My father had a lot of plans. You might even call them schemes.
Like how he lashed together a bunch of old tires to construct a makeshift reef to make it easier to fish on oceanfront property he did not own.
Or how he bought Great Dane puppies of dubious pedigree with the expectation that he could resell them for a quick profit. That didn’t pan out.
Or how he purchased odd things from home shopping programs, back when those were on exclusively at 1 a.m. on Channel 452, planning to resell the items at a t-shirt shop he would own and manage. Which led to him acquiring, among other things, a dozen wooden briefcases. Not exactly a product the world was clamoring for.
One of my favorites was that he was fascinated by how much people in his state of Florida would pay for Christmas trees. So he decided he would buy trees in Wisconsin and have them trucked down to Florida for a big windfall. He bought some trees for a test run.
What he didn’t count on was how the wind whistling over the open-topped truck holding the trees was going to strip them of half their needles by the time they made the trip south.
Family lore doesn’t record exactly what happened when the trees reached Florida, nude on one side. But I like to think that Dad still found a vacant lot somewhere and set up the trees in a circle so the naked parts were facing in. I imagine him making fast friends with anyone who might wander past the lot, convincing them that he would give them a great deal, and wouldn’t this unusual tree be amazing pushed up against a wall? What a space saver!
Nothing really compares, though, to the Great Cheese and Shrimp Scheme.
The can’t-miss plan this time was to buy cheese in Wisconsin and take it to Louisiana. There, he would sell the cheese to dairy-starved southerners, and use the cheese money to buy shrimp. Then — and I bet you know where this is going — he would truck the shrimp back up to Wisconsin, where shrimp profits would buy more cheese. Rinse and repeat.
Man plans, God laughs, as they say.
First, he bought a bunch of cheese. White cheddar, because in the 80s I guess he thought that would be considered more “exotic.” He then drove the cheese down to Louisiana.
So far, so good. But unfortunately, no one really wanted to buy cheese from a weird stranger in a parking lot. And in an even bigger hitch to the plan, when he got to Louisiana, it was not shrimp season.
It reminds me of that Monty Python skit where the man goes to the marketing firm to help him come up with a campaign to sell his stockpile of string: “122,000 miles of it, to be exact.” Useful stuff, string, says the ad man. No problem there.
“But there’s a snag, you see,” says the client. “Due to bad planning, the 122,000 miles is in three-inch lengths.”
I didn’t know any of this was going on when I went to my mailbox in my college dorm one night after dinner. My friends who lived in the same part of the dorm sometimes would eat dinner in the cafeteria together, then go get our mail, then return to our rooms with our doors open to the hallway while we opened our mail and continued to chat about the day.
I retrieved a long soft cylindrical object from my mailbox, completely encased in brown shiny packing tape. It was from my father. From the shape and the feel of the package, I thought it was a t-shirt.
It was not a t-shirt.
I sat at my little dorm desk and tried to open the package. But I couldn’t get a grip on it, because every surface was covered in tape. So I took out a scissors and snipped off a corner.
A blob of oily goo plopped onto my desk.
I called my father.
“Did you send me unwrapped cheese through the mail?” I said, a bit incredulous.
“Yes! I’m so glad you got it! I want to start selling this cheese so I sent some samples to people so they could try it,” he said. “Did you like it?”
“Dad, it was melted, and gross,” I said. “It probably sat on a radiator at some post office for a week. You can’t send unwrapped cheese through the mail!”
“Oh, I guess I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.
“How many of these unwrapped cheese bombs did you send out?”
“I don’t know — probably a dozen?” he said, beginning to get the sense of what he had unleashed on the U.S. Postal Service, and his close friends and family, aka cheese testers.
So all in all, not the most successful of ventures. Sadly, Blust Cheese & Shrimp Incorporated never got off the ground.
As I’ve written about before, my father was a brilliant artist and deep thinker, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. I don’t care that he couldn’t work out all the intricacies of multi-state cheese and shrimp sales. If anything, I love him more for it.
He took risks. He tried things, fearlessly. He “thought outside the box” many years before that became a silly business cliche. I wish I had one-tenth of his bravery and willingness to forge his own path through life.
I miss you, Dad.