Free Dave Barry's Money Secrets by Dave Barry

Cruise and a standard coffeemaker:

    From left:
Nash Metropolitan, Tom Cruise, coffeemaker (
all images shown actual size
).
    Photography Credits

    The first time I ever drove my own self to pick up an actual girl on an actual date, I was at the wheel of the Metropolitan. I was already insecure and self-conscious enough without having to show up at my date’s house driving a vehicle that could easily have been stolen by squirrels.
    It did not help that my dad cut my hair. This was another way my family saved money. Dad got a cheap electric hair trimmer from the drugstore, and every two weeks he would give haircuts to me and my brothers. My dad went bald early—somewhere around age seventeen, to judge from the old photos of him—so he was not what you would call keenly sensitive to hairstyles. He put one of those depth guards on the clippers and styled us using the lawn-mower technique, the goal being to get all the hairs, regardless of their location on a person’s head, to be a uniform length of about three sixteenths of an inch. It’s a fine hairstyle for tennis balls, motel carpeting, certain varieties of coconut, and Eminem, but it doesn’t look good on humans. Here’s a photo of my dad cutting my hair:

    SOURCE: Matthew Brady

    There are a couple of things worth noting in this picture. One is that I am displaying the cheerful, upbeat body language of a prisoner about to be beheaded. The other is that I have a high forehead. Not as high as my dad’s forehead—which went all the way over the top of his head and down the back to his shirt collar—but still quite high. So, as you can imagine, I looked really terrific with the tennis-ball hairstyle. To get an idea of
how
terrific I looked, take a gander at this photograph of me in the early sixties, lounging on our living-room sofa in all my coolness with my cool “Hair by My Dad” hairstyle and my equally cool Soviet Union–style eyeglasses from the optical department at Macy’s in White Plains:

    SOURCE: Annie Leibovitz

    Note that, in addition to the excellent hairstyle and suave eyewear, I am wearing
loafers without socks.
How cool is THAT? You can imagine the impression I made on my date when I pulled up, looking like this, at the wheel of the Nash Metropolitan, ready to head out for a “night on the town” complete with oncoming cars crashing because their drivers were blinded by the glare of their headlights reflecting off my forehead.
    I am not asking for your pity here. I had wonderful parents and a fine childhood. I’m just saying that we did not have much money in our household.
    This was a good thing, because it taught me that, if I wanted something, I had to work for it. My primary source of income was mowing lawns. When springtime came and the grass started sprouting in our neighborhood, I’d go out to the shed and get out our lawn mower. I’d spend the next two hours yanking on the starter rope, which was a complete waste of time because we had (needless to say) a used lawn mower that was obviously designed by the same crack engineers responsible for the Hillman Minx. It was no more capable of internal combustion than a zucchini. Eventually I would give up, go inside, and beg my parents for money, and they’d give me some. Yes, it was hard work. But I learned the value of a dollar.
    Now let’s fast-forward several decades to the current generation of young people, the generation that was produced by me and my fellow Baby Boomers. There has been a lot of criticism about us Boomers, but I think we can say in all modesty that, despite our flaws in other areas, when it comes to parenting, we have done a truly horrible job. In an effort to make life perfect for our children, we have ruined them. Instead of teaching them that they have to work for nice things, we’ve simply
given
them everything—money, clothes, computers, phones, TVs, travel, cars, college educations, and, most damaging of all, lawn mowers that start instantly. We have raised a