To Chris: No one wanted to make a donation to get a free "Love-Worm" so we tied nooses around their necks and attached them to over-inflated balloons that we got from the Heart Association. Yours needed weight so you tied a key to it and we proceeded to send our "Love-Worm Aeronauts" up and down through the mall. That is, ...until your worm fell off and your house key got stuck thirty feet up on the ceiling. Your mom was going to kill you.

We didn't panic but instead went into the nickel-store and bought a roll of kite string. Then into a restaurant for a gum ball and a toothpick. It was pretty easy to navigate my balloon since it had the long string. With the toothpick attached to the top with the gum, it only took a couple of tries to pop your balloon and recover the key. However, our moment of inspiration occurred when it got stuck to the gum instead of popping and we almost recovered the balloon intact.
 
After a minor upgrade from gum to tape (and no toothpick), we were off to go fishing. There were little children all over the mall crying over lost balloons. We received a loud ovation from the crowd that had gathered to watch us get a little girl her balloon back. It didn't take long before we had accumulated perhaps thirty stray balloons, each of us now starting to look like a circus clown or carnie.
 
Business was great after that! People would ask us for a balloon and we would say "They come with a Love-Worm and require a donation of a dollar." To your parents' amazement, we sold all of our worms. When we told them how we did it, it was death to the Love-Worm and promotional balloons only from then on. We raised a lot of money for your sister with balloons in the years that followed.
 
My best memory from that first day of selling balloons and something that still makes me smile, was when some lady was getting snotty with us over the dollar we were charging. "...you have to give it to me free because my friend said the Heart Association was giving them away for free... blah, blah, blah." We just laughed and said, "Well lady, ...we're not the Heart Association!"