When Grandma Goepel died, I remember going with my Dad to her house on Avenue K. Among the things we were doing was going through her personal belongings.

Among the interesting things we gathered was a wooden box with a set of white dominos in it. I don't know how old the dominos were, but I had seen them before when we visited her house. We really didn't understand the game at first, but later caught on. The dominos had rounded edges on the back and I remember how they clicked on the table or floor surface when we played with them.

The absolutely most interesting thing we found (from a 12 year-old's perspective) was an old suitcase. If I remember correctly, it was in the attic storage area where we found it. The suitcase was of an average size, but not a trunk. It was basically black with brown leather accents and a brown leather handle.

Opening it up was like opening up a treasure chest. The suitcase was, literally, filled with money. There were all sizes, shapes, and colors of bank notes from Germany.

Many of the bank notes had large numbers on them, like 100,000 and 1,000,000 and higher.

Of course, they were all denominated in German Marks.

I can remember how excited I was at this find. Because we were only there for a day, there wasn't much we could do there, but my Dad brought the suitcase back with us to Cedar Grove.

I know that I must have spent hours and hours over the next several weeks going through the bank notes. One of the things that I did was count it all. As I recollect, there were over a billion German Marks in total.

Many of the notes were pieces of art in themselves with fine engravings. It appeared that they were issued by many different authorities, mostly banks I believe.

Anyway, the rub was that these notes were all printed during 1922 and 1923 during the German high inflation period. So, we weren't rich, but it was still interesting.

My grandmother must have saved all these notes from when she was a young woman and kept them for years in Germany. Then she brought them with her to the United States many years later.

I always wondered if she thought that they would one day be worth something, because they certainly weren't worth much during the days of the high inflation.

Nevertheless, it was a treasure for us.