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The next morning, I told my best friend, Mike, what my dad had said. As best as I could tell, Mike and I were the only poor kids in this school. Mike was also in this school by a twist of fate. Someone had drawn a jog in the line for the school district, and we wound up in school with the rich kids. We weren’t really poor, but we felt as if we were because all the other boys had new baseball gloves, new bicycles, new everything. Mom and Dad provided us with the basics, like food, shelter, and clothes. But that was about it. My dad used to say, “If you want something, work for it.” We wanted things, but there was not much work available for nine-year-old boys. “So what do we do to make money?” Mike asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “But do you want to be my partner?” He agreed, and so on that Saturday morning, Mike became my first business partner. We spent all morning coming up with ideas on how to make money. Occasionally we talked about all the “cool guys” at Jimmy’s beach house having fun. It hurt a little, but that hurt was good, because it inspired us to keep thinking of a way to make money. Finally, that afternoon, a bolt of lightning struck. It was an idea Mike got from a science book he had read. Excitedly, we shook hands, and the partnership now had a business. For the next several weeks, Mike and I ran around our neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking our neighbors if they would save their toothpaste tubes for us. With puzzled looks, most adults consented with a smile. Some asked us what we were doing, to which we replied, “We can’t tell you. It’s a business secret.” My mom grew distressed as the weeks wore on. We had selected a site next to her washing machine as the place we would stockpile our raw materials. In a brown cardboard box that at one time held catsup bottles, our little pile of used toothpaste tubes began to grow. Finally my mom put her foot down. The sight of her neighbors’ messy, crumpled, used toothpaste tubes had gotten to her. “What are you boys doing?” she asked. “And I don’t want to hear again that it’s a business secret. Do something with this mess, or I’m going to throw it out.” Mike and I pleaded and begged, explaining that we would soon have enough and then we would begin production. We informed her that we were waiting on a couple of neighbors to finish their toothpaste so we could have their tubes. Mom granted us a one-week extension. The date to begin production was moved up, and the pressure was on. My first partnership was already being threatened with an eviction notice by my own mom! It became Mike’s job to tell the neighbors to quickly use up their toothpaste, saying their dentist wanted them to brush more often anyway. I began to put together the production line.