Stool Sample

I found a dollar bill that someone had been using as a bookmark in a library book I took out once.

For days, every time a car drove up our street, I thought it was the racket squad, come to knock down the front door with a battering ram as a guy in a trench coat stood on the front lawn, barking, "Awright, we know you're in dere, come on out with your hands up and bring dat dollar bill!"

I about broke my neck to take the book and the ill-gotten gain back to the library, where the librarian looked at me askance as I turned in the loot.

SO imagine how it feels to be Howard Kirby, of Owosso Township, Michigan.

After Christmas, he dropped $70 at a Habitat For Humanity store and took home some furniture, including a footstool which "didn't feel right" once he got it home.

His daughter-in-law unzipped the cushion on the stool and found $43,170 stashed within.

What Kirby did was, he went back to the shop and found out who donated the lot of furniture he had bought.

“I do what I can to be as much like Christ as I can, and this is the moral thing to do,” Kirby, 54, said. "This is going to help them. I’m so happy for them.”

It turns out, the footstool was part of a living room set donated to Habitat For Humanity by Kim Fauth-Newberry and her husband. The couple inherited the  furniture from her grandfather, Phillip Fauth, who died in July.

Ms Fauth-Newberry said Grandpa Fauth was one of those old-timers who paid his way in cash all along, and he had stashed this loot in the footstool, telling no one about it.

“This is crazy,” Fauth-Newberry told the news last week, staring at stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Mr Kirby (l) and Mrs Fauth-Newberry

Odds are, I will buy the farm one day, and if you come and pick through what I leave behind, take care to find a hollowed-out book titled "See? I Told You I Was Right About Everything!" by R. Limbaugh.  Look inside that book, very carefully, and you will find the words cut out of every page, leaving enough space to hide almost $50,000.

You won't find any money, just a place to put some, if you have any.