Thomas and Ruddy were a pair of ambitious ten year olds who lived on the same block in Charlotte, North Carolina. Pining for some spending money, they approached their dads with a scheme: Rent us your lawnmowers so we can start a mowing business. A deal was struck and off they went. By August of that hot summer the boys had a dozen accounts apiece—lawns belonging to almost all of the neighbors they knew, most of the lawns within four square blocks, and certainly all of the lawns two ten-year-old boys could handle
