The grandson Rowan returned from the Ida Valley last week, his tiny pockets stuffed with money.
A stall of home-made lemonade on the Rail Trail netted him $27 after five hours in the unrelenting Maniototo sun, refusing to be drawn back inside, refusing to play that heart-breaking trick of the sole trader, the sign that reads Back In Five Minutes.
Rowan is 4 years old.
According to a piece in the Sunday Star-Times that same weekend - "Advice For Aspiring Gazillionaires" - the boy is on the right track, his fiscal future already assured.
Start young and work hard with active mind, determination and passion, the country's entrepreneurs said.
Go harder, faster, sooner, said Geoff Ross, who is clearly still going harder, faster and sooner, having sold his garage vodka company 42 Below to Bacardi for $138 million after only six years.
Ross began as a possum trapper, TV producer Luke Nola sold little paper frogs from his house at the age of 6, Orcon boss Scott Bartlett had a fruit stall, and of course, Bob Jones put the first planks into his money bin by selling the Wellington Public Library bookmarks full of advertising.
Auckland supercity mayor Len Brown started as a paper boy.
As indeed did I.
But after reading the Sunday Star-Times article, I wondered at what point in the 50 years between the paper round and now - when, with a mind razor-sharp and a brain straining beneath a bucket of life experience, I managed an annual income of just twelve thousand dollars - just when did I make a wrong turning?
You could argue I was a dishonest paper boy, karma, but that would be saying dishonesty is not part of acquiring gazillionairdom, and that sort of talk is just stupid.
But this dishonesty does still tear me from my genteel dreams in the night.
My run was around Wallace and Pacific Street, leaking through to Lynwood Avenue, a nice area between Roslyn and Maori Hill.
The money for dragging a large sack of Evening Stars around was pitiful, and I naturally turned to the entrepreneur's insistence on an active mind - if I omitted to deliver one paper a day and sold it later on the way home in the Roslyn Village, then I could raise my wages considerably.
I can assure you my mind was very active choosing which householder to disappoint and why.
From the afternoon paper run - much easier than getting up in the early morning to deliver the ODT or go on the well-paid but physically difficult milk runs - I progressed to the letterbox sale, a mini forerunner of the garage sale, where I set up at the gate after giving all the houses in the street notice.
I sold comics, books and toys, plus, in order to keep the dishonesty factor strong, a thieved supply of my father's paperbacks, often Carter Brown, and the occasional big-seller like The World of Suzie Wong.
At this stage, I was still on entrepreneurial track, but I peaked there.
Records Records, established when there was hardly a used record store, seemingly indicating an active mind, and sold 35 years later, was not my vodka sellout to Bacardi.
It never became a global franchise with branches in Hobart and Khazakhstan.
There were days in the early 1970s, the commission era, when we took just 50 cents.
But I was no salesman, I did not bound out of my chair when a customer entered offering kind assistance and coffee, I either hid from customers or ignored them.
Had I been able to run Records Records from behind a screen, I would have.
And therein lies the key.
The entrepreneurs are right about the work ethic, the active mind and starting young.
But gregarious confidence and spell-binding spin is the thing.
Rowan had all of that in the Ida Valley, people bought the spiel not the lemonade.
We will watch his progress over the next 20 years with interest.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
