“And we figured it all out, step by step, and one of the kids who graduated, who had done the most work on that typewriter, went to the Monroe company and said, ‘I will help you sell your equipment. I will show people how to use it and you let me charge $1,700 a program and I’ll do it.’ They thought $1,700 a program was a gift and this kid was so good. I remember when he came to my house. He said, ‘Doc, I have a problem.’ I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ ‘Well, we graduated in June [1970], it is now October. I’ve earned $100,000 and someone told me I had to pay income tax.’ ‘What?’
“So he explained to me that he got so busy with the car dealers, with the credit unions, with the banks, because they could then sell something at 3% interest or 1-1/2% interest. They could do whatever they wanted, because it was mathematical and he programmed it in. What they did, up to that time, was they bought a book from some company in Massachusetts that made logs of what payments you’re going to make on what date and how long it is going to last.
“Nobody knew how those logs were formed, so my first — We had done at school an examination of that magazine to make sure that it was honest — whatever it did was correct and we couldn’t make heads or tails out of how they got some of those numbers. We were always off a $1.50 and a $1.75 and I took the girls — the kids — to the mountains.
“A friend of mine bought a condominium in Frisco [Colorado] and we were going to use it to go skiing. It was given to me, because it was $275 a month, which I didn’t have. So I decided, before I turned it back in, to make some use out of it and I took all these kids up to the mountains for a weekend. And I took up all the Monroes and our job was to figure out how they got the numbers in that magazine. Well, it turns out that the kid that made the $100,000 — that kid figured out that each car dealer was charging, when you bought a car, a payment each month on an insurance plan, on which if you couldn’t pay it, you got it back, and they charged interest on the unpaid premium. Nobody who bought a car was ever told this. Nobody knew anything about it, including the car dealers. But that’s how it was written and we figured it out and he was able to do everything.
“I said, ‘What did you do with the money?’ He said, ‘Well, I bought an airplane, I bought a boat, I bought a car, bought a motorcycle,’ and he went on and on. So I said, ‘You never heard of having to pay quarterly income tax?’ ‘No, my father pays income tax every month. He’s a postman.’ I said, ‘I see, I see.’ Well, I called up a CPA whose children I had taught tennis to and explained to him the problem. I told him it is probably the school’s problem, for not telling people how to be an entrepreneur. But nobody expects a kid to be an entrepreneur. So I hadn’t heard from him after that. Except I talked to the CPA, who said they were able to take his future earnings to pay off his quarterly payments and explain to him how to do it.
“That kid dropped out of college because he was bored. He says, ‘There is nothing they are teaching me that I can’t teach myself.’ That’s how he spent his whole life with me. We were all teaching ourselves.”