This Was the Real Profit
Grace, Victor, and I left the club room and headed for the exhibition space I had rented near the school.
It sat in a quiet alley on the edge of Cambridge.
A red-brick building from the nineteenth century came into view.
It had once been an old print shop, but I had gutted it and turned it into a glass-fronted building with a completely open view of the interior.
Between the weathered red brick of the outer walls, the large glass panels set in black iron frames caught the sunlight and flashed brilliantly.
By the standards of this era, it was probably a little too bold.
“Wow, the building is gorgeous. Did you design it yourself?”
“Yeah.”
Grace kept marveling at whether my futuristic(?) taste matched hers.
With a series of sharp pops, the industrial lights hanging from the ceiling came on one by one, revealing the whole space.
The floor was hardwood.
There were traces of age here and there, but I had finished sanding and polishing it last week, so it carried a soft sheen.
Freshly installed track lights ran at even intervals along the walls, and each fixture could be individually adjusted to aim at a display piece.
“This is way better than I expected. It feels like an avant-garde museum.”
Grace said it as she looked around.
Just inside the glass doors at the entrance, a large notice had been posted.
- ADMISSION $5
- BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
- NO PHOTOGRAPHY
Framed display lists and price sheets hung on the walls.
While Victor went to fetch the ledger from the lounge area, Grace and I wandered through the gallery for a bit.
Her attention settled on a 1940s Lucky Strike cigarette advertisement mounted on the wall.
“So this is the thing you mentioned yesterday. The one the movie prop team wanted to rent.”
“That’s right. Everything here is one of those pieces.”
I looked at the enamel-coated steel sheet.
The green circular logo reading Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco gleamed vividly.
Next to it hung a circular Gulf Oil sign from a 1950s gas station.
Grace tipped her head back to study it.
“Did this really come from a real gas station?”
“Of course. It came out of a closed station in Texas. Gulf changed its logo in the 1960s, so this design was discontinued. You can’t get them anymore.”
“...”
“How do you know so much about everything?”
Grace turned to look at me, and something complicated flickered in her eyes.
It was the sort of feeling a precocious teenage girl might have toward a boy who seemed more grown-up than she was.
That look made me slightly uncomfortable, so I turned my head away.
“I didn’t know much until a few days ago. I learned from Rick.”
“Rick?”
“He’s my uncle’s friend. He runs a big pawnshop.”
“That’s amazing. You’re amazing, and everyone around you is amazing too.”
As we walked along the wall, I showed Grace one antique after another.
We stopped in front of a mannequin inside a glass case.
Hung on it was a U.S. Navy airman’s G-1 flight jacket from World War II.
The jacket was made of dark brown goatskin.
It had slanted handwarmer pockets on both sides of the front, and a shearling mouton collar at the neck.
The most eye-catching detail was the patch stitched into the back.
Across a skull and crossed bones, the words Jolly Rogers were embroidered.
“It belonged to a pilot in VF-17, the Jolly Rogers squadron. They were an ace unit in the Pacific theater that shot down Japanese Zeroes. That skull patch isn’t machine-printed; it’s the original, hand-embroidered piece.”
“It has a great feel to it. The movie prop team would kill for something like this. My father would probably love it too.”
“Not just movie prop teams. Photographers go crazy for this stuff too, especially the ones who care about historical accuracy. Things like this are always in demand.”
I pointed to the shelf beside it.
There were sets of British airborne red berets and rank insignia displayed there.
“A few old-military-themed cafes asked about renting these too. They want them as props. I quoted them five hundred dollars a week. What do you think?”
“Wow. More profitable than I expected. I never would’ve imagined a field like this.”
“Do you like movies?”
“A lot.”
I pointed to the opposite side of Grace.
Her eyes went wide.
“Wow!”
Vintage movie lobby cards were lined up along the wall.
There was an original press kit for Citizen Kane, released in 1941.
Framed alongside the poster showing Orson Welles’ enormous face were the promotional materials that had been handed out to theaters at the time.
Next to it hung a still photo from the shower scene in Psycho, released in 1960.
It was an original black-and-white print taken directly on set, showing Janet Leigh mid-scream.
“Even someone like me, who doesn’t know much about antiques, can tell these are valuable.”
Grace kept admiring everything we passed.
Standing beside her, I kept explaining.
“If I charge five dollars admission and get only 150 people a day, that’s $750. In a month, that’s over $20,000. The rental income is even bigger. If I lend those military pieces to a movie prop team for a week and charge just $2,000, it’s far better than the bank interest I’d earn while waiting for an auction.”
“You’ve figured out every place money could leak out and sealed it shut cleverly. No, actually, you’ve turned those leaks into ways for money to come in.”
Grace turned to me.
“You’re really amazing. I mean that.”
“Thanks.”
“I can’t fall behind either... The lottery buying just isn’t moving as fast as I want.”
“It’s a good plan. It’ll work out.”
I encouraged her.
After that, Grace kept talking about the antiques and explaining her lottery project, but to be honest, I was only half listening.
I had other plans I needed to reinforce in my head.
The funds to develop Wishville’s gold mine have finally piled up enough. It’s time to move.
I called up the memories I had from before my regression.
<Forgotten Wishville Mine Rediscovered as a 21st-Century Gold Vein. Estimated reserves: 8 million ounces.>
The estimated gold reserves of the Wishville mine, rediscovered in the 2020s, were between 5 million and 8 million ounces.
Gold, which was worth only $380 an ounce in 1991, would fluctuate above $1,900 an ounce in the 2020s.
...So why had such a juicy mine been abandoned? The reason was simple.
Geological survey technology in the 1920s simply wasn’t capable of properly examining the deep underground layers of a gold mine.
The exploration team concluded that the surface vein had been exhausted, and they never even dared to find out what lay beneath it.
A hasty misjudgment that there was no more gold to mine.
That was the real reason Wishville Mine was abandoned.
Much later, when 3D seismic surveying and satellite remote sensing advanced, people discovered that beneath it lay a massive gold vein unlike anything ever found before.
A place everyone had believed to be nothing but an empty abandoned mine for nearly a century would be reborn as the largest gold mine of the twenty-first century.
And yet I never expected that, inside a warehouse I’d barely cared about, I’d find clues proving exactly that.
The two kinds of old documents I found in the abandoned warehouse.
The first was an unpublished geological report written in the 1920s.
Inside it was a map marked Unexplored Area, Second Shaft, along with handwritten notes filled with the geologist’s questions and doubts.
- Abnormal mineral response in the lower strata.
- Additional drilling recommended, but halted due to budget constraints.
- Promising trace indicators confirmed in deep samples.
- However, verification impossible with current equipment.
...
A possibility buried because it could not be confirmed with the technology of the time.
If a gold vein really was found at the specific point indicated by this report, then what?
...I could slash exploration costs dramatically.
I knew only that this gold mine was still alive; I did not know exactly where the vein lay, down to the fine detail of the precise point.
Even if I was convinced there was a vein inside the mine, exact surveying would still be necessary before extraction could begin.
As of 1991, a standard gold exploration program cost $150,000 for literature review and surface survey, $300,000 for geophysical survey, $1.2 million for 10,000 feet of core drilling at $120 per foot, and another $200,000 for sample analysis and report preparation.
But with the report and map I’d found in the warehouse, I could start by drilling the zone the old geologist had already doubted, instead of boring holes at random.
Of course I could be wrong, but since I’d need to dig through all of it anyway to mine the gold, it’s no loss.
There was no guarantee that a report left behind by technology from seventy years ago would be accurate.
But starting with no clues at all and starting with coordinates left by an old expert were entirely different launch points.
If it was right, I could save millions of dollars and years of time; if it was wrong, I would only break even. There was no reason not to try.
The second was the original mineral rights deed issued by the Massachusetts Mining Bureau in 1889...
I recalled the title deed for Wishville’s gold mine that I had obtained from the abandoned warehouse.
<...Mining rights registration completed - the owner of this deed shall have exclusive rights to explore, extract, and dispose of all mineral resources buried within the above area, and these rights may be transferred, inherited, or pledged under the protection of federal and state law...>
A document over a hundred years old was unlikely to still hold force in 1991.
Most mineral rights would have expired or reverted to the state government.
But this old paper might not be completely worthless.
It could serve as key evidence if I ever had to file suit.
To secure new mineral rights, I would need $100,000 for a chain-of-title search, $500,000 as a retainer for a specialist attorney, and $900,000 for preliminary environmental impact research.
In Massachusetts, the land records would have to be traced all the way back to the 1780s.
Just to start, $1.5 million would go up in smoke, and even then the result would not be guaranteed.
But if the original 1889 document could be recognized as valid? If I could secure even part of the rights, even if the whole thing wasn’t accepted?
Since I had already legally won the land and mineral rights for this place at auction, I might be able to drastically shorten the procedures needed for exploration and mining.
I would need to have Victor the lawyer review it, but if it worked, it would be huge.
It was a card with real potential.
...Whatever it was, it was better than having nothing.
To develop the mine, I would need a demolition company, an excavation contractor, a geological survey firm, and plenty of other specialists.
Stocks, manpower, technology, equipment, patents... all of it was sitting on the market at absurdly cheap prices in the recession of late 1991.
And I had $15 million in cash earned from selling untaxed gasoline, stock profits, and the antiques I’d found in the warehouse.
I’ll buy everything. Then I’ll build it out.
Gold and oil. Before long, I would become the king of America’s underground resources.
---