Dime a dozen millionaires

The kids started giggling when I told the clerk at Rising Sun Store that I wanted a big pack of that "Experiment" gum. Back in the car, 13-year-old Wyatt said, "Grampa, I know that you know that's not really the name of that gum." Parker and Tana told him, "Grampa just likes to have fun with people."

This past summer it was a wonderful adventure for me to take my three grandkids for a full day's tour of Glacier National Park, just them and me. Those kids are not little tykes anymore and it was the first time I had been alone with them together for many years. Last summer's laugh at Rising Sun made me think about a fun column written exactly 12 years ago about that sticky gum subject.

It's worth a rerun:

That does it! I've decided to not be a millionaire. Years of yearning and planning are down the tube.

Ever since I was a little kid in the hand-me-down overalls sharing a bedroom and a bicycle with my brother, I've been working on goals and plans for acquiring great wealth. This drive was increased by my not having a car at college, and the ultimate deprivation… my family not owning vacation retreats in Hawaii and Sun Valley. In 1955, I spent a winter in Florida as a yacht bum. Worked on a fancy yacht, mixed drinks for the owners and kept rich millionaires from falling overboard when they got drunk while cruising out to the Bahamas. Nobody worried about us poor guys falling in the ocean.

A Wrigley's chewing gum heir had a "winter home" near the Bahia Mar Yacht Basin where I worked. One time, I sneaked his kids some Black Jack gum, which caused the guy to go bananas. I envied the things he had to worry about. Think of the fit Edsel Ford got to throw when he saw his kid in a Chevy. Remember when John D. Rockefeller gave one of his sons a few million dollars to get rid of a wife he didn't like and later that same kid got to be a governor. I thought, "I'd be happy if my dad just bought me a state and made me get rid of the girls on my own."

Big time experienced millionaires don't pack bags when they travel because they have their own tooth brush and clean pair of shorts at more than one place. That plush concept of conspicuous consumption has had an almost mystical appeal to me.

Loved the story of the Texas oilman who willed that he be buried at the wheel of his gold-plated Cadillac. After the elaborate services were over and the gravediggers arrived to fill up the big pit, one looked at the deceased sitting in his Cadillac then turned and said to his fellow worker, "Man! That's really livin'."

What has soured me on reaching for these kinds of earthly achievements? It is the latest report on millionaires which appeared in a recent U.S. News magazine. It says that, by the end of the year, one in every hundred American households will have a net worth of a million or more dollars. That means there could be over 150 millionaire families right here in Flathead County. Before we know it, they'll be as common as wood ticks on a gopher, and I for one have never gotten real excited about being just a run-of-the-mill kind of person.

First wife Iris seems a little disappointed, but I feel like the universe has been lifted from my shoulders. I will now be able to spend more time getting back to basics, hiking in the mountains, plus wandering through fields with a shotgun or wading streams with a fly rod to put hard but honest food on the table, skiing the sun-swept slopes of Big Mountain in search of the true meaning of life, and of course… giving my grandkids whatever kind of gum they want.

G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and Hungry Horse News columnist.