A woman of integrity

I ran into an old friend last week who asked me if I'd been able to sell my house yet. It's kind of a sore subject these days--I live in a beautiful home on an acre lot in a lovely neighborhood but despite two separate attempts to sell (totaling over two years on the market), I've had no takers. I'm not in distress (yet) but the house is just too big for me and much too far away from work and family to be practical. Nothing would make me happier than to sell it.

No, I told him, I haven't sold the place yet and in this economy, it's not likely that I will--maybe ever. His response caught me by surprise. "You might just have to walk away from it," he said.

Not in this lifetime. Someday they may come to drag me out of it and sell it on the courthouse steps for back taxes, but walk away from it? NEVER.

This got me thinking. I'm rocking along okay right now but it wasn't too many years ago that our financial world was in total shambles and we were in real danger of losing our home and everything in and around it. A deadly combination of unemployment, underemployment, and spectacularly stupid financial decisions left us, as my Dad was fond of saying, without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. My toes still curl when I remember the mailbox stuffed with letters marked FINAL NOTICE and the constant barrage of collection agency phone calls. It was bad.

Of the many thousands we owed, though, I can only remember one $200 bill that we never did pay. J.C. Penney, bless their nonexistent hearts, got impatient and wrote us off while I was in the process of scraping up the last few dollars. When I tried to pay them, I found that our account no longer existed. Everybody else got paid in full. It took a looooong time and we were, unfortunately, helped along by an unpleasant windfall or two (read: somebody died and left us a little money), but things did get better. They got a lot better when Randy finally found the job of his dreams and we were both fully employed again.

One thing that helped me through the whole miserable ordeal was a story passed down through the family about my grandmother, Ruth Hardy. Growing up, I spent many weekends, holidays, and summers at the exclusive hotel she owned in Palm Springs. By the time I was born, she was well established, a Palm Springs City Councilwoman, and a shrewd businesswoman. But she didn't get there overnight. The truth was, my grandfather drank away all the profits from the hotel they owned together and by the time she divorced him in 1939, he had left the business--and her--with staggering debts. Her creditors offered her a settlement--she could walk away from her debts for pennies on the dollar.

She refused. Give me time, she told them, and I'll pay you back every cent. The "rest of the story" in her own words (as quoted in Palm Springs Life Magazine, October 1963):

"There were so many of them that finally my creditors got together and served me as a group and put a keeper from the sheriff's office at a desk (in the hotel lobby) to take in any money for bills. The keeper was a nice young man, embarrassed at the job he was doing. I soon made him a good friend. On the second day, he wore civilian clothes and for the next two weeks, while collecting money, he served as room clerk. And I never had a better one."

She did pay back every creditor in full--despite being told in 1933 that she was "doomed to failure" because Palm Springs was "way over-built" and didn't need another hotel!

I'm really lucky to have this published magazine account of that old family story. The article details many of the struggles she went through to become successful and it's a great read. But what strikes me most about the article is what she DIDN'T say. There is not one single word in it about my grandfather and his drinking. It would have been so easy (and truthful) for her to say that it was entirely my grandfather's fault for getting her in such a mess in the first place. But she didn't.

I hope I learned something from the financial mess we were in years ago. But even if I didn't, I will never forget the example Ruth set for me. I'll never walk away from a financial obligation. It may take me years to get it paid and things might get lots worse before they get better. But they will get better.

Ingleside Inn, Palm Springs, California (circa 1960)