Immediately after my conversation with Zolna, Bill Treffinger, the man sitting to my left, asked me if I was interested in investors that were not friends of mine.

I said quite frankly that anyone wishing to invest in my business is welcome to invest, but I needed to raise $10,000.00 in investment money before my brother partner, would agree to incorporate the business!

Bill introduced himself and said that he had $10,000.00 to invest and he liked my idea of retail outlets discounting art supplies to the students!

I asked him where he was living and he said that his parents had a home near Kent and that he was visiting them for the weekend. He worked for General Electric in Indiana and he came home occasionally since he was also dating the Go-Go dancer at the bar.

Again I went over the business plan that I had envisioned and the man sitting to my immediate right interrupted me!

He introduced himself as Roger Macon and told me that he was an architect student at Kent. His girlfriend, Pam was an art major at Kent and he was aware of my store and the business that I was doing.

He asked me if the investment was limited to $10,000.00 or if he could invest $3,000.00 of his money also.

Since I was unsure of Bill Treffinger's ability to raise $10,000.00 and I had only met these gentlemen that evening, I encouraged both of them to become investors in the art supply retail business and asked them if they would like to see the store that evening.

Both agreed to go up to the store near the Kent Campus and we met there shortly after our introduction.

Roger Macon asked me why our store did not carry architect supplies. I replied that we were under capitalized and were finding it very difficult to stock art supplies. He agreed to help me locate the architect supplies used by most students and that his $3,000.00 investment was ready immediately!

Bill Treffinger also assured me that he had the $10,000.00 since he had recently sold most of his stock in the stock market and he was looking to get into a business at its "ground floor."

I told them both that we were at the ground floor, but I knew we were able to grow rapidly above it if we had the right capitalization. We all agreed to meet the next evening at our tiny warehouse on Gougler Avenue in Kent and that they would have to speak to my brother about all the details since my brother was more involved with finances and I was involved with sales.

The very next evening, Roger, Bill and I met with my brother at the warehouse. It was so small that Mike's office could barely hold a desk and three chairs. In fact, I had to stand in a corner because there was not enough room to hold a fourth chair.

After introductions and a little history about the two potential investors, my brother began to "unsell" the two men destroying everything that I had led them to believe.

First he said that they probably would not get their stock for several months, as we would be organizing the corporation to provide stock to them when it was available through our attorney, Richard Levine.

Then he said that they probably would not see a financial statement in the next two or three years as we could not afford to create one and we would be investing the money in the business rather than prepare financials every three or six months.

Then he said that they might just as easily lose all their money since Mike and I had no real business experience in running a business. We had worked for our father as "laborers" and our father was a "one man business" that never relied upon his sons to help him run his business.

Then, after about thirty minutes of trying to discourage the investors, Mike's attitude changed.

He said that neither he nor I would steal from them. He said that we would give 110% all of the time and that we would do everything within our abilities to make the business a success.

That if we failed it would not be because we did not try with everything we had to make it successful.

That investors invest in people not in businesses and that we would always put the business before ourselves.

It was their decision to invest and they could do whatever they wanted to do as long as they knew the odds and the circumstances under that which was to be their investment.

I felt that anyone listening to Mike would probably get up and say, "Thanks, but no thanks" and then walk out the door.

Roger was the first to speak and he said that the three thousand dollars was all that he had to invest, but since Mike was so open and honest about the prospects, he felt that we would be a good risk and if he lost the money, it was not that much where it would destroy his life.

Bill also agreed to invest the money for basically the same reasons. He as well as Roger felt that Mike and I were honest and sincere and that we would do our best to succeed! He said he had $10,000.00 and wanted to invest it all.

Mike and I agreed to sell 10% of the new corporation to Bill Treffinger for $10,000.00 and Roger was to receive 3% of the business for $3,000.00. Both men said that they would have their checks to us within the next ten days.

Shortly after that night, both men gave us their money and Mike began working with Dick Levine to incorporate the retail art supply store business.

The retail store was called the "Green Gas House" because our first location in Wooster, Ohio was my art gallery near a movie theater and its previous occupant had painted the front of the gallery green. Since I had several paintings of my college classmates hanging in the gallery as well as many of my own, I was under capitalized and from June of 1967 to September of 1967, I failed to sell a single painting.

It was cheaper for me to call the store the "Green something-or- other" then it was for me to paint the front of the store. Many of my friends used to call the gallery a "Gas!" since it had many abstract paintings and Wooster being a very conservative town was not the type of clientele that would purchase the art that was displayed in the gallery.

In September of 1967, I was returning to Kent to finish my senior year at school and I intended to close the store, which also was my studio in the evenings. Mike suggested keeping it open and having my sister, Paulette, run the store while I was in college. We could get a few art supplies to stock the store and Mike would loan me the money to buy them.

This way, the art supplies could pay the rent and overhead and I could keep the store open through Christmas. As the rent was only $35.00 a month and I was on Main Street next to the only theater in town, I felt his idea had some merit to it.

I contacted a Cleveland Art Supply manufacturer called "Craft-Tint Corporation" and spoke to their National Sales Manager, Don Katz.

He was very enthusiastic and asked me if I wanted to buy some "close-outs." Not being knowledge- able in the "close-out" business, I asked him, "What's a close-out?"

He said that I should come to Cleveland with some money and he would show me everything!

I said that I would have to bring my "banker" with me since he had all the money. I was referring to Mike, but Don thought that I was really bringing a banker!

The next day was Wednesday and Mike and I went to Cleveland to meet with Mr. Katz. He was a nice man with a warm smile. He was about forty-five; medium build and he had a great sense of humor. He took Mike and me for a tour of the plant. It was an artist's paradise! Everything that an artist could imagine was there! It was like looking at candy in a window and wanting to "eat" it all.

Then Don took us to two rooms and said that the merchandise in the room was "obsolete" since they were going through a "name change" and only Craftint would appear on the new labels.

Mike asked me to inspect it and to estimate its resale value if I had to buy it as a student in a retail store.

Shortly after the inspection, Mike and I discussed it and I said that it was worth about $20,000.00 at retail!

Mike asked Don what the company wanted for the two small rooms and Don replied, "$2,500.00 and its all yours."

Without batting an eye, Mike responded, "We'll give you $250.00."

It was obvious to Mike that Craftint wanted the space in the two rooms and that they really wanted someone to pay them to take the obsolete material away.

After a little negotiating, Mike agreed to pay them $500.00 and we would rent a truck and haul the material to our father's warehouse in Wooster, Ohio.

After two days of hard lifting and difficult labor, we had cleaned out the two rooms and another room that they "threw-in" when they saw we only had a half of a truckload on the second day!

After a brief inventory, I estimated the value of close-out art supplies at about $100,000.00 at wholesale and retail was far above that figure!

This was the beginning of our business careers!

After we obtained the art supplies, Mike and I decided to rent a small space in Kent and open a second store on a second floor of the old Revco Building in downtown Kent!

The rent was only $35.00 per month, which included the utilities, and we allowed an art class to meet there once a week at night for three hours as part of the agreement with the landlord!

Shortly thereafter, we moved up next to the campus to be closer to the students who purchased art supplies. In fact, we were across the street from the largest art supply store in the city!

We called the store, The Green Gas House 2 because we still had the original gallery store in Wooster, which my sister Paulette was operating and making money from it!

It was shortly before we opened across from the campus that a family friend introduced Mike and me to Robert (Bob) Gedan from Chicago. Illinois. He was one of the three partners that owned and operated a company called "Hip Products."

You must realize that in December of 1967, the Viet Nam War was just beginning to catch the eye of the students on campus' everywhere. The Sexual Revolution was just beginning and Timothy Learey was the Drug Guru of the late 60's. The Beatles were meditating in India and the Hippie- Haight/Ashbury movement was only visible in New York City and San Francisco.

Bob Gedan was a very nice man that introduced Mike and me to posters. Prior to Bob, I had purchase a large black and white poster of W.C. Field playing poker with his top hat from a company known only as Personality Posters in New York City.

Now Bob hyped his poster line and Mike being the skeptic only wanted to try the posters on three conditions: 1. If they did not sell, Mike could return them for full credit; 2. Mike wanted 90-day terms to pay for the first order or until such time that he re-ordered, WHICH EVER CAME FIRST! 3. Mike wanted to take 1 or 2 posters at most of the designs that Bob recommended and that would be a test order.

Ironically, because Bob knew of the effects of posters on the young student population, Bob agreed to all of Mike's conditions!

I can still vividly remember the poster shipment arriving in the three cartons that contained the flat posters. I was unwrapping them in the store on Saturday morning trying to place them up on the walls to cover space that was vacant and available ideally for posters.

No sooner would I begin to try and tape a poster to the wall and a student customer would ask the price of the poster and purchase it before I could hang it.

It was a few hours later and Mike had not yet arrived from Wooster to help in the store. I had sold over fifty posters in less than 2 hours and had made 100% profit on the sales!

By the time Mike came into the store, I was swamped with students buying the posters right off the tabletop where I had placed them to mount on the walls!

By three o'clock that afternoon, we had done nearly $400.00 in posters and we had sold out of fifty percent of the inventory Mike had ordered! It was the best retail Saturday we ever experienced up to that point in time.

Mike picked up the telephone and called Hip Products to speak to Bob Gedan. Luckily, Bob was in their office writing orders with other accounts over the telephone. I remember the conversation as if it had taken place a few second ago.

Mike said, "Bob, I am sending your check out today! Send us one dozen of everything you have unless it is really good and send us two dozen. We want the incense, the hippie glasses, and anything else you think we can sell."

That was the beginning of it. And when Roger Macon and Bill Treffinger invested in the Green Gas House, we told them that the posters were a fad and that as soon as it looked as if the business was fading out, we would be out of them and still be in art supplies.

As the posters continued to generate outstanding profitable sales, we gradually became a distributor for Hip Products and I began traveling throughout Ohio selling other college campus' posters. We purchased at an additional 25% discount off the wholesale price and this only increased our retail profit tremendously!

We billed our company as "Ohio's Largest Distributor of Youth Oriented Posters." Funny, but we were Ohio's only distributor of Youth Oriented Posters!

It was Mike's intention as well as mine to expand the art supplies into discount student stores. But when the sales of posters began to dwarf the art supply business and we discovered to our own dismay that the students were stealing the art supplies from our store, we decided to close-out the art supplies and turn the store into a full blown head shop!

Personally, I have never smoked anything in my life. Not even a puff of a single cigarette! Yet, everyone was touting the virtues of marijuana and saying that it was better for you than alcohol. While I drank in college and found it to be enjoyable as a student, as a businessman I could not afford to drink any longer. It was too expensive and I did not have the money or the desire to continue drinking.

Yet, today I look back and regret the day I sold drug-oriented posters. I feel that it was a cop-out and that I had advertised the virtues of the one thing that has harmed my family and country more than anything else had in the world.

Today, I do not sell drug or alcohol related posters or items and I discourage this at every opportunity that I may have.

As Mike and I wanted to approach business in a professional manner, we decided to refrain from calling the poster distribution company a funky name that would indicate a "hippie drug oriented fad type company."

There were many poster companies in 1968 and to name a few that were distributing posters that were hippie oriented, I will list those that come to my mind:

"Hip Products; Funky Features; Third Eye; Insanity; San Francisco Poster Company; Gilded Lily; Scorpio Posters; Gemini Rising Poster Company; The Purple Plum. There were other professional companies marketing posters that did have a few good names and one company, Studio One was part of a publicly traded over-the-counter company known as National Student Marketing, which was started by an entrepreneur named Cortez Randell.

After many discussions, Mike and I agreed upon "Pro Arts, Inc." and rather than set up two corporations and only provide stock to Treffinger and Macon in the art stores, Mike and I felt that they should participate in both companies and only incorporated Pro Arts.

In May of 1969, after nearly one and one half years of waiting, Treffinger and Macon received their stock. There were 500 shares in Pro Arts, Inc. but only 300 shares were issued. Treffinger received 30 shares (10% of the company) for his $10,000.00 investment and Macon received 9 shares (3%) of the stock for his $3,000.00 investment.

Pro Arts, Inc. had grown considerably in the 18 months prior to incorporation. From a 500 square foot warehouse and office, we were in a 5,000 square foot warehouse and printing posters instead of buying and distributing posters of "competitors." We started shipping nationally and attended several national gift shows. Within the next nine months following incorporation, we estimated our net worth at about $180,000.00 and we were looking to build a building of 7,000 to 10,000 square feet for expansion in January of 1970.

While our retail store, The Green Gas House, continued to sell art supplies and posters, we tried two franchise stores that later became a drain upon our company. One was in Akron, Ohio near Akron University and one was in Canton, Ohio near Malone College.

These two stores taught Mike and me a lesson in hiring people. Not everyone is qualified to run a business. They may have the right spirit and attitude, but the drive and ambition must also be there if they are to succeed.

While Mike and I devoted 110% of our waking hours seven days each week to promote and expand the business, some people can only work 40 hours a week without burning themselves out. Success often gives you the energy to continue even though common sense tells you to quit.

Personally, I have never quit doing anything. I have a philosophy that I have been true to since my childhood. I must see everything through to its "Ultimate Conclusion."

Too often people quit without knowing where they stood at the time that they quit. There is the old story about a football team that continued to pay against the toughest team in the league without knowing where they were on the foggy football field. Thirty seconds before the final gun, all the players quit and walked off the field losing to the other team by one point. When the fog had finally cleared, the ball was resting on the one-yard line.

Perhaps they may have tried to make the touchdown in the final 30 seconds and they might have won the game. Then again, they might have failed. But if they did not try until the final gun was sounded, they had no chance of winning at all.

My philosophy is to continue to try until the final gun is fired. It may take a little extra strength and courage, but what else is there in Life other than our ability to try and be more than that which we are?

I say that if we can try to be more than that which we are, we can sometimes be more than that which we could have been.

It is when we give up on trying to be more than what we are that we wind up being less than that which we could have been.

After the two franchises were closed, we became discouraged with banks and bankers that continued to turn down our requests for a building loan.

Our financial statements were quite impressive for the two years we had been in business, however we were not "credit worthy" since neither Mike nor I had any credit history.

This is the "Catch 22" of the business world. Banks do not loan money to company or people that need the money. They loan it to people and companies that do not need it!

If you had a million dollars in cash assets, a bank would loan you money to get your money in their bank. With a million dollars in their bank, they can go to the Federal Reserve Bank and borrow against your funds up to ten times the amount on deposit. With this small interest loan to the banks, the banks can take the Federal Reserve money and loan it out at twice the amount they are paying for the funds.

Often the bankers will use a term called the "Prime Rate." This is the interest rate the banks offer to their "best" customers. Other more risky loans to people like Mike and me would be 2 to 3% higher on the rate. And we would pledge all our personal property to the bank as well as all corporate property.

Yet, General Motors does not get the same treatment! The officers and shareholders do not sign personally on anything! If the company files Chapter 11, the bank only gets the property that it has secured through its liens. And sometimes liquidation of the property may only bring 10% of the value indicated by the corporation's books!

In fact, the Savings and Loans Institutions have done more to illustrate this than any other incident. The Federal Government will liquidate nearly 700 BILLION Dollars worth of property that may only bring 70 BILLION DOLLARS AT AUCTION! The other 630 BILLION DOLLARS WILL BE PAID BY ALL OF US TAXPAYERS!

That's right, each man, woman and child will pay approximately $24,000.00 EACH to pay off the fraudulent loans made by the many bankers that used the taxpayers' savings to make their friends rich! Not only does the taxpayer find it hard to obtain a loan, but also they wind up paying off someone else's loan that walked away a multi-millionaire without ever having to lift a shovel to get a day's pay!

While I continue to digress to illustrate certain facts about business, banks, money and the law, I will continue to try to tell the Pro Arts story throughout the book. Each episode is a lesson in business and human nature. Each incident represents the writer's own personal experience and the truth. Throughout this book, you will be given certain specific facts that will be referred to later on in the book and the significance of these facts should amaze you.

After three or four refusals for building loans in the Kent State University area, Mike received a call from a man that he had met while playing Gin Rummy with our friend, Dean Chance.

Many of you may recall Dean Chance the baseball pitcher that as a Cy Young Winner in the early 70's played for the Twins and the Indians. He was from our hometown; Wooster, Ohio and Mike used to play Gin Rummy with him and some of Dean's friends.

Amos Mears, better known as "Mr. Medina," because he had brought so many businesses into the Medina area that Governor Rhodes honored him as one of the best contributors to Ohio's thriving economic growth during the late 1960's.

Mike went to see Amos and upon returning to Kent, Mike indicated that Amos and he had arrived at a building agreement for 23,000 square feet in the Medina Industrial Park!

It was to be a ten-year lease with an option to purchase the building at the time the lease expired.

It was at this time that Mike and I discussed the idea of John Argiry coming to work with us in the "new" building and this would be our opportunity to build a business along the lines of "big business."

John is my uncle on my mother's side of the family and he is five years older than I am and two years older than Mike. My father and mother used to take John with us on outings when we were children and sometimes when our mother and father were on a business trip, they would leave Mike and me with John's mother and father in Canton, Ohio, as they were our grandparents.

In the early beginnings, John, Mike and I were like brothers since we were about the same age. My mother and father treated John as well as Mike and I since he was my mother's baby brother and since we were often together either at our house or our grandparent's house.

Though we had our sibling rivalries, we were all "close" as we grew up together and Mike and I had felt that it would be nice to "grow a business together."

John graduated from Kent State University with a Masters in Psychology. He had worked on his Ph.D. while working for the state of Ohio as a representative in their Vocational Rehabilitation Program.

After John married Magdeline, a very nice person from New York area that was also of Greek decent, they moved to Kent, Ohio where John was able to finish his college and obtain his Masters Degree.

John went to work for Chrysler Corporation in Twinsburg, Ohio after obtaining his Masters and continued to work there trying to rehabilitate the "hard-core" laborer in the Chrysler Rehab Program.

John had achieved such great success that he was asked to move to the Detroit area in the late sixties to help head-up there Rehab Program with the "inner city Detroit hard-core" people.

While I often traveled to the Detroit area on business, John, Magdeline and I would go to dinner and discuss the business that Mike and I had started.

I sensed that John was interested in working with Mike and me, but Mike and I had not really looked at the poster business as an industry until we had obtained the opportunity to build our own building and really get into the silk screening business.

Now that a building was to be erected for us in Medina, Ohio, and since we would be purchasing sophisticated Automatic Silk Screening equipment, both Mike and I felt it necessary to obtain a well qualified Personnel Manager that would organize our work pool and keep our employees from either quitting because of low wages or lack of benefits.

Not only did John more than qualify for that position, but also Mike and I trusted him and loved him knowing that it would ultimately bring our inner desire of working together to reality.

When I discussed the idea with Mike about John working with us, Mike was totally for it and we decided to offer John the opportunity and leave the decision to John and his wife as to whether or not they wanted to join Mike and me in the business.

Mike and I decided to offer John 25 shares of Pro Arts, Inc. stock which represented 8.33% of the company and rather than dilute the shares of Bill Treffinger and Roger Macon by issuing new stock from the Pro Arts treasury, Mike and I each contributed the stock from our personal holdings in the company.

Additionally, when John came to Ohio to discuss the possibility of working with us, he made it clear that it was not just the money and stock that was involved, but it would be the personal relationship that each of us enjoyed with each other.

It was decided that any "new" business and opportunity we would consider, each of us would receive one third of the new company if a new company or ventured were started.