Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

Background, Early Life and Education
17
weren’t, if I was just a common character who
wanted to learn something. So it just gave me
much more incentive to go ahead and learn.
We had people—I can’t remember their
names now—but they would come up from
California, here, there and the other places.
We’d always know them and know exactly
what they were going to do. They would come
up and go broke, and then want train fare
home or bus fare home and stuff like that.
And you’d know exactly what they were going
to do because they’d come up, and you’d say,
“Hi, Joe or John or whatever. Now give me
five dollars; I’ll hold it for you. When you’re
broke, then I’ll give it back to you for your
bus fare home.”
“Don’t worry. I can handle my own
money. Don’t worry about a thing.” So pretty
soon, “Hey, Sil!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m broke.”
I said, “Didn’t I tell you to save five dollars
to go home?”
“Yeah, I know, but you know how it is.
Give me five to go home.
[Chuckling] So we’d have to give it to him
naturally because they’d come back up again
the next week or two weeks and do the same
thing all over again. But it was just a way of
life.
Some people used to—they’d come up
and they’d cash a check or something, and
they had it in their mind, you know, that they
weren’t going to pay. If they lost they weren’t
going to pay, period. They’d stop payment
on the check. So what we used to do is on
Monday morning, I would leave here about
four o’clock in the morning, drive down to
Sacramento or San Francisco or wherever it
was and be the first in line to the bank to cash
their check. Well, they naturally didn’t get up
in time to stop payment on the check before
I had already cashed the check. And they
would come up here the next week or so and
just raise seven kinds of hell with me saying,
“How could you do this to me?”
I said, “Because you were going to do it
to me.” And it was just a lot of fun really, but
it was a way of life in those days, just a way
of life. Now of course it’s a little different
situation; you have your credit systems and
so on. That’s it.