BATON ROUGE, LA – Local resident Daryl Kleinpeter told his wife Friday that she and his family would be in a very different financial position today had he been the correct caller during a WFMF giveaway in 1985.
“I was caller eight,” said Kleinpeter, staring across his kitchen like a man describing land his grandfather should have bought. “They wanted nine. People don’t understand how close we were.”
The prize package, which he remembers as two concert tickets, a station T-shirt, and dinner for two, remains the foundation of several hypothetical retirement scenarios.
Kleinpeter maintains he had the speed, preparation, and one of those new push-button telephones, all the tools necessary to change his family’s trajectory. However, his mother picked up the phone to ask him if he needed anything from the store derailing his whole effort.
“That’s when the everything fell apart,” he said.
His children have repeatedly suggested that he could have simply saved money over the following three decades.
Kleinpeter dismissed that strategy as unrealistic, noting that savings accounts rarely include backstage passes to Van Halen.
