Fame
In Wall Street, month ago, a frayed old man wearing a sandwich sign picked a wallet out of the snow. The wallet contained $42,000 in negotiable securities, which 67-year-old Frank Grigoris turned over to a policeman. Overnight Frank Grigoris tasted sudden fame, saw his picture in all the newspapers, collected a reward ($100), got a new job, as messenger boy ($70 a month) at Belden & Co., the brokers who owned the wallet.
“Honest Frank” bought new clothes, marched perkily to work, told a radio audience, “I’m not going to let this go to my head.” Each day at Belden & Co. he grabbed his “fan mail” first, cashed the small money orders from people who thought he had not been rewarded enough. He suspected the firm of withholding his mail as it began to dwindle, as his name faded out of the newspapers. Last week Frank Grigoris began knocking at his own door, telling himself to come in, began rushing into the street and bumping into strangers.
Late one night his friend Michael Gryzwacz walked into Grigoris’ room. “I am God!” screamed Grigoris. “Look at me and you die!” Michael Gryzwacz looked with staring eyes and fell dead, of a complication of old diseases, topped off by a heart attack. Having killed once with a look, Frank Grigoris was dragged off to the psychopathic ward of Bellevue Hospital.
Talent
In Omaha, George H. Cobb Jr., 26, identified himself as a one-armed paperhanger. Said he: “I guess I just got a natural talent for it.”
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