Dave Walker | Jim Chayka | Adam Roszkiewicz | Lisa Kalke | Joe Kenny | Dave Zimmerman | back

Dave Zimmerman ran away from home at the age of 7 in a boat he fashioned from an old whiskey barrel. From a broom stick mast held up by some old bailing wire he hung a his leather belt as a sail and made his way down to the Mississippi towards New Orleans. Dazed by the fumes wafting from the whisky-soaked barrel wood as it baked in the southern sun, he missed New Orleans altogether and soon found himself afloat in the Gulf of Mexico with a hurricane baring down. As the winds whipped and the sea began to boil, he lashed himself to his makeshift craft by wrapping the belt around his shoulders and gripping the bailing wires for his life only to have them ripped from his grasp by the fickle wind every few moments. Before long a spotlight appeared out of the fog and a dinghy carrying three men plucked him from his watery tortue. From their off-shore drilling platform, they had heard the vibrations of the wires each time they were wrenched from his hands and were lured by the sound. Once back on the platform, they begged him to repeat the sound and he carefully began to replicate it by pulling on the wires fixed between the broom handle and the barrel. They knew they had something valuable and being business men, suggested that they would give him half of their long dormant drilling operation if he would give them half of what he made from this irresistible sound. To this day, half of every dollar put in a tip jar at a Folkslayer's show goes to those three men. Oh yeah, that night, the rig struck oil and at age 8, the youngest oil tycoon in history appeared on the cover of Fortune.