re: #627 Decatur Deb

If I can’t play the piano, I’m staying away from whorehouses.

My granduncle was out of work (Like everyone else in the Depression) and was to the point that he knocked on the front door of a “House of Ill Repute” to see if they had any paying jobs that didn’t involve him taking his clothes off. The madam felt sorry for him and offered him a job as the bookkeeper.

“I’m sorry, Ma’m. I can’t read.” The woman still felt sorry for him and gave him a couple of apple to help tide him over.

He was sitting on the corner crying, with the apples in his hat, when someone bent down and picked up an apple. Before granduncle could protest the other fellow threw some change into the hat. A few minutes later the same thing happened.

Granduncle ran off and bought more apples. Time passed, and soon he was using a handcart, then a push cart, then worked up to a little spot at the farmers market, and last month he sold his chain of 106 grocery stores for 45 million dollars. And as always, he signed his name with an X.

“What’s this? You can’t write?” the lawyer said.

“Can’t read either,” Granduncle admitted.

“My word… if you could read and write, what could you have done with your life?”

“I’d probably be a bookkeeper for a whorehouse in Franklin, Tennessee.”