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Roy was born on Tuesday, May 24, 1938, at 3:45 pm at Mary's Help Hospital in San Francisco, California.
Roy's mom told him, he came down the chute feet first and had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. If the doctor, Ray Harris M.D., had not unwrapped it quickly this would have been a very short book.
Well, feet-first is pretty much the way he's traveled through life. 1938 was the same year Superman came into existence. Superman was faster than a speeding bullet. Superman could leap tall buildings in a single bound. Superman could see through walls and...Superman could fly!
Roy never learned to crawl! He would lie on his back and push with his feet to get around. That's why the back of his head
Time Magazine made Adolf Hitler the "Man of the Year" in 1938 and they didn't even so much as mention the birth of
Le Roy Dan Bain.
Roy's very first recollection is living at 260 Juice Street, San Francisco.
Then Roy's family moved to 475 Edinburgh Street in San Francisco.
As you can see from the pictures, the houses were very close together. As a kid, Roy could make it from the upstairs bedroom where his two brothers and he slept to the ground outside without going through a door. He could shimmy up and down between the houses by putting his feet on one house and his butt on the other.
This is Mission Street in San Francisco.
It was a late date...after Roy had been selling hearing aids which took him until 8 or 9 p.m. on most days. Roy would pick Jean up and drive around town with a stop at a drive-in restaurant with car service to get a hamburger. The romance was on and it became an every night affair.
Jean's dad always teased Jean saying that she was Roy's after-date. Jean liked the smell of Roy's "Old Spice" cologne so he always splashed it on before he picked her up. He left a shirt at Jean's house and her dad said he knew she was in love when she would walk around smelling his shirt.
Jean & Shirley put their names in a drawing at the Princetown theater. The prize was an expensive Mouton Coat & $200. Jean won & got the coat. Her mom got the money & Shirley got jealous. Ruth kept the coat for 47 years & Jean sent it to Shirley. Shirley had 4 bears made from the coat. Coat buttons were used for eyes. A little collar for the boy & a dress for the girl was made from lining. A decorative piece from the coat was added to each bear. Jean & Shirley each got a set of Mouton bears.
In 1968, Roy started Squaredough Donuts, which he believed was a great concept. First, Roy encouraged the owner of the Brockton Arcade Shopping Center where his hearing aid office was located, to build a small building and set up a square donut baking company. Next, Roy held meetings at a little cafe next to his Beltone office. He invited kids and their parents to come in for job interview. He hired the kids on an independent status to sell donuts in their neighborhood after school.
Roy put teaser ads in the paper for a couple of months saying, "The Squaredough boy is coming." The boys were outfitted with a Squaredough hat and carried their donuts door-to-door in a special Squaredough tray. Roy sold an unregistered franchise agreement for three cities for $50,000 each. Roy was to receive the $50,000 in monthly payments. And then the governmental problems started. The Health Department wanted all of their donuts delivered in dust-free trucks. Roy told them as a member of the Lion's Club, he sold candy that wasn't even wrapped. They pointed out that the Lion's Club was non-profit. Roy then said, "You mean if I was non-profit the kids could carry the donuts on a stick, but if I made a profit each kid needed a dust-free truck?" Roy won that one. The Riverside City Council wanted every kid to have a license which would cost more than they could make. Roy lost that one. He had a similar problem with the city council of San Bernardino.
They also had another problem at Squaredough; their donut box was a little too big. If they used 16 oz. donuts they looked small in the box, so they had to go to a 32 oz. dozen, which caused a number of problems. Because their donuts were so big they had to charge a higher price. When the boys came by two days later the customer still had donuts left over from their last purchase.
Speaking at a success seminar one day, Roy used the hoop toy story metaphorically to explain a philosophy Roy had about the human mind that goes like this.
The human mind is either going in a positive direction or a negative direction. Like the hoop, it never goes both directions at the same time. Sometimes it will bounce up and down in the morning. But once it takes off, especially in a negative direction, it becomes overwhelming and is difficult to keep up. Unfortunately, in life there are those who never realize that they hold the stick and they can give it a hit in the right direction.
To replace the stick Roy wrote the Today poem and printed it on his coffee cup in 1978.
Roy gave a "Today" cup to Art Linkletter. Art co-authored a book with Mark Hanson who wrote, "Chicken Soup for the Soul." "Chicken Soup for the Soul" is the all-time best selling non-fictional book in America followed by Art's "Kids Say the Darnest Things." These two great authors named their book, "How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life" from Roy's "Today" poem.
Jean drinks coffee from her favorite cup, with the poem Roy wrote in 1981 called "Love".
In 1978, Nu-Ear's business was slow and Roy decided they needed a celebrity to endorse their products. He began to ask everyone who would be the best celebrity. Most everyone agreed, Television personality Art Linkletter was the man they wanted. Now the question, "How could I get him?" We don't have any extra money to offer for his services.
The dream cup is another of Roy's favorite cups. He often used it to open his success seminars. Roy would recite the poem and then explain they they were going to spend some time talking about their dreams and how to make those dreams reality. This poem encompasses what he believes is an important philosophy. Read it lin-by line you will absorb its meaning.
Roy usually works on projects for days. He likes that fact that projects have ends and then he can find a new one. When he's in between projects, he will use the Dream cup to keep him focused on finding his new project.
Roy and Matt opened a Deli-Hofbrau in Bakersfield they named the "Nooner." There slogan was, "Have a Nooner, You'll be delighted!" They found it difficult to run with absentee ownership so they sold it.
Matt and Roy also started a coupon book company they called "Free-For-All." They put the Free-for-all booklet together in Riverside. That meant Roy contacted all of the business owners and sold them
Matt came to Riverside and helped run the phone room. Jean was in charge of delivering the books and collecting the money. While they did profit in that business, the people they hired in the phone room were difficult to manage. They had trouble getting them to show up for work. There was a lot of employee turnover. They choose not to create a second book.
Roy once built a pair of skates out of an old pair of ski boots that he wore on Red & Black day at West HS.
They had fun pulling each other through Liberty Park behind a car. They would dress with 2 or 3 sweat shirts as padding to keep them from getting skinned up. Roy hit the open door of a parked car. He fell to the ground, got back up & was off again. He never stopped long enough to see what happened to the door.
Roy even rode the skates in the canyon. He got going so fast, he passed the car.
On Sunday evening, the 30th of October 1966, one day before Halloween, Jean had gone to bed early. Roy left Jean in bed and went to Dick and Nell's house to pick up a few chairs they had let them borrow for a party at their house. After loading all the chairs and a small box of flatware into Roy's car, Jean called on Dick and Nell's house phone, (cell phones had not been invented). She was very upset and said someone was trying to break into their house. She was hiding beside the bed. Roy jumped into his car and headed for home. Dick and Nell followed in their car. Roy was home within ten minutes to find the garage door up, not the way he left it. He grabbed the box of flatware as a weapon and ran in. Jean was OK and no one else was there. Dick and Nell showed up minutes later.
They sat at Roy and Jean's kitchen table and talked about what Jean should have done to better handle this situation. From there they moved on to discuss a book Dick had just finished reading, "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote. They began playing cards as they talked about a number of brutal murders, and they drank a little booze. Roy remembers one story was about a young boy who had killed his grand-parents and stuffed their bodies into a foot locker at the end of their bed. It was the night they were supposed to set the clocks back one hour, which they forgot to do. Dick and Nell went home and they went to bed. The next morning, Roy showed up an hour early for his 8 A.M. Monday sales meeting. His office receptionist, Helen, was already at the office when he arrived and she looked like she had not slept all night. Cheri Jo was a freshman student at Riverside City College who had been going with Helen's son, Dennis and they were planning to get married. Cheri was a cute girl who had been a cheerleader at Ramona High School. While in high school, she worked at Roy's hearing aid office on occasion addressing and stuffing envelopes for his open house mailings. After discussing the matter with Helen, Roy went next door to the café and started his meeting. About half hour later, Helen came over and told them that the police had found Cheri Jo's Volkswagen parked down by Riverside City College. Shortly thereafter, they found her body. Her head had been cut almost totally off. Most everyone in the small town of Riverside was in shock.
Article from the Press-Enterprise Nov. 29, 1966 provides, "The Letter" some believed was from the Zodiac killer.
When Roy, Jean, Ron, and Jon arrived in Las Vegas, they found the Osmond Brothers were performing at Caesars Palace. Roy called and spoke to George Osmond and he invited them to the show. They had a table right in the center of the theater.
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