About

Solid Business Sense

Grassroots power can change the world.

I want to help enable it by getting more people online and encouraging community involvement. I believe everyone should learn to use search engines and have a blog, whether they are in business or not, to give them a view of the world they cannot see now, and a chance to hear and be heard online.

Hosted WordPress Shop is a merchant on this road, peddling our websites and encouraging ordinary people to organize. We are in business to help your business succeed. We offer websites that anyone can use.

Let me share a story with you of my father, and his faith in people.

In the early 1950′s, a very young black man walked into a bank in downtown St. Louis, Missouri to get a loan. He was carrying an old acoustic guitar his late uncle left him. He had learned to play and wanted to buy an electric guitar and amp and start a band. The guitar was his collateral.

The bank was Mound City Trust Company, and the banker was my father, Oliver Troxler, head of the loan department. He had been sizing up this young man as he spoke. When he finished telling his story, Ollie Troxler looked him in the eye and said, “The bank cannot accept a guitar as collateral for a loan … but I believe you are an honest young man and will repay the loan. So I am going to lend you the funds myself. I’ll charge you the same interest the bank charges. But I want you in that chair every Friday to make your payment. ”

The young black man was Chuck Berry. He took the funds and bought his white Gibson and an amp. Then he went to Chicago and found Muddy Waters and asked him who to record with. Muddy sent him to his studio, Chess Records. If you’ve seen the movie “Cadillac Records”, you should, just for Chuck’s audition scene with Leonard Chess. Chuck Berry never forgot my father’s kindness to him, and started a weekly visit that lasted thirty years.

Dedicated people with vision, like Chuck Berry, willing to fearlessly take on great odds, can achieve great things and change history. Ollie Troxler had no idea when he made a personal loan to a young man that he would go out and change the world with his guitar, but that’s what happened. To a community banker it was the only fair thing to do. Oliver Troxler spent 50 years at Mound City Trust Company helping his community.

Chuck never knew it, but Ollie was continuing his father’s legacy of community support. His father had owned a hardware store and Ollie hated working there as a child. When he graduated high school and got his first job as a clerk at Mound City Trust Company, he was reaching beyond his blue-collar legacy. So when he met Chuck, he saw another young man reaching for more and “passed forward” the break that was given to him by the bank when he was young.

There were many others who my father helped over the 50 years he worked in that bank. The spirit with which Oliver Troxler offered assistance to those who sought him out is alive in me, and in Hosted WordPress Shop.

Hosted WordPress Shop is built on this faith in grassroots power and ordinary people helping one another. Yes, we are in business to make money, but ultimately its not the money that makes us rich. It is our connectedness and sense of responsibility for one another that enriches our lives.

I am now married to a blues musician who loves to tell this story. He tells his fellow musicians, “my wife’s father financed Rock N Roll”, and in a way I guess he did.

– Mary Troxler Luketich

Owner