Opening paragraphs...................Part the First

Debt takes its toll.
      To no one had this ever seemed clearer than to the sixty-one-year-old farmer named Oliver Coolidge who languished in Woodstock Common Jail in Windsor County, Vermont, in the spring of 1949.  Coolidge was behind bars because he owed a neighbor, Frederick Wheeler, $24.23.  He had not honored a contract because he lacked the money to honor it.  Now his debts had climbed to $29.48 because the justice of the peace had ruled that he had to carry the  costs of the creditor, $5, and a fine of 25 cents for the serving of papers.
-Amity Shlaes, from the Introduction to Coolidge