Sunday, August 16, 2009

Newport bachelor eats at college cafeteria for 40 years, donates

Depression-era Omaha is where a pre-teen Lindsay collected dandelions to sell as chicken feed, earning a few pennies each week to buy bread for his family.

Walking to school one morning, a skinny, starved Lindsay picked through a neighbor's garbage can and emerged with a not-quite-empty jar of peanut butter.

"Bruce eagerly ate the peanut butter and would never forget how delicious it tasted," according to a self-published biography of Lindsay's life written by a friend.

Now, admittedly, eating from a garbage can � and being so desperate that you enjoy it, no less � might make any reasonable person a tad frugal. For Lindsay, though, financial security became a real obsession.

Even as things began looking up in the 1940s, after his family had moved to California, there was no way he'd let impulse buys send him back to the poorhouse.

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