You can imagine how the rest of this story goes.
So she finished cleaning on Somerville in the Westmounts and headed home to 3474 de Bullion with her purse jammed with $4,000 - mostly in $100 dollar bills.
She got on the 52 tram at Guy and Ste. Catherine and noticed her purse that she usually left jammed under her arm had gone missing.
It might have fallen out because she was also clutching some soap in the same manner.
(Did she lose the soap too?- Chimples).
She had been dreaming about buying a house with the money. Back then you could get a joint for like $14,000 in NDG or $9,000 in St. Laurent.
That amount - $4,000 in 1947 - is worth about $42,000 in today's money by the way.
Anyway she carried her life savings around because she thought that her son would stop sending her the $20 a month if he knew she had already saved that much cash.
Moral of the story? There is no god. Nobody cares about you. People have it way worse than you. All, yes, all is futile. (Wow freaky! - Chimples)
I also remember a story in the late 70s early 80s about a man who had just arrived in Montreal from China with a suitcase containing thousands of dollars in cash and, having left it in his hotel room, returned to find it stolen.
ReplyDeleteGoogle search is filled with similar tales of lost and found money.
The worst ones are about people who have won a large lottery jackpot yet end up broke and even in debt through their own stupidity and irresponsibility.
We will never know the more interesting part of this story... Someone in 1939 found (or stole) a purse with a literal fortune in it. Was it a criminal who blew it all on hookers and opium? Maybe it was an honest (but not that honest) tram driver or fellow passenger who used it to buy a home for his family or to go to university.
ReplyDeleteI like to think of myself as honest. I know I would turn in a purse with a thousand / two thousand dollars in it. But 40k in today's money? I'm not that honest. It would be too easy to tell myself that the owner was probably a drug dealer or some other type of criminal. At best, I would hide it away and wait to see if any heartbreaking stories emerged in the news.