Get Rich in Your Spare Time While Doing Absolutely Nothing (Almost)

All you who chase with panting eagerness the ghosts of your hopes, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth and that the difficulties of today will be salved by a brighter tomorrow, attend to my tale of the pursuit of wealth far beyond the wildest dreams of something as trivial as mere avarice.

Indolent, a muser, a dreamer of dreams, I, too, once was held in the grip of the "tomorrow's newspaper" syndrome. Through some magic charm or time machine, get tomorrow's newspaper and, starting with a two-dollar bet in the first at Aqueduct and finishing with the last sulky at Yonkers, just keep laying it on some nag's nose, watching the money pyramid, mountains of 10s and 20s, an Everest of 100s.

Like Bloom, I dreamed of Spanish treasure ships, of diamonds in the gizzard of my Thanksgiving turkey, of being sole legatee of some distant relative, twice removed on my (continued on page 179)Get Rich(continued from page 143) grandmother's side, who, jerked to Jesus several centuries past, had left behind, out of the grasp of czar and commissar, in the care of the Rothschilds, a sum of 10,000 guilders or pounds or Swiss francs that has been quietly expanding itself at the rate of six percent per annum. I whiled away half my life dreaming of being adopted by the Guggenheims or the Morgans, of so impressing the Rockefellers that they settled upon me a full tithing of their estates. I dreamed of discovering an inexhaustible seam of gold ore.

There were always practical thoughts of inventing some sort of device for the benefit of mankind, with concomitant financial benefit to myself. Such as: devising a small but powerful solar battery capable of powering everything mechanical, from lawn mowers to locomotives; making a new translation of the Koran in which Moslems are strictly forbidden to own, use or come into personal physical contact with any product taken from beneath the earth's surface--such as oil; discovering a true aphrodisiac.

Who hasn't had such thoughts?

And while in one of those musing moods, my soil already prepared, so to speak, I happened one day to be perusing some magazine of negative literary value, when my eye skidded to a halt.

I can make you appear to be a $ millionaire $ in just four weeks!

Pictured alongside the headline, shoehorned right into it, in fact, was a drawing of a suave-looking fellow, legs crossed, sitting in a chair, phone held importantly to the ear, and a sheaf of papers dangling casually from the other hand. Surrounding this wheeler, shaker, maker of deals were three dollies, obviously wise in the ways of the business world, wearing miniskirts.

• Get a $90,000 House Without Money!

• Make Yourself a Millionaire in Seven Days!

• Attract Glamorous Women!

• Enjoy All Kinds of Vacations Absolutely Free!

• Acquire Property Without Money!

• Buy and Sell Stock Without Money!

• Stop Paying Taxes Forever!

And there was more. A full page of lures, promises, answers to everyone's daydreams. It was signed by one Sid Rosen, who admitted being a lifetime wheeler-dealer. For ten dollars, American, he was willing to instruct me in how, like him, I could "Get Smart and Live Great."

Terrific.

Suddenly, opportunity seemed all around me. I became attentive, alert, more quick-minded, as if some sort of internal fine tuning of the senses had just been adjusted. Each page I turned sang to me the same siren song--the way to wealth is as clearly marked as the yellow-brick road. Just follow the signposts.

A lifetime of frayed cuffs and greasy gravy seemed to be mocking me. But those beckoning ads seemed to assure me that within weeks it would be silk sheets and truffles.

• How to Build an Instant Fortune--Information Free!

• $350 DAILY in Your Mailbox--Free Report Reveals Fortune Building Secrets!

• $100,000 Yearly Possible!

• $8000 Monthly spare time!

My threadbare dreams began to take on a kingly, Croesuslike aura. Let's see, eight times 12 is 96, nearly 100 grand a year. And that's just part time. With the time left, 1 could get:

• $2000 weekly at home using other people's money!

Now we were talking. That's over 100 grand a year and, added to the 96 I would be making in my other spare time--well, it was not the ultimate fortune. I would not have the wealth of a Getty or a Hughes, but it was a start. It would give me the leverage to get into something really big. For instance, oil!

You may be a winner of an oil lease thru public drawings conducted by U. S. Govt. Could make a fortune for you. Get free oil-field map, brochure and details on oil-lease drawings.

• $1,000,000 in Months. Complete Report, $5.75!

• $1,000,000 Plans. Spare Time. Send stamped envelope.

Now we were making financial progress. That $96,000 I would be making in my other spare time could pay for my butler, valet, chef and upstairs maid. The $100,000 I could use for tips and maintenance on my fleet of vintage Rolls-Royces. Plus the $350 I would be receiving free in my mailbox every day; that would go mostly into my kitchen and wine cellar. A fellow in my position has to make sure to stay well stocked with Romanée-Conti, to say nothing of the Roederer and Gaston Briand for after-dinner sipping and seductions. Let's see, $350 times 365--I wondered if that offer included Sundays. Why be greedy? I could afford to be generous. Say 312 days of mail delivery, minus 12 days for holidays. Make it an even 300 days. That would come to another $105,000 a year. I never eat much breakfast, anyway. I'd probably even be able to set aside a little out of that to keep the cigars flying in from Davidoff's in Zurich and to bring in the Juilliard or Olivier for some light entertainment. And if that budget didn't work out, there were other opportunities to make up any deficiencies and contingencies.

Instant Riches!--New Foolproof Method to Riches!--Incredible Income!--Money Secrets, Fabulous Opportunities!--Millions Won!--Build Wealth!--Enjoy Lifetime Income!--I Will Help You Turn $6 into $1,000,000 While Sitting in Your Favorite Chair at Home!

I already had a favorite chair and I thought I knew where I could raise the six bucks. Wealth and the power it brings--the feeling began to surge through me. After all, why not?

For the cautious, for those who lacked the blood of the true economic buccaneer, like me, there were ways to be comfortable. Simply by answering an ad, they could set themselves up for life in a profession or a trade. Porcelbond promised $20 to $50 an hour for repairing and refinishing bathtubs and sinks. Another man said he made millions assembling electronic devices in his basement. There was a secret for sale whereby you could make $50 an hour playing blackjack or could live comfortably playing the horses.

And not to be lightly put aside was the one for:

186 uses for sawdust, newspapers, rags, glass....

Nor was that the last word in opportunity. There was a small fortune, literally, within your hand's grasp. Don't bite your nails. Sell them.

You can make thousands of dollars just by growing your fingernails. Norm Heinz, owner of Creative Airs Salon in Dallas, Tex., says he will pay 25¢--$2 apiece for fingernails at least 1/3 inch long. Heinz uses the clipped nails for fingernail transplants....

That kind of stuff might be all right for clods and clucks, but I knew I owed it to myself--a debt to all my dreams, I called it--to try for the main chance. What the hell, nobody was asking me to invest a fortune. Nobody was asking more than ten dollars for his secret to how to become a millionaire. It was worth it.

If I wanted to test the waters before taking my big financial plunge, there were ways to do that, too. The classified sections of those magazines repeated the same call over and over. They were full of the same ad.

Stuff envelopes--$750 a thousand. Complete details....

That was the ad that really did it. That was the ad that really "woke up the financial genius in me," as another ad challenged. In one of those flashes of intuition, an insight of absolute clarity and shining brilliance, I saw instantly how to convert envelope stuffing into the very bedrock, the unshakable foundation of my fortune. Someone was willing to pay me 75 cents for every envelope I stuffed. Suppose I did two a minute. That's $1.50--$90 an hour, $720 a day, $3600 a week, if I worked a straight 40-hour week. And why not? They're not paying me for overtime. Say I took eight weeks' vacation. That's still $158,400 a year. But that's not clear profit. Out of that I'd have to pay my own hospitalization and Social Security and maybe set up a retirement-income plan. Still, that's a lot of money for something as simple as stuffing envelopes. Unless they're asking me to stuff cobras into the envelopes.

A genius is a fellow who can take a simple, everyday idea and with a shrewdly applied twist of imagination create a work of art. I could actually feel the thought. I was on my own peak of Darien surveying an empire of envelope stuffing. I could offer employment to the world--truck up rural blacks, illegal aliens, long, long rooms of them. Conveyor belts trundling envelopes and stuffings to them at the rate of one every ten seconds. Separate shipping docks at either end of the building. One bringing them in, the other taking them out. Loaded trucks driven by retired cabbies, busmen and newspaper delivery drivers, speeding off to waiting freight cars, ships and planes. I would expand quickly to Africa and Asia. Labor is plentiful and cheap. My profits could run as high as 90 percent. I could feel the shade of Jay Gould smiling up approvingly.

And while the frontal lobes were engaged in all this grand flush of excitement and empire building, what was going on in the rear, in that inner core of self that tells us who we are and where we live? Laughter dwelt there. Not a raucous guffaw or a raspberry, but a quiet, smiling chuckle and now and again the whispered word sucker. Gradually, it would seep to the front and the absurdity of the entire proposition would overcome me. So throughout all this extrapolation and elation, there was the feeling that at some particular moment in the immediate past, one had just been born. But putting aside, for the moment at least, the great William Claude Dunkenfield's twin admonitions that a sucker should never be treated with equilibrious parity or that a worthy individual cannot be hoodwinked I plunged into what I felt could be the main chance.

After all, was Columbus intimidated by the Sargasso Sea?

"Dear Sir," wrote I. "Please send me the information on how to become a millionaire Enclosed is my check for ten dollars."

Or, "Dear Sir: Please send me your information on making a fortune from TV game shows."

There were variations, of course, but that was the general form. I sent out about 45 such requests. Not in a spirit of greed, necessarily, but I felt I owed it to my financial destiny and to all those disenfranchised blacks, Africans and Asians who would henceforth be dependent on me for their livelihoods to survey the field closely and choose only those opportunities for great wealth that would be most beneficial to us all.

While the keys went clickety-clack, I began to imagine the recipients of those notes, seedy little men and gray little women, ma-and-pa mail-order shops, waddling down to their post-office box every day to see what good turn the U. S. Postal Service and the classified section of Mechanix Illustrated had done them. I could imagine them rushing up their rickety wooden stairs, letting the screen door slam in joy and triumphantly shouting that another sucker had bit. There'd be real meat on the table that night.

Was I being conned? I found it hard not to trust a man who would say this:

I'd like to give this to my fellow men ... while I am still able to help!

It was almost a plea. Almost desperate in sincerity. It conjured up the image of the author, knowing himself to be in the dread grip of some terminal illness, striving for immortality through his charitable deeds. If you could have seen that photograph: square jaw, squinting, as if only great strength of character and a pain threshold somewhere around nine gs were all that was holding back the screams from bubbling out over those tightly pressed but honest lips. If a fellow couldn't believe in such a man, there was precious little he could cling to in this thorny life.

Finally, it was done. All the requests were out. My bread was on the waters. The rest was in the hands of time and the vicissitudes of the Postal Service.

The first reply was back in a matter of days. One busted bubble. In fact, my scheme for providing sustenance for all those rural blacks, Africans and Asians went up in, poof, smoke. The bedrock of my financial empire had turned to quicksand. Something quicker than quicksand.

Disillusionment. But that only proved the ultimate wisdom of W.C.'s eternal caution. Funny thing. I had sent four replies to envelope-stuffing ads to opposite ends of the country, but what I received back were four identical replies. Absolutely identical, except for the return address to which I was supposed to send my money to go into business for myself. For an investment of anywhere between $50 and $1000, I was now offered the earning potential of $50 to $1500 a month. A far cry from the $14,400 a month I had been counting on. My Romanée-Conti was turning to vinegar.

I was offered six options--gather clippings from newspapers and magazines; distribute their unnamed publication; sell ads for their unnamed publication; gather subscriptions; line up other agents (other suckers like myself); or operate on a large scale in a protected territory. (Like those fellows were doing. How's business, guys?

Nor was the magnate of Bermuda much more help. Next to his cordial signature at the bottom of the ad was a line drawing of a man in a sailboat, sparkling sun overhead, waving out to me.

If you like to bum around, I'll show you how to make a lot of money at it.

He said that at the age of 37, he had already retired--in style; a $100,000 home in Bermuda, tennis and golf all year round and deep-sea fishing from his own yacht. And he did it, he said, by not practicing the puritan work ethic.

He painted such an appealing picture of the carefree life, perhaps somewhat scaled down from what I had originally projected for myself (better call Davidoff and tell him to hold off on the shipment), that I sent him my eight bucks. What he sent me was a manual on how to be a telephone solicitor, usually for charities on the make. Not to put too fine a point on my normal inclinations toward hereticalness, but I began to have some serious doubts as to the actual existence of this tycoon, in Bermuda or elsewhere. Yachts and smiling suns were replaced with the image of a seedy guy in a washable windbreaker and white socks, giving the well-modulated pitch to a plumbing-supply wholesaler for ten tickets to the Kiwanis circus.

That image fell somewhere around 179 degrees to the right of my notions of the good life. I'd certainly have to let the domestics go.

Seriously, I didn't expect much out of the ad that promised me wealth and happiness by appearing on TV game shows. Since they stopped fixing the winners, those shows have had no appeal for me. If some guy with capped teeth is going to scream in my face, I prefer him to do it while handing me a check for $64,000 instead of a five-year warranty on a dishwasher or a freezer.

Nevertheless, I mailed off $3.25 for the promise of a better tomorrow. About a month later, I received a paperback, The T.V. Game Shows--How to Get On and Win. The book was an account of the history of TV game shows. The only significant information on how to get onto the shows and reap all those rewards occupied a total of exactly one of the book's 272 pages. And even that one page was padded.

How's this for real inside dope?

First of all, make sure that you are completely familiar with the program you are shooting for. Watch the program regularly before making application. Second, put on a happy face when you visit the people who choose the contestants....

Having gone this far, I don't suppose it would hurt to tell you that all the ads were hustles of one sort or another, full of hyperbole and pie in the sky and requests for more money to get the real secret. All except one.

There was no reason to suspect that when I mailed off my check for two dollars to Mark Fleming in answer to his ad--"Want money? Hate work? Lazy Way to Big Money. Complete, Clever Plan ..."--I would, for once, get the real truth. Mark, it seems, was the only one who had found the real road to--not wealth, exactly, but at least some pocket money. His reply:

Lazy Way to Big Money

This is the easiest way to make money in mail order there is. Try it, it will work!

Step 1: First buy a mail-order business license.

Step 2: Find a suitable magazine that has a classified section with a heading "Business Opportunities," "Moneymaking Opportunities," or something of that sort.

Step 3: Write an eye-catching ad such as mine that tells people you will mail them a plan to make big money, easy. Two to five dollars is best.

Step 4: Write up a reply like this one.

Step 5: When the letters start coming in, mail them back replies. Your profit:

$2.00 gross

--.01 envelope

--.03 copy

--.13 stamp

$1.83 profit

Your own two dollars has proved that it works.

Thanks, Mark, I needed that dash of cold reality. There's still a way, though, an honorable way. I'll become a CIA front to suborn Congress. What the hell--who lived better than Tongsun Park? Call my tailor. Uncork a magnum of the Dom; see if Billy can make it for lunch.

"Wealth and the power it brings--the feeling began to surge through me. After all, why not?"