>>123027
I have heard a story about a guy who served in the Seabees during the war and was trained as a heavy equipment operator. After he got out he was able to buy a war surplus bulldozer at scrap metal prices. The military was getting rid of shiploads and trainloads of equipment in 1946. He got a bulldozer for a couple hundred bucks--more money then but not out of reach for a frugal man who had banked his combat pay--and got a bulldozer with an engine that had a blown head gasket. Such was the ferocious rate at which American factories had produced them that it was frequently faster and easier to get a new bulldozer than to fix an engine. The engine still started up and ran but antifreeze was mixing with the motor oil because of the gasket. So, being a bright guy, he drained the radiator and filled it up with used dirty motor oil. Oil doesn't conduct heat as well as water does, and he could only run it half an hour before the engine overheated. But he was a very skilled bulldozer guy, and he could get a lot done in half an hour.
He was in California and he got in on the earth-shattering postwar housing boom around Los Angeles. He made a shitload of money and by 1950 he owned his own construction company. He was a millionaire by 1960. So when he retired his Boomer kids ran the business into the ground and squandered all the money within a few years. Them's the breaks, I guess.
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