The Last Laugh

A resident of a Swedish coastal town Skelleftea, Curt Degerman, was considered an eccentric for forty years. Townspeople were accustomed to seeing him with his old bicycle, cycling along the streets of the town, searching in waste bins to secure tossed-out tin cans. The empty containers he rescued from the town's garbage dump were stuffed into bags he had tied on the handlebars of his bicycle.

As an eccentric it can be assumed that no one thought it particularly odd that he would often be seen in the town's library. Where he appeared to be especially enthralled by daily newspapers' financial pages. The man was obviously an early environmentalist, and concomitantly a budding capitalist. For he regularly hauled his cache of empty tins to recycling depots, receiving small amounts of cash for his trade-ins.

And those modest cash earnings? Well, it would appear that "Tin-Can Curt" was a financial genius in disguise. This man traded on international markets with his modest earnings elicited from searching out scrap metal and selling it for meagre profit. The meagre coinage gradually turned into lavish earnings on his investments over the four decades he spent trash-diving and investing.

At his death it was discovered that Mr. Degerman had managed to amass a fortune of over $1.7-million. He had a rented safety deposit box which turned out to contain 124 gold bars. Not bad for a scrap collector. Two of Mr. Degerman's cousins have been busy entertaining the locals through their legal battle over his estate.

The matter has now been settled, according to a court order. A bit of devilish wickedness, to have died intestate with the understanding that with the revelation of his fortune his two remaining relatives would be at odds against one another ... ?

Did he overlook the fact that he could have been even more mischievous had he left his fortune in support of orphan seagulls?