The back of my car is covered with bumper stickers. Given that it’s a 20 year-old Camry with 215,000 miles, the joke is that it is being held together by the bumper stickers! Even funnier, when I come out of a store there are people standing there reading my bumper stickers!. I cannot tell you how many people engage me in stories about it. It has been fun in spite of delaying me getting where I need to go! I started joking by calling ahead:
“I charge for reading!“
Somebody said I should make a sign saying that. So from Northern Sun (https://www.northernsun.com) where I get my bumper stickers I got blank bumper stickers, and Maria in my office designed one which says:
“I charge for reading. Leave a dollar under the windshield wiper”.
When in Orlando I try to always have dinner at an Irish restaurant called Fiddlers Green Irish Pub & Eatery, 544 W Fairbanks Avenue, Winter Park, FL 32789. I came out of the restaurant and sure enough there was a dollar under the windshield wiper. So how did all this bumper sticker business get started?
I had a referral to a potential billion-dollar case in Naples, Florida from a very good client of mine there. It was a Rhode Island Estate case where a priest who was excommunicated by the church for undue influence on susceptible elderly people to give him money. The family went to court to regain the fortune that he had stolen from an aunt. I looked the case up and it was a real case. Given what then happened it was fortunate a colleague of mine was in Naples seeing a client of his from Tampa and an ING executive was in Naples giving a speech to an investment group from Des Moines. They were joining usfor dinner. It’s a good thing because I was delayed by an auto accident.
It was rainy weather when I exited I-75 at US 90 in Lake City to gas up. Some guy came flying down the exit and rear-ended me, almost pushing me into the oncoming traffic to be T-boned! A sheriff deputy was there quite quickly and told me not to move. Later on my medical clients in Naples told me that a whiplash can cause a hairline fracture on the spinal column in the neck and cut your spinal cord and paralyze you, believe it or not. There are two hospitals right there so I very quickly got a CAT scan and was told that I was OK. I tied the bumper down with some rope in the trunk and was only an hour late for the dinner.
Eventually, the man married to the woman who was the potential heir and who was referred to me by my client in the medical community had a very bad ending to their marriage so who knows whatever happened to the case.
I got back to Tallahassee. I asked my mechanic what to do about repairing the car. He said there was a body shop just down the street. I took the car there and got it back after an inordinately long and unreasonable period of time. Not long after that the paint started peeling off the bumper!
When I was a kid in the ‘60s bumpers were made out of steel and chrome plating. When you started getting rust pitting, you needed to do something about it to protect the metal. But the bumpers now are a carbon fiber composite. They don’t need paint. It is strictly cosmetic.
It upset the woman I was living with quite badly. It also bothered people I knew who said I should go back to the body shop. I said number one, it doesn’t need paint, number two, he couldn’t make the paint stick the first time so why would it now, and number three, my time was worth more than paint and appearance of the car.
One day, Martha and I are coming out of Publix. It’s a white Camry in a parking lot with 50 or more other white cars. I asked her where my car was. In a microsecond she pointed to it.
“See how convenient it is to have a black bumper with white paint peeling off it so you never have to figure out where your car is!”
Not long after that, my youngest sister-in-law, who is associate general counsel for a non-governmental organization and is involved in lobbying got a bumper sticker that said:
“Republicans for Voldemort”
Becky came to me and said I can’t put this on my car but I know you would like to!! Not long after that Martha and I are in Apalachicola and she bought a couple of bumper stickers that were humorous in a little gift shop there.
The rest was history! Some of the stickers are just for humor, but some do have a pointed political comment. I’m so blue I fade into the ultraviolet, but I have never had a right winger give me the interdigital gesture of you know what. I have had unbelievable number of people give me a thumbs up. It has just been a lot of fun to do.