A Suit of Clothes

One of my daddy's favorite stories involved a local merchant in my home town and some surplus clothes.

Back in early nineties, a friend of mine shared with me his tickets to a seminar at the Wynfrey Hotel in Birmingham. The seminar was on a Saturday and I went and spent the day. It was a money making seminar and of course they had lots of books and tapes to sell and I bought some. Of all the things they offered, the information on buying at government auctions and reselling for a profit was what interested me the most.

I brought the books home and studied them and came up with a plan. I got on the mailing list for goverment auctions and attended my first auction at Fort McClellan in Anniston. I bought some ammo cans and a few other items. Along toward the end, they auctioned off and enormous box of army dress green uniforms. When the auctioneer opened the bidding, no one was bidding so I did. I was the only one that did so I got the box of dress greens. I had no idea what I would do with them but that much poly wool blend material just seemed like it was sure to be worth something.

The buttons on the Army dress green coats were gold plated so they had been removed from virtually all of the coats. The pants were intact. When I got home with the lot, I unloaded the dress greens and sorted through them. I found a couple of pairs of pants that fit me and much to the distress of my daughter I started wearing them to work. Those things wore like iron. I tried to dye a pair of them black but that poly wool blend would not take the dye. Eventually the bulk of the dress greens ended up in a storage trailer that my daddy and I had bought on halves several years earlier. There they sat for quite a while.

My daddy was in business for years but by the time I started buying government surplus, he was retired. You could tell that he missed the buying and selling that he had done in the past and he was always coming up with something to satisfy that business itch. One weekend I was down there visiting and he said "what do you think about me taking some of those army clothes up to Bobby's and letting him try to sell them?" Bobby was a guy that I had gone to school with and he ran a store in the town just north of where my parents lived. I told him that was fine with me. I did not think too much more about it but a couple of weeks later I was down there visiting again and my daddy had a story to tell me about Bobby and the clothes.

Before I tell you the story, I have to admit that Bobby loved a joke or funny story as much as, if not more than, my daddy so there could be slight embellishments contained in the story, but here is what my daddy told me.

The Monday after my visit, daddy went down to the trailer and picked out 5 of the dress green coats and 5 pairs of pants and took them up to Bobby who put them in the back of his store. I don't know whether they were hung up or stacked on a table but they were placed back there for sale. Time past, maybe a day or two, and a guy came in and saw them back there. He wanted to know how much they were. Bobby told him it was $2 for a pair of pants, $2 for a coat, or $5 for the suit (the suit in question was of course a pair of pants and a coat). This pricing in itself was funny as hell to my daddy but what was even funnier was that the guy said that he definitely wanted the suit. Bobby told him to go back there and check and see if he could find something that would fit him. The guy sorted through the clothes and indeed did find a coat and a pair of pants that fit him. He paid his 5 dollars and left. After awhile, he returned and told Bobby that the coat didn't have any buttons. Bobby assured him that it had buttons when he bought it and that he must have lost them. I don't know if the guy kept the suit of clothes or if Bobby gave him his money back, or both, but I do know that that story was worth a whole lot more to my daddy than the 5 dollars that guy supposedly paid for his suit of clothes. It was also worth more than I had paid for the whole box of clothes at Anniston.