Many years ago when I was young, I'd known a full-time university student, majoring in Journalism, who'd transferred from university to university almost every year by signing up for only 18 semester hours per year.
In other words, he was doing only half the usual course work in school.
He didn't want to graduate and leave his college life.
He had a nickname called Peter Pan.
Several years ago, a newspaper reporter had discovered a supposedly homeless woman living inside an airport, making free use of bathroom and WiFi facilities.
She was found to be renting out her downtown apartment and collecting monthly rental income of about $2,000 and having a bank savings account of more than $100,000.
In 1986 while traveling on a flight going from New York to Seoul, South Korea, I'd got to know a young college student who was sitting two or three seats away from me.
The airplane had a short stopover at Anchorage Airport, Alaska.
He told me he was dying to eat some watermelon, and I thought he was insane to pay that kind of money for a thin slice of fruit.
(At that time, the currency exchange rate of US$1 was equivalent to about S$2.15)
Many years ago, one of my elderly work colleagues had told me that his elder brother was a successful businessman before World War Two.
His brother had hoarded many stacks of those British colonial banknotes used in Malaya, Borneo, and Singapore..jpg "Malaya 1941 $10 GEF")
When the Japanese soldiers invaded the region and fearing persecution, his brother burned all those stacks of colonial banknotes instead of burying or hiding them.
After the war was over and when the British returned to the colonies, all those colonial banknotes (and coins too) were recognized as legal tender for circulation, and their purchasing power had remained the same if not more.
Just half cent or one cent could buy a cup of hot coffee!
Many years ago, I'd heard from an elderly work colleague who told me about a construction worker driving a bulldozer, demolishing an old concrete house, somewhere in the Chinatown area..
Nobody had ever heard from him anymore since that time.
Many years ago when I was young, I'd heard from an elderly work colleague that he knew someone who'd won a first-prize from The Big Sweep lottery in the mid-1970s. That first-prize sum of several hundred thousand dollars was big money back then when gold was selling for only US$150 an ounce.
Today, the price of gold is about US$2,450 an ounce.
That lottery winner was a humble craftsman working in a goldsmith shop at Chinatown and he'd still continued working, riding a bicycle to work daily.
That image below isn't that of a book, but an old postcard showing the demolished National Library at Stamford Road.
In the early 1990s, I'd read an interesting book (Goldstein, Joshua S., Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, Yale University Press, 1988, pp384) at the reference section of the National Library and it had a catalog number R338.542GOL. In 2006, I've tried to search for this book to read it again, but it isn't there in the new building. Does the National Library Board discard away a good academic book like this?
Again in the early 1990s, I'd used the old catalog index card system and found an interesting title (Moss, William Stanley, Gold is Where You Hide It: What Happened to the Reichbank Treasure, London: Andre Deutsch, 1956) but the book, which had a catalog number 332.41MOS, was nowhere to be found on the bookshelf at that time.
My search using the then newly-installed computerized Octopac system had revealed two catalog numbers, CL-332.41MOS and BM-332.41MOS, available for lending. That would mean that there were two books of the same title, one located at the Central Lending section of the National Library at Stamford Road, and the other at the Bukit Merah branch library. Needless to say, both these books of the same title could not be found, presumably lost, I would guess. Or had anyone been hiding them?
The Band, The Last Waltz (Live Recording/3 Vinyl LPs) 12-inch Records, 33 rpm, Warner Bros. Records, 1978, Made in UK. Sold to a Carousell Singapore buyer on December 1, 2023.
