Legacy

This is a tale of one John Winston Trolle, one of the finest Engineering geniuses of his day.  The time starts in the late roaring twenties on Black Friday, the day the market crashed and made paupers out of millionaires.  Many committed suicide over it.

John had made quite a pile as an Engineering Consultant.  He also invested most of it in the stock market, and yes his fortune was wiped out also.

Now John was a sturdy character not easily defeated nor pushed into hopeless depression.  While he lost it all; he still had four hundred dollars and some odd change in his pocket.  Not a lot for a rich man to normally carry; but in those days it was the equivalent of about three month’s wages for the average Joe.

Being a New Yorker, John used mass transit so he had no car to lose.  He did lose everything else and was now homeless on the street.  John decided to be as innovative as he could to survive and hopefully make an eventual comeback.

Like I said, John was a thinker.  He took twenty five dollars of his four hundred and rented a room on the top floor of an old slum grade brick building that like so many others was under the Brooklyn Bridge.  In fact his only window was only about twenty feet below the bridge, which made the building fairly close to where the bridge started.

John bought some basis materials, such as an iron box about twenty inches high by twelve inches wide and ten inches deep.  That box ended up being bolted to the bridge rail and John had installed beneath it a gutter drain pipe with curved sections where needed and ran that down some twenty feet and into his room through the window.  He boxed off the sides of the open part beside the drain pipe to keep out as much cold air as possible.

What was with that box you well might wonder; well I’ll tell you.  John painted the front of the box with a face of a goofy but friendly looking goblin.  A slot was cut in the Goblins mouth and a sign superimposed on where the Goblins chest was, which read “Be charitable, give the troll a toll and make a wish.

The box of course was strategically on the rail where the pedestrian walk lane over the bridge was.  There were several thousand people per day walking across that bridge.  That box became an institution, a place of hope for the poor to make a wish.

Some only had a penny or two some had nothing; and some had a nickel or dime and a rare quarter.  All of which went into the troll’s mouth, down the drain pipe, through Johns window and into the cardboard box John had sat under the window.

Seems penny ante stuff, yes and no, that penny ante stuff brought in about forty dollars a day when the average Joe if he could find work only made about two dollars per day. Needless to say that was about twelve hundred dollars per month.

John made many a back breaking trip to the bank to change coin to currency, and in about two years he’d built a sufficient capital reserve back up enough to venture forth and start a business up.

As I said, he was an Engineering Genius.  He went to South America and took advantage of the boom there in building infra structure as civilization expanded. By the strangest coincidence he became a bridge builder and formed the company still known today as the “Trolle Bridge Works.” Don’t laugh; you see the irony of it all lies in the fact that even though the spelling is different, Troll and Trolle are pronounced exactly the same. And bridges are his game.