The value of saving...

When I was in the second grade, which would have been about 1957, I attended to a small, four-room school in Independence, Missouri. There was no cafeteria, so our mothers had to pack our little lunchboxes every morning.

However, the highlight of the week was Wednesday. On that day, two things happened. First of all, the school board sent a hot lunch crew to our school. And they almost always served the same thing — Made-right Hamburgers. Yum! I loved those. They were a loose-meat hamburger on a bun. And there were a few condiments you could add.

The second thing that happened was a visit from the Government. Now, that's typically not a good thing, especially if it's the IRS, but these ladies came into our school room and sold us Savings Stamps. They were twenty-five cents each. And we all wanted to buy them, because Superman said it was a good thing to save and to help the country at the same time.

They also gave us a book, kind of reminiscent of the S&H Green Stamps, or Gold Bond Stamps of that era. We licked the stamps and stuck them in our little books. When you had 50 of them, you could trade the book in for a $25 United States Savings Bond. Then the waiting began as the bonds matured over the next 11 years or so. During that school year and the one that followed, I manged to fill two books with stamps, which I traded in for two new $25 United States Savings Bonds. But I never cashed them in.
Years later, in the 90s, my father gave me my Savings Bonds. They had been stored safely away in his filing cabinet for forty years. I figured it was time to cash them in and get my $25 for each of them.

When I went to the bank I was surprised to learn that, although the bonds had stopped maturing at the regular rate after the 11 year period, they had continued to earn interest at a lower rate for the following 30 years. At the time I redeemed them, they were worth a little over $250 each.

Wow! What an unexpected bonus. Superman was right. As usual.