on the paper line, worked in the cottage cheese department, worked in the garage, a really was very, one thing I did a deliver milk, a home deliver milk. A senior in high school and on through college. But the thing was I was not really a very good student. A my dad only had an 8th grade education, so he kept saying, “Look. You don’t need a college education to milk cows. I mean, nobody in college is going to show you how to milk a cow.” So he was more interested in me getting out of college. Is this going to run for a long time?

Jrs1: Yeah, you’re good.

Jrs2: So he was more interested in me getting out of college and into work at the dairy. So I went to IU for three years and a I didn’t graduate but a he told me he said, “Look.” He said, “I don’t care whether you go to college or not, because I need you in the plant, I need you in the business. And he said, “I really think I can teach you about all you need to know. So, I really enjoyed working more than I enjoyed going to school. A probably anyone else can make that statement. But I think in raising a family, being around your mother, and the four other children, and Honey, I think that the idea of being of service to other people, and you’re a lot like this, Jessica, and have been for 10 years. When we opened that store in Gas City, I saw it in you. You wanted to help those people find, when they came in. Seven years old, eight years old, but you were meeting those people at the front door “May I help you find what you are looking for?” Very few very few children, 6, 7, 8 years old. DO you remember that?

Jrs1: No.

Jrs2: The store out at Gas City? But very few children, 6, 7, years old would have picked up on that, but you had your mother’s sense of servit of service. And I think I picked up on my dad’s sense of service and it is truly a gift. But, my dad didn’t expect anything out of me really in grades, no all of our children graduated from college because of Honey. Honey insisted that they get a college education. But they all did that because of Honey, they did not necessarily do that because of me. But a, my mother always expected me to be a business man. My mother said, “Jimmy is going to be our business man.” And her expectations were that I was going to be a business man. So, although I wasn’t a very good student, I think that I was getting an education in watching my father and watching our employees and being in the middle of the line. As I was saying, my dad would watch. His office was right behind the dairy store and he would watch people coming in, getting milkshakes, banana splits, and that sort of thing. He’d go out and greet them, then he’d come back in. He always kept his eye on that glass filler. To see it was operating to see it had clean bottles coming off of there. And then the next minute he would have a salesman coming in, a they would talk about chocolate. “John, I’ve got a great new chocolate powder for you.” Dad would listen to the guy, then finally the guy would get up and go, then maybe he would have a home delivery salesman who came in and said “John Mrs. Butterworth up on Nelson Hill, she she had some Half-in Half that kind of feathered in her coffee and she wants to know why that Half-in-Half, wasn’t sour, but it curdled in her coffee. So, he would talk to the guy about that. Take her a free pint of Half-in-Half. And then the next thing he would know. He would be getting a call from a farmer, “John what’s the price of milk going to be next month?” And I saw my dad switch hats seven or eight times behind that desk in a days’ time and there was always something going on. And he was totally comfortable. That maybe the next thing would be our accountant, bookkeeper, come down and say, “Well, I got the profit and loss from last month. Do you want to take a look at it?” And he would let me watch him operate. So, not only was I thrilled to see all of the machinery in the plant, I was more than thrilled to see him operate behind his desk because it was such a a a, it was nothing boring about what he did. Now the only time I saw my dad get nervous, everything else he knew, but when he bought a load of milk he might have been buying 2,000 gallons of milk in every single truck load or 15 hundred gallons of milk. And he was operating on about a cent a gallon, a cent and a half, a quarter, maybe a little over a cent, and a quarter. And, so, when he was buying a load of milk, buying by the hundred weight and lets say that pulling a figure. A hundred weight price was $2.50, but in the spring, the cows always gave more milk, than they did in the summer. When it was cool and pleasant the cows were always giving, then they would dry out and in the summer the price of milk would go up and in the winter time the price of milk would go down. Because the same cows were giving more milk in the winter time and the spring, then they were in the summer. So, it was always a changing market. But he had to be sure that he wasn’t giving away his profit when he bought that load of milk. So, I did see my dad get nervous when he got that pencil out and he was talking to the guy over at Producers or over at Kroger, “John I’ve got a load of milk for you.” And he would have to figure out first of all whether he needed that milk. But if he made a mistake of a half cent or a quarter, he might have been giving away most of his profit. So I. And in having an 8th grade education, he had good arithmetic! He knew his numbers and he had good books. But still, if he was off on that calculation he could still easily give away three or four hundred dollars. Which was a ton of money in those days. So he was going to try and drive for the best a maybe, maybe he had to have that milk. When that phone rang, maybe he said, “I’ve got to buy this load of milk.” So, he was still negotiating to buy the milk as cheaply as possible. So, I did see my dad tense up. When he used to get those pencils out and start figuring the price. “Well let me see. How many quarts am I going to get?” But everything else seemed to come easy for him. He certainly enjoyed it. And he would go down after dinner, we would have dinner, and he would take me, take him with you, take me with him. And he had his own set of books, he had a set of books. But, he would take me upstairs, no one else there, everybody was gone. But he had a key to the accountants cabinet and he would put a key in there and unlock that thing and he would pull out about four or five books, ledgers. And they were this big. He would flip the pages back, then he would get the adding machine out and he’d take and figure out this thing, then he would take and set this book, then he’d pull out another book and he’d run the, then he’d set that, then he’d pull out another book, then five books later, he would run about eight or ten numbers. He knew from those numbers pretty much within 5% what the profit was going to be for that month. And he would show it to me. A he’d say, “Now this is what I think we did last month.” And I would say, “What do you mean?” And he would say, “I mean the profit.” And he would show me a number. A he said, “You think that’s alright?” And I said, “Well, it looks pretty good to me.” But anyway, he kept me, he would, he would, he would. Then we’d walk through the plant and he’d look over at the bottle washer and see if it was all cleaned up and see if there were any broken bottles, or if somebody left a light on he would turn out the light. Loved to go throughout the plant and turn off the lights. A I think he took me along for protection because he, there were two of us, so anyone in there, I make a lot of noise. But then he’d go by the bottle washer, and then we’d go back in the garage and looked the trucks over. So it was a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week. The plant ran 7 days a week, all the way through the Second World War, a no, no, up to the Second World War. And then we went back to six day a week delivery. So, I was brought up in a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week atmosphere. Certainly on the farm, the cows had to be milked 7 days a week. There are certain religions that say you should not work on Sunday, and I was not able to accept that, because what were you going to do with cows that needed to be milked 7 days a week? And in those days the plant needed to run 7 days a week because in those days the people at home had very few refrigerators, they had iceboxes, but we had 7 day a week delivery, we delivered to the home every day for 7 days, because they would only buy a quart at a time, or a quart and a half. You still got plenty of film?

Jrs1: Yep.

Jrs2: Ok. But, anyway, it was an exciting education. And I just found all of that, I loved U.S. history. A, it had a, good, good, U.S. history. And a, a, and I loved that. It was, and Spanish. A, but a, at the same time, what I’m just talking about, being exposed to it day after day and night after night, at the dinner table at our house with your mother and her brothers and sisters was pretty much the same thing. We talked business. Honey never said don’t talk business at the dinner table. Now Nana did, once in a while and I kind of, I just said, “Now Nana, you’re telling me not to talk business at my own dinner table with my own family?” “Yep I am.” “Nana, what are you having for dinner?” “Well, I’m having roast beef and mashed potatoes.” “Who do you think paid for the roast beef and mashed potatoes? Now can we talk about business?” So, we had a couple of run-ins like that, but eventually Nana had to give in. And I think that your mother and her brothers and sisters, and of course your mother and her two sisters worked in the dairy store at 14 years old, 13 years old. Childhood labor laws were very lax in those days, particularly with daughters working for their dad. But, they went down and got those jobs themselves, and my boy both went to work. A, various jobs, but they all got jobs themselves, I never got a job for anyone, ever. And they all pretty much worked when they were in high school. I think it is so important. I wish that I still owned the Handy Andy, Stacey wor and Ryan worked in the Handy Andy’s at a very young age. And I just think and with working on the farm that working on a job, an adult job, really, really knowing what it is to earn a day’s pay. Now when I got my checks, I thought I was a rich man, and I was, because there was nobody in Marion that I know of, from the fifth grade on threw that made the dollars and cents that I was able to make by working. I loved to get those checks, put the money in the bank. It was a great experience, and anything that our government can do to put these kids back into gainful employment; not all kids are able to get jobs, but there were a lot more in those days. They worked in the theatres, a, they ran newspaper routes, they still have that. But, there were so many more things that the kids could do and it was such a great education for them. So, I’d love to see those days come back. Uh, the reason that we got into the Handy Andy’s, or I did, was that I was sales manager for Sutter’s Dairy, and my number one responsibility for Sutter’s Dairy, at the, was to provide sales, to put volume through that plant, run milk volume, get customers, find business. Well, the convenience stores were an excellent outlet for dairy products. Uh, our own dairy store was an excellent outlet for our dairy store. So, as a, my, my dad would go down south and go to Florida and would come back with pictures of Seven Eleven stores and Circle K stores, and that was the early days of convenience stores, and he’d say, “We need to do this, we need to do this.” So, we finally got a chance to go into the Little General Stores, they were originally Little General Stores and we went to a convention and there was a man there from the Little General Stores, and he was talking to a hundred milkmen about “You need to start these stores, because your home delivery is going down, and there is going to be no home delivery someday.” We didn’t like to hear that, but it was true, and Kroger is going up like, and A&P Standard, and Marsh, and all these other people, and they are going to have all of your business someday. “So what are you going to do to replace that business? Well, these stores are a way to replace that business.” So, we started with one store on Kem Road, uh, the store there by, uh, uh, now, it’s across the street from the Harris Bank, there on, was our store number one, 1970, and by 1972 or 73’ we had six or seven stores, by 1990 we had 16 stores or 15 stores, and the year 2000 we had 16, 17, 18 stores. But, and that was true, they put volume through our plant, but still our milk business was going down. Every year we’re losing, we were beginning to lo, ya, there were some years we lost money, but the business from the Handy Andy’s was going up. So, eventually we were able to sell our stock in the dairy and I ended up full time with your mother, after a few years, in the convenience store business. Um, we had a big decision to make, uh, we wanted, we had seven people in the, in the store business originally, six of them out of Kokomo, and uh, they wanted to go in the business without paying franchise fees. now Little General was the second or third largest company in the country, and they had 600 stores out of Tampa, Florida. They wanted 3% of our sales, uh, right off the bat, whether we did made any money or not, if we sold $2,000 of stuff, we had to send them $60, if we sold $30,000 dollars a week we had to sell, uh se, send them $600. So, I came back from the convention and dad said, “How’d it go?” And I said, “Well, we had a meeting with Little General, five or six of us went up in a bedroom and the guy from Little General, we were all laying on the beds, and he went through the whole pitch.” And he said, “Well, what are the other guys going to do?” And I said, “I don’t think they are going to do anything.” “Well, what are you going to do?” And I said, “Well.” And he said, “What’s the cost?” And I said, “It’s going to be 3% off the top, and then $2,000 a store, is the cost to use the Little General name.” “Boy,” he said, “that sounds expensive, that really sounds expensive.” I said, “it is.” And I said, “If we get up to ten or 20 stores, it could cost us 30, 40, $50,000 dollars a year, plus $2,000 a store. Not per year, but first time charge.” He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I think you ought to go with Little General.” He said, “I think you ought to pay the price. I’ll tell you why.” He said, “I think they’ll keep you out of trouble, because if you go into the store business without knowing anything, you’ve got to go find these locations, you’ve got to do all this on, you’ve got to make, make up your own books.” And he says, “They’ll come up with all of that for you.” So, we did go with Little General and he was exactly right, because after we got 2, or 3, or 4 stores, in Marion, I asked the Little General field manager, I said, not after, it was, it was right at the beginning, I showed him our three locations we picked out and he said, “Well, this location is a secondary location, this location is a secondary location, and this third location is no location at all.” And he was right, there has never been anybody go into that location, I’ll show it to you, it’s behind Wendy’s, but nobody ever went into that location. So, the locations, he said, “Now, uh, 200 yards away is a primary location, but it was right across from Erma’s, well, from the, uh, Highland Avenue bridge. He said, “You need to be up there, on that bridge.” And I was trying to go where the 9-49 Restaurant, which is the Mill restaurant, or the 9-49 Drive-in. He said, “You don’t want to be here, you want to be up there, because you want to be right when they come off the bridge. You want to be in the number one position.” So, he showed me right away, he said, “If you would have gone for the three locations that you were going to take you would have been broke. You never would have got, you never would have gotten past three stores.” So, uh, franchising is the way to go, somebody going into a new business: drive-ins, Culvers, all of the new good, all of the new businesses coming to Marion anymore, 75% or 80% are franchised businesses. So, my dad was right, the guy from Little General was right, and that’s another one of the times in my life, that if I would have turned left, instead of turning right, I would have gone broke. There have been five or six of those that in every case, I made the right decision, based on somebody else’s information and the chances of turning left instead of right or right instead of left were about an even 50-50. So, I have been extremely lucky, fortunate, uh, to have been able to make the right turn at the right place, and fortunately uh, in every case they have worked out. But, at the time, and that is extremely, that’s like throwing a nickel and coming up, calling heads six times in a row. Try doing that sometime or try saying it will come up tails, try calling six times in a row, very hard to do. I don’t know if I could ever do it, I mean, I know I could if I did it all day long, but, that, you can do everything else right, but if you have a little divine guidance, I’m sure I prayed on some of those decisions, maybe not all of them, but I think I did pray on some of them. A little divine guidance, or a heck of a lot of luck you’re, you’re, probably not going to do a lot well, you’re going to have a good life and you’re going to have a happy life, and you’re going to be good all the way around. But, in order to really claim that you can look back at the age of 76 and say, “You know, uh, I really owe my success to other people’s advice, some of it my dad’s, some, some friends, uh, uh, the reason I showed up in the bedroom that day with that man from Handy Andy, uh, from uh, Little General, Will Roy, he’s passed away now, is because Lew Gallagher, from Gallagher Dairy in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, came to me, knowing that I was going to go into the convenience store business. He said, “You need to hear this guy, and there are going to be six, seven of us meet with him. Why don’t you come on up?” If I hadn’t, if Lew Gallagher had not come to me that day, and said that I would not have been up in that bedroom, I would have not met Wilbur Roy, I doubt seriously that we would have had Little General as our franchise, and I would have gone broke, and the guys with me would have gone broke. We had 30,000 bucks, and 30,000 bucks would have carried us through three, but there is no way that we would have been able to make it if Lew Gallagher wouldn’t have come up to me that day in the hotel. That’s just one example out of the five, or six, or seven times that I have had things happen that I look back on today and I think I had somebody helping me, sitting on my shoulder telling me which way to go.