Definition from The Macquarie Concise Dictionary (the official Australian Dictionary): ug boot: boot from Australia lined with 100% merino sheepskin. Also known as ugh, or ugg boot.

The Story of Ug Boots

Ug Boots: the original. This sheepskin boot, made in Australia, is not branded as Ug, (also refered to in Australian dictionaries as “Ugg” and “Ugh”) but is a generic word. “Ug” is Aussie slang for “ugly”. However, the beauty of this boot lies in its comfort, not its appearance. Australian Merino sheepskin is very soft and gives the boot a fit that is snug and warm, yet it is sturdy enough to be worn in the rugged outdoors With its comfortable fleece lining, the boot can surprisingly be worn year round. Acting as an insulating material similar to goose down, the plush fleece traps body heat to keep your feet warm. However, the natural-fiber fleece wicks perspiration away from your feet in the summer heat, keeping them cool and dry.

Growing Up in Ugs

Several small manufacturers were producing Sheepskin Boots by the 1970’s in Australia’s largest west coast city, Perth. With a climate similar to that of Southern California, Perth is also a mecca for “surfies”, as the Aussies call surfers, boasting well-known surfing sites at nearby Margaret River. The local Aussie surfing community was the first to adopt Ug Boots as their favorite footwear, and Ugs came to symbolize the surfie lifestyle in Australia.

The Spread of Ug Fever

Ugs soon spread from Western Australian beaches to Brisbane and down to Sydney on the East Coast, where surfers could be seen wearing them. I didn’t take long before some surfers, who went from riding waves in the summer to shushing down ski slopes in the winter, to discover that their Ugs were as suitable in the Snowy Mountains ski resorts as they were on the sand at Bondi Beach in Sydney. When Aussie surfers traveled the world in their quest for the perfect wave, they were the first to introduce the comforts of Ug Boots to their counterparts in Southern California. Surfers living in Los Angeles quickly embraced the fashion and could depend on their Aussie mates to send them Ugs from “down under”.

The Essentials of Ugs

The “secret” of Ugs is out, today. The versatile Ug Boots are fashionable from the beaches of San Diego to those of Santa Cruz, and you will see them in ski resorts from Lake Tahoe to Vail, Colorado. These boots are now imported regularly by several companies, so you no longer need an Aussie “mate” to send them to you. If you’re look to purchase the real deal, be cautious and know what to look for, for there are a number of importers who sell knock-offs, and whether they call them Ugg, Ug, or Ugh, the quality falls short of the genuine article. To get genuine Ug Boots that are constructed with the features that made them so sought after, be sure that… They are constructed with 100% Merino Sheepskin from Australia. You can then be confident that your boots are made from the highest quality sheepskin available.

Please Note…

Be cautious of cheap knock-offs… several commercially available boots are constructed using cow suede, and cut sheepskin fleece is sewn onto the inside. It would be unwise to chance purchasing these boots… cow suede doesn’t “breathe” as does 100% sheepskin, and your boots will soon become sweaty and smelly. As cleverly as these boots are made to look like the genuine article, they come up short in comparison to comfort and quality of authentic Ugg boots.

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It is fairly obvious from the ad above that adjectives, as a weapon had not been discovered yet.  Instead of answering the bully boy tactics with an array of withering words, as the metrosexual of today would be expected to do by his erstwhile dance partner, the secret here was to deal with the bully by – well, becoming one.  There is only one language that these types understand and that is the language they speak themselves – or so proclaims the advert.  Jack goes from being abandoned by his date to winning her back – and has a number of eager females to take her place should he so choose, simply by joining up to the Charles Atlas program and waiting until a little ‘later’ when he has the ability to beat the bully at his own game.

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If the beat the bully tactic didn’t work then selling bodybuilding as fun was possibly the answer.  The age old before and after shots were de rigueur already – eve though the before shot does picture Ken Grimm (the photo model with the huge ears, sorry muscles) at about the age of ten.  From skinny-shrimp to He-Man this advert promises that for a dollar (not a great amount of money in those days, but enough) he can add inches to his chest – and if the ‘red-blooded’ guarantee is anything to go by, elsewhere too.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out, however, that with a ‘a big book of photos of strong men’ free with the plan, then it may not have been an altogether heterosexual audience at which this advert was aimed. 

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Joe Weider, the trainer of champions is still used today to sell all sorts of bodybuilding paraphernalia and his attempts to get the nation fit (and make a living) have been going on for decades.  Here, the promise is that a skinny young man can look like his muscle-bound buddy in, again no time frame given but that mysterious ‘later’.  The big blond friend is here called Rocky – so perhaps it happened in ‘just seven days’ as the song in the film declared.  As unsophisticated as these adverts seem today, they worked for many decades.

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It gets better.  Poor old Harry, in the face of an armed robbery he turns tail and runs – even leaving his girl-friend behind in his rush to get to safety.  It would, perhaps, be the wrong advice to give today but way back then a little more muscle bulk had the ability to stop bullets in their tracks.  Charles Atlas, who started his company in 1929 was, despite the hyperbole of the advertisements, committed to wiping out the bullying culture of that era – having been bullied himself as a teenager. 

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The muscle ad was already virtually an art form when the likes of the Arnold got involved.  Pre-Governator, he was always willing to use himself as a poster boy for the bodybuilding movement and make a little money too.  By the seventies, of course, the people at which the ads were aimed were becoming a little more sophisticated in their media savviness and this advert makes no preposterous promises.  However, there is still the subliminal message that more muscles equals more general popularity and – no doubt – more contact with the opposite sex.

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This unintentionally funny (at least in terms of the title) ad from Popular Mechanic again reinforces the notion that in order to beat the bully, you have to, well, beat the bully.  Once more a fawning woman admires the new He-Man after he settles an old score and so wins her heart back.  The guarantee that he can get powerful muscles is only a ‘can’ and no doubt this canny wording was used to fend off a number of complaints from people who had not got the physique they desired at the point of the ever mysterious ‘later’.

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Fame instead of shame – a neat little poetic device to get the till ringing.  The beach featured strongly in these advertisements.  Here we finally get to the crux of these adverts and the main feature by which they are remembered.  Yes, it is the classic ‘sand in the face’ motif, together (usually) with the withering put downs of a girl friend who is possibly only with you for your money.  After a few sessions in the bedroom (ahem) then the victim is finally ready to be the bully.  Hurrah!

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The slogan which would launch a thousand parodies – ‘I can make you a new man too’.

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It wasn’t just the Americans who bought in to this sort of advertising. Here is a thoroughly British take on the idea of gaining muscle to beat the bullies – of course the odd shrimp to the boys at the baths may have had nothing to do with his musculature at all… Who can say?  Of course, the British did not have nipples until after 1960, a dark secret that is still kept to this day and only brought to light inadvertantly in advertisments such as this.

Charles Ponzi arrived in America with two dollars and fifty cents in his pocket, having gambled away the rest of his life savings playing cards during the boat trip. In Boston, he took a job at a restaurant, initially as a dishwasher and then, after he had learned to speak English, as a waiter. He was fired after being caught short-changing customers.

In 1907, Ponzi moved to Montreal, Canada, and took a job at a bank that catered to other Italian immigrants. Starting out as an assistant teller, he worked his way up to bank manager. In that position, he discovered that the bank was in serious financial trouble. Its owner promised high interest rates on savings accounts, but was funding the interest payments with money from new accounts. The bank’s owner packed up and fled to Mexico, taking a portion of the bank’s money with him.

Of course, the bank folded leaving Ponzi without a pay check. For some reason, he went to the office of one of the bank’s depositors. When he found it empty, it dawned on Ponzi that he could still get a slice of the pie. Locating the man’s checks, he simply wrote one to himself. It was not a particularly smart move, and Ponzi wound up doing 3 years in a prison near Montreal.

When once again he became a free man, his emancipation would not last long. He became involved in a scheme to smuggle illegal Italian immigrants into the United States, was caught, arrested, and sentenced to two years in an Atlanta prison.

Ponzi Returns to Boston, and Stumbles on to the Con that Would Immortalize Him

Ponzi took a wife in Boston, but was still searching for a scheme that would make him rich. He hit on the idea of publishing a list of business advertisements, similar to the Yellow Pages. To his chagrin, not enough businesses were interested to make the venture profitable. Then he received a mail inquiry about the listing from a company in Spain. The letter did not pique his interest, but what was enclosed with it did. This was an international reply coupon (IRC), something he had never seen before.

An IRC was commonly included as a courtesy in international mail to which a reply was anticipated; it was redeemable at a post office for enough stamps to facilitate return correspondence. IRCs are still available today, but are used far less often. It was now 1919, and Ponzi knew that in the wake of World War I many European nations were experiencing rampant inflation, and this meant that IRCs issued by those nations were more valuable in the US. Using borrowed money, Ponzi had some of his Italian relatives purchase IRCs and send them to him.

He then started a business he called the Securities Exchange Company whose stated purpose was to engage in arbitrage. Arbitrage is the purchase of a commodity in one part of the world and the sale of it in a location where it has a greater value. This kind of business has never been illegal.

Yet when Ponzi tried to redeem the coupons for cash, he soon found this a difficult thing to do. It did not take him long to realize that the overhead for his venture would eat up the profits. Ponzi would not be deterred, though, so he started to engage in, well, a Ponzi scheme.

Ponzi Builds a Pyramid Khufu Would Have been Proud Of

Charles Ponzi did not invent the con that bears his name. Charles Dickens described such a scheme in his novel Little Dorrit published in 1857, decades before Ponzi was born. Brooklyn bookkeeper William F. Miller made a million dollars using a similar con back in 1899. It is doubtful that Ponzi read Dickens, but he may well have been inspired either by Williams or the owner of the bank he managed in Montreal. Whatever the case, Ponzi brashly announced that investors in his arbitrage plan would earn a 50% profit within 45 days, or 100% within 90 days. Nothing on Wall Street could match those numbers, so investors began lining up at Ponzi’s School Street office to get in on the deal.

The investors received the promised returns. What they did not know at the time was that the return on their investments was not funded by an IRC arbitrage, but by new investors, which is the identifying characteristic of the Ponzi, or pyramid, scheme. Ponzi became known as a financial wizard, the Warren Buffet of his time. It was not until later that the fact emerged that Ponzi had purchased only $30 of the international reply coupons. While the average investment was about $350 dollars, some people were mortgaging their homes to generate money to invest with the School Street wizard. Ponzi’s business snowballed and between February and July of 1920 he made millions.

The word on the street was that such returns were ’impossible,’ but when investors got nervous Ponzi paid them off. After all, he was not only raking in cash from new investors but prior clients were re-investing their gains.

Then a Boston financial writer claimed Ponzi could not legally generate such returns. Ponzi sued the columnist for libel and won a verdict of $50,000. This was prior to the US Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times Co v Sullivan, 376 US 254 (1964) which drastically increased a plaintiff’s burden of proof in defamation cases against the press.

On July 24, 1920, a Boston Post writer authored a piece favorable to Ponzi, and this increased the number of his investors. It is estimated that at this juncture he was taking in about a quarter of a million dollars a day. He was spending it, too, on a house with air conditioning (rare in those days) and a heated swimming pool (not all that common today).

Ponzi’s scheme was about to come unglued. One of the reasons Bernard Madoff was able to keep his con going for so long is that he never explained how he was making his money. Ponzi had a cover story, and that would lead to his undoing.

Despite the Boston Post’s favorable piece on Ponzi, its publisher and city editor were skeptical. They began running a series of articles that asked some tough questions about the Securities Exchange Company. They also asked Clarence Barron, whose financial magazine bears his name, to look into Ponzi’s company. Barron found out that Ponzi was not investing in his own company, a big red flag. Barron also noted that to cover his investments, 160 million postal reply coupons would have to be in circulation, but that only 27,000 actually were. Following hard on the heels of Barron’s report, the US Postal Service added that no large transfers of IRCs between countries had taken place.

This time, instead of retaining a lawyer. Ponzi hired a publicist, one William McMasters. Yet in a matter of weeks, McMasters threw Ponzi under the trolley. Though Ponzi told the publicist about the coupon arbitrage, McMasters found only a few of them at Ponzi’s School street office. He found no accounting system, but he did discover some incriminating documents. McMasters would later describe his client as a “financial idiot” who did not seem able to add.

McMasters sold his story and the documents to the Boston Post for $5,000. In his piece he claimed that Ponzi and his SEC were insolvent.

Ponzi wanted to continue doing business but the press pieces had exposed him as a charlatan. His office was raided, and he was soon facing indictments from both the federal government and the state of Massachusetts. His scheme had been short-lived, from December of 1919 to August, 1920, but during that time he had duped thousands of investors out of millions. Ponzi admitted to taking in $10 million, but some thought it may have been 15 or more.

On August 12, 1920, Ponzi was charged by the feds with 86 counts of mail fraud and was eventually sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary. Following his release he was prosecuted by the state on 32 counts of larceny and received a 7-9 year sentence. Compared to the sentence Bernard Madoff received, which would take two lifetimes to work off, the Italian con man got off easy.

A common aphorism on gullibility goes: ‘If you believe that, I’ve got some swamp land in Florida I’ll sell you.’ After being released from the state pen, Charles Ponzi did just that. He started a real estate company in Florida that sold small parcels of land as investment properties, sight unseen, promising investors a 20% return in 60 days. All of the parcels were swampy and some completely covered with water. In 1926 he was charged by the state of Florida with securities fraud and spent one year in prison.

Charles Ponzi was deported and took a job in the finance section of Benito Mussolini’s government. What happened next is the subject of conflicting stories. Some claim Ponzi fled to Brazil, taking part of the Italian treasury with him. Others say Ponzi was sent there to do a job, but either way he wound up running the Italian commercial airline in Rio.

However, when World War II began Brazil sided with the allies and closed down the Italian airline business. Ponzi stayed in Brazil, occasionally taking a job as a translator, but never again having even a glimpse of the kind of wealth he enjoyed during the spring and early summer of 1920. He became infirm and passed away in the charity ward of a Rio hospital in 1949; his sole legacy was the application of his name to a confidence scheme.

As the Bernard Madoff scandal demonstrates, every generation has men or women who want to get wealthy by ripping other people off. It is wise to remember Charles Ponzi’s ultimate lesson: if something seems too good to be true then it most likely is.