The Counterfeiter

 

     After the war Dad worked at several jobs before he found his calling. He worked on the ore ships that sailed the Great Lakes until Mom made him come home. Once he was back home he drove a cab in Gallatin and at some point he became an apprentice butcher. Being a butcher turned out to be his calling and he became very good at the trade so much so that as the years passed he developed a reputation and was in demand. He trained under several older butchers and worked for a local chain called Logans.

     By the late 1950's Dad was the butcher / meat manager for a small independently owned  grocery store called C&S Foods, the store was located in an older group of buildings along Lebanon Rd. in Donelson. I don't know how old the building was but it was small with wooden floors, the stock room and butcher shop were located in the basement and a conveyor was used to get products upstairs. The store was part of a long group of store fronts connected by common walls. 

     All of the stores had basements but not all of them utilized them for product storage so there were businesses located in a couple of the basements that were accessible from the rear. As best I remember there was a repair shop of some sort and a print shop. The print shop produced fliers / handbills and odd sized signage for local businesses. Dad would see the workers now and again when off loading trucks but he didn't know them enough to call them friends, they sort of kept to themselves. 

     One day there was quite a commotion at the print shop, police cars were every where along with a few unmarked cars which turned out to be from the FBI. The print shop workers were handcuffed and put in the back seats of the patrol cars and a truck was being loaded up with boxes from the shop. Dad found out later that the print shop had been raided because they were printing counterfeit money.

     I wasn't a teenager yet but I heard Dad tell this story several times, he always ended it with "there I was working a hard forty hours a week for a few dollars and these guys were right next door printing two months salary with every turn of the handle". I sometimes wondered if maybe he wasn't just a bit jealous.