Arthur F. Carmazzi as a Young Entrepreneur

An Explosive Entrepreneur
While as a teenager Arthur Carmazzi had major problems with confidence and girls, making money came as easily as falling off a log.

“I bought my first car with bubble gum money –the real bubble gum car” says Carmazzi who explains he made US $2500 in his last six months of Junior High school selling bubble gum.

“At the time there was this new bubble gum on the market – “Bubble Yum”. The kids couldn’t get enough of it, but it was not sold at school. Nothing was. The kids could only eat at the cafeteria, no snacks – only healthy food – if you can call cafeteria food healthy.

“To look the part of a businessman I picked up a briefcase at a garage sale and half of that was filled with the usual student books, papers and pens; the other half was my first business – bubblegum.

“I’d sell a half a briefcase of bubble gum a day. I was buying it at nine cents a pack and selling it at 35 cents a pack. I even ran credit where kids could go on the debtors list and take their gum today and pay 50 cents for the privilege. It was a great little business that bought me my first car,” says Carmazzi, acknowledging that bubble gum was banned at his school at the time so he innocently found himself dealing in contraband.

He adds that making money was something he could not help doing, “I was entrepreneurial from the very beginning. I loved working and finding niche markets that gave people what they wanted and gave me pretty good pocket money at the same time. Making money was my hobby,” Carmazzi says.

But his bubble gum business paled into insignificance when he graduated and started at university. Like many young men in their late teens, Carmazzi had a passion for explosives – anything that went bang was ripe for exploration.

“So I started making and selling bombs; you could call them fireworks if you want to be polite, but they were still bombs and as undergraduates we had a ball blowing things up,” says Carmazzi.

He stresses these bombs were small with more bark than bite, but packing enough punch to charge up people’s reactions.

“I remember one frozen Montana night – we were in our dorm and the guys from across the way were playing this song, Dead Puppies VERY LOUD. It must have been about one am and we were all really sick of the sound of this thing, played repetitively over and over again.

“At the time you could still get hold of a lot of good bomb making materials and I had some magnesium powder. Now this stuff does not explode by itself, but attached to a smaller bomb it erupts in a flash of fiery sound that lights up the world as the magnesium blazes the oxygen around it.

“The guys and I thought we’d silence the Dead Puppy song once and for all. We opened the window of our 14 th floor dorm and threw a blast of magnesium bomb out the window. The explosion and fire storm looked like the Battle of Britain all over again.

“All the fire alarms went off and we were all herded out into the dorm grounds – freezing our asses off at 2 am. Needless to say that little event was one of the best ads I ever had in selling fireworks, but it also killed the grades as I was suspended for ‘being a danger to other students’, well, it was still a lot of fun!”

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