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The Boxtop King's Ten Tips for Business Success

Have you ever wished you could just walk off your dead-end job and do what you really wanted to do? Have you felt frustrated because you didn’t have the money to make that Big Move? Harvey K. Pulver, known to business insiders as "The Boxtop King," knows how you feel. The reclusive CEO of the powerful Tundrax conglomerate began building his corporate empire on a childhood playground. Known as the youngest man to achieve a hostile corporate takeover, Pulver wants to share with you

One: Start with your dream. Everybody has a dream. At recess, when all of us third-grade boys played softball, I’d lean against the wire playground fence in the deepest part of right field and dream I was Christopher Columbus discovering a new world, or Davey Crockett blazing trails, or the first man to land on the moon.

But I didn’t have a dream I could call my own till the day Duffer McDonough, the white-bearded sidekick on Captain Kerwin of the Dogsled Patrol, told us kids in the TV audience that we could buy our very own square inch of property in Alaska for ten Cavity Crunch cereal boxtops and fifty cents.

My brain blazed like a flashbulb. A hunting lodge in Alaska! All the kids in class could come to my log cabin hideaway. In a valley of fir trees and snow, we’d hunt caribou with bearded oldtimers and fish with broadfaced Eskimos. After dark, we’d sing silly songs and tell scary stories around campfires. We’d cower in sleeping bags while Indians whooped war cries outside. Sometimes we’d even help Captain Kerwin corral the Bad Guys. Thanks to the lessons I learned at home and in school, I calculated that If I ate three bowls of Cavity Crunch every day and invested my weekly allowance wisely, I’d be able to buy all the square inches of land I’d need to build the hideaway where my friends and I would have more fun than I ever did playing right field.

The morning after my inspiration, I inched to the edge of the huddle the boys in my class had made around Butchie Bullard and Shuckie Wheeler to trade baseball cards: Mickey for Willie or the Duke even-up, or Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese for one of the three. None of the kids ever wanted to trade with me. It used to hurt my feelings, but looking back on it...heck, even I wouldn’t want my Roy Sievers and Don Zimmers---not when I could have Mickey Mantle (oh, what his card must be worth now!). But I knew how great my hideaway would be and wanted all the kids to know too.

"You fat little jerk!" Butchie Bullard spat through his gapped front teeth. "The Old duffer’s just blowing snow through his chinwhiskers." He laughed. Shuckie Wheeler laughed. All their friends laughed. When I covered my ears and turned away, Butchie snatched the cards from my hand. Everybody laughed even harder.

I felt humiliated, I felt degraded. But I didn’t feel discouraged. Not at all. The next day I offered to trade Butchie any one of my cards for one Cavity Crunch boxtop, even-up. After looking at me as if I was even crazier than he thought, he nodded his boulder-sized head. It was quick! It was easy! My mind’s eye could see the timber fall for my cabin walls. Butchie wagged a Cavity Crunch boxtop against my the tip of my nose, then snatched my prized Ted Williams card with his free hand. I’ve always meant to thank him for teaching me

Two: If you can’t overcome an obstacle, work around it. Shuckie Wheeler, Butchie’s best friend, wasn’t big enough or fast enough to snatch my cards. In fact, after a week of swapping boxtops for cards, Shuckie brought half the kids on the playground over to trade with me. Most of the kids who traded with me made fun of me for doing it. Let them laugh, I thought. The next day, Mickey, Willie and the Duke were five tops apiece. Lesser players were fewer tops. Whenever some kid complained about the rates of exchange, I’d remind him he wasn’t giving up any cards to get mine. Some days I came home with enough boxtops to buy two square feet of Alaskan soil, rich with natural resources, as I learned in the next grade. Shuckie Wheeler, who later sold his card collection for ten million dollars, was the only one who stopped trading with me.

But my success made him envious. In fifth grade, Shuckie told me he and Butchie wanted to meet me at home to trade a bike basket of boxtops for the cards I’d bought for trading. While my parents were at work, Butchie pounded me till I groaned bellydown on my bedroom floor. While he spat on me through his freckled sneer, Shuckie inventoried my cards through a snicker. My every aching bruise wanted to get even with them, but they’d only beat me up again if I tried. Their beating sent my dream of an Alaskan hideaway up in flames every night. No matter what my mother and father tried, they couldn’t stop the shrill, anguished screeching that woke them every morning at 3:00 A.M. Four bleary-eyed months later, they took me to a psychiatrist. Dr. Norman listened while I told him how I spent my weekly allowance on cards or land in Alaska, then asked me why I didn’t spend my allowance on anything else. Didn’t I know that other children might think I was...well, different...because of the... ahem, obsessive...things I did?

"I want what I want," I told him. Memory tells me my tone of voice sounded part petulant schoolboy and part prescient investor. I was determined to have my cabin in the woods, even though I dreamed it flared to tinder every night on every square inch of Alaskan soil I owned. But Butchie and Shuckie inspired me to rebuild my trading business through

Three: Smaller is better. The kids in the third and fourth grades weren’t as big as the kids in my sixth-grade class. Or as smart. If they laughed at me for trading baseball cards for boxtops, so what? I laughed at them for paying twelve tops for one Willie Miranda, a lifetime .221 hitter.

Eventually my fellow eighth-graders outgrew trading cards---and those delightfully sticky nuggets of Cavity Crunch! But the 3:00 o’clock bell at my old elementary school still triggered a traders’ rush across the playground. Every Thursday, though, Dr. Norman cautioned me that not making friends my own age would retard my personal development. Good advice for somebody else, maybe---but not for me. My square feet of Alaskan property were growing into square yards by the week. But Butchie and Shuckie, now matured into ducktail haircuts and raised-up collars, didn’t believe I was still trading for boxtops. They started a rumor that my business was a cover for selling dope and dirty pictures to innocent little kids. In the 1950s, people took such allegations very seriously. So did I. The police, eight-foot replicas of Butchie, menaced me so badly with their hog-nosed threats and squint-eyed insinuations that my eyes gushed terror and shame while my parents drove me home from the station. In the weeks that followed, nobody could sleep through my fiery nightmares. My parents, their attorney and Dr. Norman met with the police. Every cent of the check the City sent me was spent on baseball cards and Cavity Crunch.

Traumatic as it was, the experience helped teach me to

Four: Have faith in a Higher Power. Especially if it’s a lawyer! In my Senior year of high school, Cavity Crunch cereal cancelled its land offer. I collected all the boxtops I could and sent the Cap ‘n Crown Sugar-Coated Cereal Corporation the money for the last of the land. The Corporation returned my money with a letter saying the offer had expired. My response explained that they should honor the offer for as long as the cartons remained on sale. Their reply rekindled my nightmare, dormant three years. This time I was trapped inside the cabin, flames inching up my shirtsleeves to singe my face. My parents’ attorney took over my correspondence. Shortly before my graduation, the Cap ‘n Crown Sugar-Coated Cereal Corporation met with my parents, their attorney, Dr. Norman and me in Battle Creek. Tired from the twelve-hour trip and months without sleep, I asked to be excused from meeting with the President and a half-dozen of the corporation’s attorneys. From the leather sofa in the receptionist’s area, I stared at the office’s thick mahogany doors, watching them roughen to the texture of timber and smelling their fresh-waxed finish turn smoky. When Dr. Norman opened the door, I found myself on my feet, screaming. The shocked expressions of the President and his attorneys sagged to long, somber glances. My parents’ attorney winked at me just before he returned to the meeting. My mother stayed with me, hugging me and wiping the sweat off my forehead and the tears from my eyes. An hour later, the Cap ‘n Crown Sugar-Coated Cereal Corporation had deeded me all of its remaining Alaskan property and had agreed to pay my college tuition several times over.

Using my new trust fund, I placed ads in comics, offering to buy Cavity Crunch property from other kids at ten cents on the dollar. Some kids just gave me their deeds. They thought the property was worthless, since the Corporation had gone bankrupt a week after our meeting. I finished college with enough land to build my lodge and start my Tundra Development Corporation.

When I moved to Alaska to build the lodge, though, I discovered that most of my properties sat in the middle of Indian reservations, oil wells and shopping malls. Very few of them were adjacent. The ideal location for my hideaway belonged to the Kwakwat Indian tribe, which had roamed Alaska, the Yukon and the Canadian provinces for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. How did I solve this problem?

Five: Let government be your friend. My letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs explained that the Kwakwat tribe’s nomadic lifestyle negated its claim to my land. Why was the United States government granting property rights to people whose true residence could just as easily be Canada?

Although the Kwakwat protested that I was taking away their prime hunting area, rich with bear, caribou, elk and other sources of protein, the Bureau of Indian Affairs respected my position. Since I’ve never considered myself a cruel person, I hired the Kwakwat at minimum wage to build my hideaway and to stage mock raids that would heighten its magical ambience. It took years of struggle, but I had achieved the first part of my dream.

When I offered to stage my high school class’s fifteenth-year reunion at the Lodge, Butchie Bullard, the perennial Class President, told me 4,000 miles was too far for my classmates to travel. Well then, how about a weekend retreat for at least some of the old gang? Tundrax, my then-forming conglomerate, would provide free transportation. After all these years, Butchie, Shuckie, my other playground buddies and I would finally have campfires, songs, stories, bears, raids and, now that we were adults, even Indian squaws to entertain us. The minute Shuckie received my moose-skin invitation, he phoned my office, sounding so enthusiastic that I could almost feel his hand slapping my back through the static of our connection. He said he’d set himself up for life by selling his collection of baseball cards and wanted to come up to celebrate our success.

But he didn’t come. Nobody came. My campfire songs echoed off the walls, but the reverberation of my jokes faded before my laughter could start. While the Indians whooped war cries and pounded drums in circle dances around my cabin, the Kwakwat princesses I’d brought in to celebrate the occasion asked if I always had problems with my arrow. I learned

Six: Don’t get mad, get even. I’m not what you would call a vindictive person, even though my determination to get what I want sometimes makes me seem that way. My maturity enabled me to accept my disappointment---until three months later, when I opened my subscriber’s copy of Overnight Success to an article about me titled, "Still Crazy After All These Years." It turns out that Stanley Bullard---I’ll always think of him as Butchie---made his living writing tabloid journalism. By misquoting my parents, my lawyers and Dr. Norman, he portrayed me as a psychopath wreaking revenge on an innocent public for my lonely childhood.

Bullard’s article started me dreaming that my cabin was burning with me inside it, my flesh charring like a hot dog on a grill. I contacted Dr. Norman, now operating the Tundrax mental health subsidiary, and my attorney, who administered the Tundrax injury claims subsidiary. Together, we documented that Butchie and Shuckie had harassed me since childhood. My attorney’s research revealed that no statute of limitations existed on theft of baseball cards. Subsequent legal action resulted in the court’s awarding me Shuckie’s baseball card fortune for damages inflicted from childhood on. Without a card to his name, Shuckie filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Since Butchie Bullard was a juvenile when he and Shuckie stole my cards, my attorney brought suit against his parents. The suit would have dragged on for years, but we settled out of court for his parents’ retirement assets. The media portrayed me as a villain when medical aides wheeled Butchie’s parents out of their nursing home and dumped them in the gutter. But their distorted accounts didn’t bother me. I was too busy learning

Seven: If an old idea doesn’t work, try a new one. Obviously, I needed to make my hideaway more attractive to the people I wanted to enjoy it with me. On a rare vacation---to northern California---Taco Bells and other chains sprang at me from the roadsides. Theme restaurants! That was it! I would make my hideaway into a place where anybody could come, not just my classmates, and enjoy not only the things I had wanted them to enjoy, but a good meal besides. And what better meal than north-country venison, with salted fries and beer! I wanted my hideaway to be the first Caribou Lodge Restaurant. But my advisors suggested opening the first Caribou Lodge in a more populous area, specifically on a few square yards I owned under a shopping mall in a community built around a newly-discovered oil reserve. Location, location, location! they said.

Further research revealed that millions of gallons of oil were gushing through one of my square inch properties. Naturally, the President of the oil company scoffed at what I owned and offered to buy me out. Cheap. However, my staff of attorneys helped me

Eight: Be persistent. Their brief asserted that the oil company had trespassed on my property and violated its natural pristine purity without my prior consent. There was a price to pay---particularly since the well covering my square inch tapped into a vein of oil that traveled outside of the company’s property onto other property which one of my real estate subsidiaries was buying up at the time. After reviewing my attorney’s list of back damages, the company agreed to make me a partner, if I dropped my civil suit. With the signing bonus they gave me, I bought the mall and opened the first Caribou Lodge. With the other restaurants and food stores in the mall shut down, the company CEO and executive staff dined nightly at the Lodge. In a matter of days they were raving about the quality of the food. When my income from other ventures enabled me to buy the oil company outright, I offered its former executives the opportunity of a lifetime: to start in the Caribou Lodge chain from the bottom up. The servers who showed the greatest enthusiasm for the Caribou Lodge concept eventually rose to night managers and, as the chain expanded, regional managers. The few who attempted to return to their former profession with my competitor companies had difficulty obtaining suitable letters of reference from the TundraTex Oil Corporation, the newest Tundrax subsidiary. Despite my success, I still had to learn

Nine: Nothing succeeds as planned. My classmates booked their twenty-fifth anniversary reunion at the new Caribou Lodge in my old home town. I offered it free of charge, of course. Shuckie and Butchie’s classmates took up collections to pay for their tickets. Unfortunately, other commitments prevented me from watching from the corner for more than a short time. When I landed in Seattle the following morning, I was saddened to learn about the tragic fire. To this day, I can picture the satisfied faces of the people, huddled for comfort after dinner while the guest storyteller recounted the tragic Caribou Valley Fire of 1888. I can imagine the terror of a scary story suddenly turning real, and the way their expressions must have changed. I can hear the voices of the campfire singalong suddenly rising to screams as the Lodge’s log columns flared like matchsticks. Their attempts to escape must have sounded like the whooping war cries of the Kwakwat, who recently turned my original hideaway into a casino. Since I’m not a vindictive person, I’m particularly saddened that my surviving classmates have filed civil suits against me, although my attorneys have settled most of them out of court. The local police seemed to agree with my suggestion that Shuckie and Butchie had motive to discredit me through an act of arson---even if they were unable to escape without disabling damages. My experience with the unexpected has taught me

Ten: Always have a backup plan. Even though my story is proof that dreams can come true, there are a few malcontents who continue to litigate against me. Despite their specious claims, you could say that I’m sitting on top of the world---and dreaming a new dream. With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the resulting collapse of its extradition agreement with the United States, I’m ready to take my pioneering spirit across the Bering Strait to start a chain of Cossack theme restaurants.

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