Danny Reneau, Publisher
Posted: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:31 pm

This business of publishing newspapers can put some stress in your life. Every day you get a new opportunity to serve the public. You get the opportunity to try to satisfy advertisers, give readers something to read, find enough advertising to pay the bills and yes find answers to questions people drop on you.

 Last week I received a call from a lady in Alabama.

She said she had seen a video of a dog being thrown off the bridge over the Neches River at Evadale and she was certain that the dog was hers.

Apparently a man saw the dog being thrown off the bridge in a bag and he waded into the river to retrieve the bag because he was afraid a baby might be in the bag. Well he found a dog. Well the lady wanted me to chase the man down and get her dog.

I asked the lady, “how do you know the dog is yours?” She said she'd know her dog anywhere. A few minutes later I had to go to the high school and I ran into Deputy Dennis Allen. I told him about the story and he said he would take care of it.

He said he researched the story for a couple hours, talked to the lady and asked her how she knew the dog was hers. She told him she raised it from a pup and would know it anywhere. He saw me last night and turned the problem back over to me. If you know anything about this dog….. let me know.

Tuesday I received a call from a lady in Southeast Texas. It seems that she hires Avon sales people. Her story was that she had had some requests in Hardin County by a man to become an Avon sales representative.

She had hired someone and later found out that they had a colorful past and might even be harmful to the public. She wanted me to warn people that they should know who they were dealing with before allowing strangers or strange people to come into their homes to sell. She said that even though this person was no longer an Avon sales person he might still have Avon materials and be able to represent himself as a sales person.

Being the country bumpkin that I am I asked why any normal man would want to be an Avon Sales Representative. She replied that there were a lot of men that sold Avon. There are a lot of Avon products for men and after all it is a license to meet women.

If I ever happen to be single again, I will have to remember that. It would be a different career opportunity. It sounds better than talking to advertisers.

Hey…. I've got problems of my own besides the ones the readers submit to me. I had a little stock back in the day before I came to Silsbee. I thought I sold it all when I bought the Bee. Twenty years ago I found that some of the dividend money had been reinvested and I still had a little. So I reinvested a little in the fund as time past.

I don't follow it too close but some strange things seemed to be happening with the stock in recent months.
Tuesday I stopped at Gary Freeman's office to see if he could help me figure it out.

Gary is my Edward Jones agent and I do some business through him. He made some phone calls and found the stock had had a 4-for-1 reverse split. In other words, where I once had 3,000 shares I now had less than a thousand.

Then he discovered that the original fund I invested in had been closed and my shares had been turned over to a lost fund in the State of Nebraska. I am now in the process of looking for my money that I really did not know I had.

Gary says this happens all the time. People hold stock or bonds and put them in a safe deposit box or forget them and eventually the people who issued the stock can't get ahold of you and they just turn the money over to something like a lost money fund at the state. According to Freeman it is better to have a local agent hold the stocks and keep them under account.

Well I may not find a dog or a sexual predator but I'm gonna get my money back.