GEOGRAPHICS INC. — A STRANGE BEGINNING

“I told my dad that we were out of business,” Hagan recalls. “He responded, ‘That’s got to be a record. I never heard of anyone going out of business in one day.’ ”

There was just a slight mis-understanding. It seems U.S. government intelligence was a little behind (go figure); the FBI was after the former owner of the company before it became Geographics. Hagan had recently purchased the foundering company’s assets from bankruptcy court for a cool $32,000, of which he had plunked down $8,000 in cash.