In the mid-90's, I was involved in real estate on Cape Cod. Myself and 3 other business partners decided to buy a property with a house on it. It had enough land that went with the house (or so we thought) to subdivide the property, selling the house on one lot, and spinning-off a separate building parcel. Just as we were about to start the subdivision, after we purchased the property, we got a call from our attorney. Turned out the lot wasn't big enough for a subdivision, and that it was short 3,000 square feet.Only one property abbutted the site, so one of my partners and I visited him to ask if we could purchase 3,000 square feet of his land for $10,000. We met him in person to make the proposal. He was a nice guy (as much as I could tell from one meeting).
We made the offer through the realtor we bought the property from. She asked us what his name was (the guy who we wanted to buy the land from), and we told her his name was Clark Gesner. There was a pause and she said: "Clark Gesner??" We said "yes". She said: "Don't you know who that is?" "No, we replied". She said "He's a playwright. He wrote the play 'You're a Good Man Charlie Brown'". We never met with Mister Gesner after that, but eventually we did do the subdivision and made a somewhat modest profit. Mr. Gesner really saved our butts that year, there's no way we could have done it without him.
On a side-note, one of the prospective buyers who came to look at the place was the guy who invented Kibbles-And-Bits.
