Ballad of the Bottom Dollar 最后一美元

 

Cameron , Mounger and I have been friends since we were teenagers. Both of us liked rock'n'roll, and several years after we left high schooll, Cam became a disc jockey.

Recently he told me the story about the day he was down to his last dollar. It was the day his luck -and his life -changed.

In the early 1970s, Cam was an announcer and disc jockey at KYAL in McKinney, Texas, and had attained celebrity status. He met many country-music stars, and he enjoyed flying to Nashville in the company plane with the owner.

One night Cam was in Nashville for an evening at the Grand Ole Opry. After the show an acquaintance invited him backstage with all the Opry stars, "I didn't have any paper for autographs, so I took out a dollar bill," Cam told me ,"Before the night ended, I had virtually every Opry personality's autograph, I guarded that dollar bill and carried it with me always, I knew I would treasure it forever."

The station KYAL was put up for sale, and many employees found themselves without a job, Cam landed part_time work at VBAP in Fort Worth and planned to hang on to This job long enough for a full_time position to open up.

The winter of 1976-77 was extremely cold. The heater in Cam's old Volkswagen emitted only a hint of warm air; the windshield defroster didn't work at all. Life was hard, and Cam was broke. With the help of a friend who worked at a local supermarket, he occasionally intercepted outdated, dumpster-bound TV dinners. "This kept my wife and me eating, but we still had no cash,"

One morning as Cam left the radio station, he saw a young man sitting in an old yellow Dodge in the parking lot Cam waved to him and drove away. When he went back to work that night, he noticed the car again, parked in the same space. After a couple of days, it dawned on him that this car had not moved, The fellow in it always waved cordially to him as he came and went. What was he doing sitting in his car for three days, in the terrible cold?

Cam discovered the answer the next morning. This time as he walked near the car, the man rolled his window down. "He introduced himself and said he had been in his car for days with no money or food," Cam recalled,."He had driven to Fort Worth from out of town to take a job, But he arrived three days early and couldn't go to work right away.

"Then, very reluctantly, he asked if he night borrow a dollar for a snack to get him by until the next day, when he would start work and get a salary advance, I didn't have a dollar to lend him; I barely had gas to get home. I explained my situation and walked to my car, wishing I could have helped him."

Then Cam remembered his Frand Ole Opry dollar. He wrestled with his conscience a minute or two, pulled his wallet out and studied the bill. Then he walked back to the man and gave him his bottom dollar, "Somebody has written all over this ,"the man said, but he didn't notice that the writing was dozens of autographs. He took the bill.

"That very morning when I was back home trying not to think about what I had done, things bigan to happen,"Cam told me. The phone rang; a recording studio wanted him to do a commercial that paid $ 500. It sounded like a million. Cam hurried to Dallas and did the spot. and in the next few days more opportunities came to him out of nowhere. "Good things kept coming steadily," said Cam. "and soon I was back on my feet."

The rest, as they say, is history. Things improved dramatically for Cam. His wife had a baby. Cam opened a successfil auto-body shop and built a home in the country. And it all started that morning in the parking lot, when he parted with his bottom dollar.

Cameron never saw the man in the old yellow Dodge again. But whether the guy was a beggar or an angel doesn't matter.

Cam was tested that cold morning-and he passed.