The Coconut Doctor Story

                                            The Coconut Doctor Story

                                                            2002

                                          Written 2010, Re-written 07/2016

                                                      A true story

                                                    Howard Yasgar

     In 1963 when I first started coming down to the Florida Keys, I noticed that a lot of the people there looked kind of strange, they looked like they were hiding from  somewhere.

     No matter where I went, in the Keys, so many of the  people looked the same.

     I heard other people talking about it, they  referred to it as the “Keys Look.”

     It was almost as if there was a dress code for the work force in the keys.

    Many of the guys had  dark tans, and an emaciated look.

     They had lots of tattoo’s, a dark tan, many had a pony tails, even if they didn’t have hair on the top of their head.

     They mostly wore tee shirts and raggedy “Cut off shorts”.

     Wearing  flip flops was the norm.

     This was a basic description of the Keys workforce.

     I hated to say it but a lot of them  actually looked like they escaped from a jail somewhere.

  You could always be assured of finding them in front of you, when shopping at the local  supermarket as they were always checking out a six pack of beer.

     It was easy to spot as they all looked similar.

    It was perhaps because of the laid back atmosphere in the Keys, but you had to wonder if they were there hiding in the Keys from something, or some one, as

everyone knew that lots of these guys were living in the woods for free.  

     Whenever any kind of service business opened up in the Keys, this was their labor pool.

   Now, as write this story forty years later, the hippy living days in the Keys are beginning to disappear, all these free spirits have had to get jobs, move, or open up small service companies.

     Yes, some of these guys have actually opened up their own businesses, and if you owned property in the Keys and needed something done, these guys were now who you had to deal with.

    It was common knowledge among homeowners, that if you hired any of these people it was a miracle if they showed up, or a miracle if they completed whatever it was that they were hired to do.

     It was called “The Keys disease”

  Now having a so many of these fellows in the local workforce has led to some interesting situations.

    In September of 2001, my wife Katherine and I had entered into a new adventure, by attempting the renovation of a really interesting piece of property in the Keys.

    How we had found the property was also an interesting story.

    We were living  in an area called “Plantation Key Colony” and whenever we would go fishing, we would take our boat onto the “Snake Creek” waterway to get us from the Gulf side of the Keys and under the Snake Creek bridge to the Atlantic Ocean.

  So, as we motored up Snake Creek with our boat, we had the opportunity to look at all the waterfront properties along the way.

   As we passed through an area called Venetian Shores, we were always attracted by a run down piece of property with a strange looking house on it.

   The house, actually had a boat slip built in under it, and the property had a lot of coconut palm trees on it.

   One day, while having coffee, my wife Katherine noticed that the property was for sale, so we went over to see it.

    Our intention was just to see this  place close up, that’s all, but the next thing I knew we owned it.

    We moved on to the property in September of 2001.

    As we started renovating the house,  we also started working on the landscaping.

    We counted 14 coconut palm trees on the property and they all needed trimming.

    Some palms were over forty feet tall.

    We knew that coconuts on palms trees are nice to look at, but during storms they  become cannon balls, so the prudent thing to do, is trim the coconuts off, especially before hurricane season arrives.

    However, on our new property there were so many tall trees that my wife knew that she would need assistance in the trimming and removing of all the coconuts off the trees.

   Most of the palm trees were so tall, it would be impossible for her to reach the tops, without renting a “Cherry picker”.       

    Our neighbors, told us  they used a local fellow to help them trim their trees and they were very happy with him.

   We were well aware that looking for a tree trimmer on our own, could lead to problems due to Keys disease.

   We knew that many of the tradesmen in the Keys were the remnants of the characters we had described earlier, and they were all known to be unreliable.

    Besides from this, there was also always the risk of hiring people you didn’t know to come onto your property.

  They said that they had the perfect guy called the “Coconut Doctor”, who did all their tree trimming.

    They said he always showed up on time and did a really good job, so what more could you ask for, I jotted down the Coconut Doctors  telephone number.

    That evening we drove about twenty miles North to shop at the Publix super market in Key Largo.

    The supermarket  was busy but, it was impossible for us to miss a fellow who was also going up and down the isles shopping.

    You couldn’t miss him because  he looked like a throwback to the hippie days of the 1960’s.

    We couldn’t help but watch him, and it appeared that everyone else in the store was also watching him as well.

    He was perhaps 50-60 years old, and he had graying hair in a ponytail.

    He was wearing a black tie dyed shirt.

    He was obviously a holdover from the old days, a real Keys character.

   As the fellow was leaving the store I saw that on the back of his shirt was the name “Coconut Doctor”.

  A week later, despite our reservations, my wife Katherine called the Coconut Doctor  for an appointment.

    She told him that she would like an estimate for trimming all of our coconut palms.

    We were surprised when the “Coconut Doctor” actually showed up.

    He carefully looked the trimming situation over, then he quoted my wife his price to do the job.

    It was then that I came over to meet him myself.   

  The Coconut Doctor said, “You should be very careful in the Keys, as most of the tradesmen working here are alcoholics or drug users, I know because I was one of them. but I have been drug free for over 8 years.”

   A couple of weeks later, it was time to call the Coconut Doctor to come over and do the trimming.

   So, on a Friday evening I called him up.

   After reminding him several times who we were, he said that he remembered talking to us.

 However, he said, at the moment he was having a party at his house and he was very busy entertaining his friends.

 I asked him would be possible for him to call me back the next day so we could confirm everything. he said, “yes”.

  So, just to verify, I asked him, do you have our phone number? “Yes.” he said, but .

  He sounded a little unsure so I gave him the phone number again.

   I repeated our name, our address and our telephone number.

   That call I made to the Coconut Doctor was in early 2002 and I am still waiting for his return call.

    

The Tear Gas Story

                                                    The Tear Gas Story

                                                                1991

                                                           A true story

                                      Written 4/5/2015 and Re-written 1/2016

                                                         Howard Yasgar

                                                 

Somehow during a recent discussion, someone mentioned tear gas, and it reminded me of a hell of an experience that I had with the stuff.

Back in the early 1990’s, I had a wholesale automotive parts company in Miami.

One of our methods of sales was by our using telemarketers, and our telemarketing department was headed up by my son.

The telemarketers regularly called all our customers, to advise them of deals and weekly specials we were offering.

At the time, I had a good friend named Joel who had an automotive electrical parts business located several blocks down the street from us.

Well, one day my friend Joel called me, and he said that he was moving to Naples Florida, so I wished him the best of luck.

Joel said that the reason he was calling me was because he had a proposition for me.

Joel said, “He had gone to an auction and bid on a truck load of tear gas canisters, the brand name was “Lance”.

I recognized the name immediately, it was the same brand I saw the police carried on their belt.

Joel said that he had them all stored in a rented self-storage unit.

He explained what his problem was that now that he was moving, he didn’t want the expense of shipping the tear gas over to Naples.

Nor did he want the expense of  continuing to pay for storage.

He said that he knew that I had extra warehouse space, and if I would agree to it, he would turn over the whole load of teargas over to me as a partner with him.

He said I could store the teargas in my warehouse, and pay him his share when we sold it.

The deal sounded great, Joel didn’t want any money.

I thought, how could I lose anything, I was getting the teargas for free until we sold it.

That same afternoon Joel came over to my office with cardboard carton full of cans of teargas.

Inside the carton were twelve black aerosol tear gas canisters.

The aerosol cans were, about one and one half inches in diameter and about eight inches tall, they had printed picture of a silver knight on horseback holding a lance.

Joel said he was moving in the next few days and he gave me the key to his self storage locker which he said was paid for to the end of the month.

Because I was so excited, I never asked Joel exactly how much tear gas there was in the storage facility, after all, he was practically giving it to me as a gift, and I didn’t want to appear ungracious.

The following week we rented a twenty foot U haul truck and went to the storage unit to pick up all the boxes of tear gas.

When we got to the storage warehouse, to my surprise there were enough boxes of  tear gas to fill a twenty foot container.

So  now we had no choice, and we made several trips, emptying the self storage unit, but filling the isles in our warehouse.

I did some research and found that each can sold for twelve to fourteen dollars apiece, so my son Jack told our telemarketers to try selling them for two dollars each, or twenty dollars a case.

At first sales seemed pretty good, and the telemarketers sold at least a hundred cans, and everyone was enthusiastic about it.

I took a case of it home to show my fiancé, as she managed a large freight forwarding company in Miami with quite a few female employees.

I thought perhaps she could offer them to all the women to use for their own personal protection.

My fiancée advised me that everyone loved them, but no one wanted to buy any.

After a few weeks, we realized the huge quantity of teargas was not selling well and it was blocking up the inside of our warehouse.

There were so many cases of teargas we could hardly walk around them all.

So, that’s when we decided to move the teargas to another one of our buildings up the street.

This move took us several days to do, and as we were doing it, I noticed that everyone was scratching.

Then someone said that they thought a few of the teargas canisters might be leaking, but there was no way to tell which ones were bad.

Well, as we were moving them out of our main building anyway, leaking didn’t present a terrible problem at the time.

Our telemarketers continued trying to sell the stuff.

After several weeks, my son informed me that the sales for the teargas had dropped off to almost nothing, it seemed that no one wanted to buy the stuff.

My wonderful deal wasn’t so wonderful after all.

At our next sales meeting our warehouse manager said we should stop selling the stuff, because now, no one could enter the building where we had stored them.

It appeared many of the cans were now leaking, and  some were now leaking so bad that nobody wanted to go into the building.

The manager said that if anyone went in the building their skin would become very irritated and their eyes would immediately start tearing.

Well, that scared me, I got to thinking that we might have an EPA or OSHA problem.

I knew that if the EPA or OSHA ever caught us with this leaky teargas we could get in a lot of trouble, and it might cost us a fortune just to dispose of it.

My friend Joel had screwed me good, he knew the stuff was leaking.

We had a brain storming session with all our telemarketers to figure out a way to get rid of the stuff, and do it quickly.

My son said that they had only one potential customer that showed some interest in buying the whole load from us, he had offered a low ball price of $1.00 a canister.

The problem was we knew he was a deadbeat customer that never paid his bills.

To get paid you needed a bill collector, or a lawyer.

I thought long and hard on the situation.

Now I knew why my friend Joel was so happy to have me take the tear gas off his hands for free.

He knew that if the EPA or OSHA ever got wind of this pollution nightmare there would be no end to the problems.

So I thought that if Joel was smart enough to get me to take the deal off his hands, I needed to do the same thing to someone else.

I suggested to my son that he call up the deadbeat customer and sell him all the teargas for $1.00 ea.

Then he should give him an open account, even though we knew he would never pay us.

My son told me that the customer was so happy to have beaten us down on the price, and that he had open credit with us, and didn’t have to pay us for 30 days..

He said he wanted to buy the entire trailer load of teargas, at a price of one dollar a can, and he would pay the freight to get the teargas to him.

We all knew that he never had any intentions of ever paying us.

Well loading the trailer truck was quite a problem, but we managed to do it with everyone crying and scratching.

The next day I was told the customer received the shipment and he did pay the trucking company for the freight.

As expected he never made any payment to us after the thirty days when the money was due, and I didn’t ever try to collect the money from him. I was afraid he would want to return the teargas to us.

As time went on, I spoke to Joel several times, but funny he never mentioned anything about the teargas, nor did he ever ask me about his share of the profit.

         

         

         

         

         

The Insider Secrets Story

                                                   The Insider Secrets Story

                           This is a story about the surprise I got in the cemetery trash pile

                                                                 1955

                                    Written 2014 and rewritten 09/06/2016 unedited                                          

                                                          Howard Yasgar

                                                        

       Over the years, I have found that every job, every business and every profession has what are called insider secrets. These are things that only people in that particular business know about.

      Most of the time it’s better if other people don’t know about them, because sometimes the shortcut secrets may not be legal.

      We have all heard the saying, they use “Tricks of the trade”, those, are the code words used for describing insider secrets.  

      Usually we, who are the general public, are never made aware of these inside secrets, and we are probably better off not knowing, because some tricks of the trade are simply short cuts that make someone extra money. Some of these so called tricks of the trade are very serious and some are very illegal.

      An insider secret could be as simple as a carpenter leaving out a few nails from a job to make a job go faster, it cuts material and labor costs.  No one would ever know until a hurricane comes along and blows the roof off.

      The trick of the trade could be a stockbroker that sells his trusting customers stock that he already knows will soon tank and disappear off the market. The broker probably says, who cares, as long as he makes his commission. The trick of the trade could be as simple as a car salesman changing the mileage on the speedometer of a used car, he may think, who cares. The trick of the trade could be as serious as the surgeon who installs a pacemaker even after the patient has already died. He collects from the insurance company for the job and who cares, it’s just a trick of the trade.

       So, even though we hate to think or talk about it, every single business has some inside angle to make an extra buck. Sort of like the grocer that puts regular food on the organic food shelf, it’s just his trick of the trade, it’s how he makes an extra buck.

      I was talking to a friend the other day and the subject came up about cemeteries and what they do to make an extra buck. What were the tricks of their trade?  How we got on that subject I can’t exactly remember. But what I do remember was that back in 1954 when I was 15 years old, living in New Haven Connecticut, I needed to earn some extra money. That’s when my good friend Richie Andrade said he had heard there were jobs available at a local cemetery stripping grave blankets. I had never heard of a grave blanket.

      I know now that grave blankets are wooden frames with chicken wire nailed over them. At Christmas time florists would put pine boughs as well as flowers into the chicken wire making a pretty design and people buy them to lay over the grave of a loved one.

      All the wooden frames were useable again every year, and every year after Christmas when the flowers and pine boughs are all dried up, the cemetery workers would remove the wood framed grave blankets and hire kids like us to pull out the dead pine branches and flowers. They did it so the wood frames could be reused by florists the following year.

      The cemetery paid us kids twenty five cents each, for every grave blanket we cleaned up for them. After we were done, the cleaned frames were stacked up in the back of the cemetery prior to being sold back to the florists to be used the following year.

      Every day the cemetery employees drove around with a truck and picked up grave blankets bringing them to the back of the cemetery where there was a dump, that’s where we cleaned them off, throwing the dead pine boughs and flowers off a precipice and into the cemetery dump that was already filled with grass clippings, leaves, trash and other junk that the cemetery threw away. The cemeteries dump was sort of a ravine, and located so that no one visiting the cemetery could ever see any of the trash that was in the dump.

     One day while Richard and I were busy standing at the cemetery dump stripping grave blankets, and I noticed that heavy rain the previous day, it had uncovered from under the trash a big piece of gray granite. I was curious so I went down the slope to inspect it. As I worked my way down the ravine, I could see there were several other gray granite gravestones that had been dumped there. It was obvious that the cemetery employees had just recently disposed of them. The closer I looked, I could see that there were names on those granite gravestones, but it was way too spooky for me to try and read them.

      We wondered why a cemetery would throw away so many big grave markers that some ones family had paid for. Well, I never asked the cemetery employees. Although I’m sure there must have been a really good explanation. Or was this just one of the cemeteries little tricks of the trade on how they do their business?