Being from Wisconsin, the title of this e-lit masterpiece could be about the furry kind of bucks fighting over territory or the state's basketball team having internal difficulties. But, in this case, it has to do with greenbacks...moolah...beans...boodle...bread...cabbage....gravy...The Almighty Dollar! A few days back we had a story on FirstNews about Warren Buffett inching ahead of Bill Gates in the billionaire bake-off. Both have fortunes somewhere in the $50 billion-plus range. That's a lot of dough...scratch...coin...long green...Benjamins...jack....loot. (As a teenager, I had a poster of Peter Mark Roget on my wall at home. Right next to the one with Farrah Fawcett in the red swimming suit. I was a geek...with hopes and dreams.)

There are lots of billionaires nowadays. When I was little, we really only had two that I was aware of: Howard Hughes and J. Paul Getty. In fact, at my grade school, there was a Hughes Camp and a Getty Camp. If there had been trading cards for these two guys, we would've bought them. I rooted for Howard Hughes. I thought of him as the regular American guy. I mean, Getty's first name was Jean! Jean lived in England! He looked like an extra in a Hitchcock movie! Imagine my surprise when I found out that J. Paul Getty had been born in Minneapolis. (Also, it turns out that Mr. Hughes was a couple of bricks short of a load. One of his wagon wheels was in the sand. He had all his marbles but his shooter was chipped.) I ended up kind of liking Getty when he refused to pay ransom for a kidnapped grandson. The kidnappers sent a part of the young man's ear to Getty as a threat. Remember, I was a kid and all that macabre stuff was ultra-cool. Anyway, as a rule, I was rooting for Hughes over Getty.

In our town, I never thought of the doctors, lawyers and bankers as the moneyed class. It seemed to me, the rich folks owned the hardware store. They had all that stuff, after all. Also, I learned early on, that there's money in bodily functions. The only in-ground swimming pool in town, that I was aware of, was at the home of the local plumbing mogul. Apparently, the money kept coming as long as people kept going. If someone was doing really well, you'd hear "Oh, yeah, she's makin' big bucks." Still, how much someone was making or had was off-limits for public discussion. Spending money, especially on luxuries, was frowned upon. If someone got an air conditioner, they'd explain it by saying "Well, you know, my grandmother is living with us now and she has trouble breathing if the window is open." That was just for a window unit. If anyone had ever gotten central air, we'd have assumed the whole family was sickly and feel pity rather than envy. If someone bought a new car, you'd hear "They made me such a good deal it would have been sinful not to buy the thing. I really didn't want it but...." As a kid, it irked me a little that people were always apologizing for getting something new. Today, as a father with a wallet that is really just a faux leather moth container, I like and admire that old-fashioned economic attitude.

I know "Money can't buy happiness" but shouldn't it, at least, make your sadness a little more tolerable? Would I rather be blue and watching a TV with rabbit ears or blue watching a high-def, wide-screen plasma gizmo? Getty and Hughes didn't seem very happy when they died within months of each other in 1976. Hughes was a very rich man with few if any true friends and no home. Getty had been married five times and always looked like he'd just swallowed a whole lemon. Still, I'm willing to take the chance on successfully combining contentment and cash. That's why I put the dollar in our FirstNews Powerball fund. Then, again, the Bible talks about it being harder for a rich person to get into heaven than for a camel to make it through the eye of a needle. I always wondered just what kind of tailor shop the Apostles were frequenting but, beyond that, could I just get a little rich...maybe not a camels-worth...how about a malnourished llama?