Uncle Ezra and his friend, Roosevelt, decided to go fishing one Saturday morning. They didn’t own a boat, so they were always restricted to casting from the water’s edge. But this day, as they pulled up to the boat dock, they saw a man was renting little john boats for $2.00 an hour.

“Hey,” said Roosevelt, “if we pool all our money, we could take a boat out for an hour or two.” Uncle Ezra thought that to be a fine idea. So they pooled the money from their pockets, looked in the dash of their truck, in the ashtrays, in the floorboards and between the seats. They came up with two dollars and fourteen cents – and they rented a boat.

 The first forty-five minutes of fishing were atrocious. They had to sit extremely still, the little boat threatened to capsize. Their lines got twisted, they hooked the weeds, dropped a rod in the water, and the only bites they got were from the mosquitoes. With less than ten minutes remaining of their hour, they paddled to the center of the lake, and found a nice dark hole.

They cast out out a worm. BAM! A strike. BAM! another one, and another! As fast as they could take them off the hook and put on another worm, another line would have a fish on. Now they couldn’t keep up with the rate at which they were pulling fish in.

  Roosevelt grabbed a wide black marker out of his fishing kit and drew a big black “X” on the side of the boat. “What ‘r you doin’?” asked Uncle Ezra. “I’m marking our spot,” said Roosevelt, “so’s next time we come back out here we ‘kin find ‘hit again.”

“You dumb old man, you”, said Ezra, “ ‘At ain’t gonna’ work. Don’t you know the odds are agin us gettin’ the same boat next time?”