Incarceration-for Kevin McP
Wonderful! Love it. More!
The old YMCA used to be on Castlereagh St in the city, close to where the org is now. I found out they had a fitness class three nights a week and mentioned it to Kevin. The two of us ended up going down there at 5:30 those days after work and we got into pretty good shape. There was a half hour or so or running and calisthenics and a half hour of basketball. We couldn’t convince anyone else to come along which was a shame because almost every post in the org was a sedentary one and a lot of people smoked. Sitting in an auditing chair day after day with no exercise took its toll.
Poverty kind of catches up to you eventually. Or at least it did for Kevin and Linnah.
Kevin got arrested one day for unpaid parking fines and Linnah had to do the rounds with a hat trying to collect enough money from the other staff to bail him out. Phyll Stevens decided it was such a bad PR scene that she had him routed off staff until he could get his situation in order. That was probably the best thing that could have happened, as it turned out.
You have to understand that we in the org had gotten pretty used to living on virtually no income to speak of so just being able to go out and get a regular minimum wage job would be viewed as a huge bonus. And I suppose Kevin could have done just that, but he chose to go out on his own. He had an idea and ran with it.
This was back when T shirts were the rage and Kevin, being an artist with experience in silkscreening, figured he could silkscreen designs on t shirts and sell them on the street or in the park. He would do his own designs, build the screen and print the tshirts himself.
And it worked. They sold well.
But that was just the start.
In the course of all this, Kevin got the idea of marketing Tshirts to businesses such as boutiques and restaurants. The angle was he would use theirs or design a new logo for a business and sell them on the idea of buying a quantity of tshirts with that same logo that they could either sell or give away. Advertising for them.
He got some clients but didn’t have enough money to buy enough tshirts in bulk.
He approached me for $100 (and a number of other people), saying he needed it only for a short time, like a week or so, and would promptly pay it back. So I and I don’t know how many others lent him what we could and….true to his word, he paid us all back in full and on time. And the idea took off.
Soon he was taking minimum orders for 100 t shirts at a time and their kitchen turned into a mini factory. Linnah was screening shirt after shirt, piles and piles of them, screening each, placing each in front of an electric heater to dry briefly, then doing the next one.
The money started rolling in.
Of course, their living expenses did not change significantly and as they were accustomed to living on so little then, so it didn’t take long until……
Kevin had paid up in advance to Full OTVII for himself and Linnah, put aside enough for the trip to England AND paid for (in cash) a Porsche to be picked up at the factory in Germany when they arrived!
Kevin tells the story of going to the Auto show in Sydney shortly after finalizing the deal on his own car, and, seeing on display the same model he had just bought, climbed over the barrier to sit inside it.
You don’t do that at an auto show. Especially not if you are dressed rather non-descriptly as Kevin was at the time.
Salesmen take great offense to that.
One hustled over to chase him out but Kevin kept his cool, choosing to remain inside in spite of the man’s protests.
“I just bought one or these,” he says.
Of course the salesman didn’t believe him, threatening to make a scene. But another salesman, recognizing Kevin by this time, came over to greet him, thereby confirming his assertion of ownership.
“You can sit in there as long as you want”, he says.
Kevin says you never saw anyone change their attitude so fast as that first guy-from snobbery to servility. Or words to that effect. You get the picture.
That sure felt good, he says!
And I believe him.