David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

He had eight, sometimes nine, kids on
the payroll. In the fall, he would switch
to raking leaves.
“I would go and check their work so I
could tell the customer that their
driveway would be done the way they
wanted it done,” he remembered. “There
would always be one or two kids who
didn’t do it well, and I would have to
fire them.” He was ten years old. By the
age of eleven, he had six hundred dollars
in the bank, all earned by himself. This
was in the 1950s. That would be the
equivalent today of five thousand
dollars. “I didn’t have money for where
I wanted to go,” he said with a shrug, as
if it was obvious that an eleven-year-old
would have a sense of where he wanted