vafatboy
02-09-2007, 07:27 PM
Bazaar event/story….
1982, we are renovating garden apartments and turning them into condo’s. Section by section as people move out we do our thing. We get to a building where an elderly lady lives and she hasn’t moved out. She has been in the apartment since 1969. She worked as a maid and left early every morning and returned late.
We spoke with her and realized she hadn’t made plans to move and had nowhere to go. So it was decided that we would move her stuff for her to a unit that was scheduled for the end of the project and would help her find a place. She comes to me on the morning of the move and is very concerned that certain items are sure to find there way to the new place. When she opens the door, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Stuff stacked to the ceiling in every room of a two bedroom apartment. She is pointing out empty detergent bottles and stuff she had moved towards the front door.
After she leaves for work and we’re digging through this stuff, it quickly becomes clear that it was trash and she had some sort of hording disorder. I made the decision that we weren’t going to move the junk. So we started throwing stuff in the dumpster. I opened a cardboard box to see if it was to be moved or trashed. It was filled with jelly jars and the like with $$$ in them.
Hey now, I kicked everybody out and told them to bring all the containers back from the dumpster. Money, money everywhere. I got the people I could trust and we started going through everything to be sure we didn’t throw the cash out. While going through everything I noticed newspapers everywhere, the sports page in particular, the horse racing results were common find. And there were numbers scribbled about.
When Ida Mea got home that evening, I asked her if she knew how much she had stashed away. She was a little cagy about it. I said something about the racing results pages, she said “you think those ponies ran around in here and left all that money”. I friggin busted a gut. I asked her if she wanted and trusted us to go through and recover her cash. She seemed relieved. She was in her sixty’s and I’m sure she wasn’t up for it.
As we dug into it we were finding money in EVERTHING. Behind pictures in their frames, small aspirin bottles, boxes, jugs you name it. She had Christmas cards that were years old and never opened with money inside.
In the end we found 32 thousand and some change in ones, fives, tens and twenties, along with a good amount of coin. She said she had no idea there was that much.
With that money and some help from folks at her church she ended up buying and moving back into the apartment she had been in for years, but this time she owned it.
I had purchased there as well and I would see her every morning waiting for the bus to go to work and wondered if she had started a new stash.
1982, we are renovating garden apartments and turning them into condo’s. Section by section as people move out we do our thing. We get to a building where an elderly lady lives and she hasn’t moved out. She has been in the apartment since 1969. She worked as a maid and left early every morning and returned late.
We spoke with her and realized she hadn’t made plans to move and had nowhere to go. So it was decided that we would move her stuff for her to a unit that was scheduled for the end of the project and would help her find a place. She comes to me on the morning of the move and is very concerned that certain items are sure to find there way to the new place. When she opens the door, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Stuff stacked to the ceiling in every room of a two bedroom apartment. She is pointing out empty detergent bottles and stuff she had moved towards the front door.
After she leaves for work and we’re digging through this stuff, it quickly becomes clear that it was trash and she had some sort of hording disorder. I made the decision that we weren’t going to move the junk. So we started throwing stuff in the dumpster. I opened a cardboard box to see if it was to be moved or trashed. It was filled with jelly jars and the like with $$$ in them.
Hey now, I kicked everybody out and told them to bring all the containers back from the dumpster. Money, money everywhere. I got the people I could trust and we started going through everything to be sure we didn’t throw the cash out. While going through everything I noticed newspapers everywhere, the sports page in particular, the horse racing results were common find. And there were numbers scribbled about.
When Ida Mea got home that evening, I asked her if she knew how much she had stashed away. She was a little cagy about it. I said something about the racing results pages, she said “you think those ponies ran around in here and left all that money”. I friggin busted a gut. I asked her if she wanted and trusted us to go through and recover her cash. She seemed relieved. She was in her sixty’s and I’m sure she wasn’t up for it.
As we dug into it we were finding money in EVERTHING. Behind pictures in their frames, small aspirin bottles, boxes, jugs you name it. She had Christmas cards that were years old and never opened with money inside.
In the end we found 32 thousand and some change in ones, fives, tens and twenties, along with a good amount of coin. She said she had no idea there was that much.
With that money and some help from folks at her church she ended up buying and moving back into the apartment she had been in for years, but this time she owned it.
I had purchased there as well and I would see her every morning waiting for the bus to go to work and wondered if she had started a new stash.