My father financially supported my family and me by managing a wholesale nursery business, shipping boxes of propagated plants wrapped in newspaper and peat moss to his network of customers in the United States and Vancouver, B.C.
Rummaging through artifacts that he left behind that I inherited after he died in 2004, I found a metal box of 3x5 cards which he and his bookkeeper used to keep track of wholesale buyers and document what air carriers they used to ship plant orders.
My dad closed his nursery business in 1989 and retired to travel and enjoy time off with my mother. He was from the "old business school" and used a manual typewriter rather than a personal computer and printer to type up contact information on his 3x5 cards.
Using the Internet to research the buyers that my dad did business with revealed an interesting and unexpected discovery: at least one of his customers is still in operation today at the same location in San Antonio, Texas.
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