Friendship & a Fast Buck

All day long, people kept coming to Charlie Monak's house in Detroit with handfuls of green, crumpled-up folding money. By noon he had $2,000. Charlie, a Packard Motor Car Co. dynamometer tester, ordered in two barrels of beer and plenty of whisky to go with it. As the money flowed in last week, everybody drank, yelled and danced around the front room.

When Charlie's sudden wealth reached $2,500, he had an inspirational idea: he picked up the telephone and invited the whole Packard Motor Car Co. to come out and have a beer. "I'm going to buy my wife some new clothes," he cried, "and get drunk for a week. Then I'm going to buy her a Mixmaster and get drunk again."

Charlie had become a top man in a Pyramid Friendship Club, a money snowballing craze which last week was sweeping across the country as the chain-letter game did 14 years ago. He was not the only man to make a fast buck. Another Detroiter got a bushel basket full of money in one evening, and gave away five-dollar bills as mementoes of the stirring occasion. People in Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and dozens of other U.S. cities and towns hit the jackpot too and found themselves in a delirious state of sudden solvency.

Twelve Nights in a Club. The Pyramid Friendship Club game had swept east to Detroit from Southern California. The clubs operate like chain letters, but with one notable exception--to avoid using the mails, members meet and exchange money at nightly parties.

The pyramids work like this: at his first party a new member hands over two dollars, becomes one of many "number 125" at the base of the pyramid. The next night he becomes a "number 11" and must bring two new members, each with two dollars, to keep the organization intact. On each subsequent night, as new members multiply and form pyramids behind them, he is pushed toward the peak of his pyramid, until on the 12th night he becomes a number i and theoretically receives $4,096.

In the areas of the U.S. where it had taken root, feverish armies of men & women talked of little else; they recruited friends and set out for pyramid parties nightly like grain plungers trying to corner the wheat market. Calls on some suburban Detroit exchanges rose by 50%.

16,777,216 Customers. The Pyramid Club idea also attracted a glib throng of amateur and professional confidence men --there were numerous ways of sidetracking money during its hand-to-hand progression toward the top of the pyramid. In Detroit, Assistant Prosecutor Ralph Garber said: "There are enough innocent people winning from $800 to $1,500 to keep the chain process alive. But I have yet to find anyone who has won the $4,096." But newspapers which warned against Pyramid Clubs or prosecutors who tried to break them up, quickly discovered that the pyramiders had no wish to be saved. In Los Angeles' suburban Huntington Park, a courtroom-full of pyramiders hugged, kissed and cheered Justice of the Peace Stanley Moffatt after he ruled that the clubs were not illegal.

In the face of all this uproar many a police chief just decided to sit back and wait for the pyramids to collapse of themselves--an amateur mathematician figured it would take 16,777,216 players to keep a club going for 25 days.

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