The big thing for my mom's family in Oklahoma when I was a kid was flea markets. Her parents and brothers bought and sold old bottles. One of the brothers convinced me that we could probably find better bargains where I lived in the northeast where bottle collecting wasn't as popular. The only problem was that I wasn't old enough to drive, so mom and I set out bottle hunting near our home in New Jersey. We'd celebrate our finds with a Dairy Queen milkshake. At the end of the summer I carefully boxed up my bottles and sent them off to the relatives in Oklahoma.

 

One year turned into the next and the big profits turned out to be rather elusive. After coming to college in Colorado, I was passing through my relatives town in Oklahoma, and there – in the same box that I had shipped them – were all my bottles. But not for a total loss... they grace a shelf in the recreation room of my home today, more than fifty years after my first entrepreneurial adventure.