Continued

In 1995 while working full time as a PC tech, my first contribution to the web was a website marketing traffic signals to collectors. I bought a pile, and I literally mean a pile, of traffic signals from the city of Clayton, in St. Louis County.

It took five trips with an eighteen foot flatbed trailer to move the pile to my home. Thankfully my house was on several acres so my neighbors didn't really mind. I created one of the first e-commerce sites on the web and because I was just learning to program, the closest I could come to a shopping cart was having the form post to email so I could call the customer for the credit card number or wait for a check to arrive in the mail.

After a while I finally had a fully functioning shopping cart online with a lot of orders coming in and traffic lights going out. The business expanded into parking meters and eventually even into railroad signals. I was amazed at the market for these collectibles. The challenge was that once my inventory ran out there was no wharehouse to call for more. When they were gone, they were gone. That was actually ok with me. By the time the inventory was sold, my desire to clean, pack and ship these things had reached it's end.

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