HUMBOLDT PARK — One good deed led to another Monday after a Humboldt Park mother found a stash of hidden cash intentionally left in the park.
Tina Gaddy and her 10-month-old daughter were swinging in a nearby playlot when a tweet from Hidden Cash Chicago announced that the most recent free cash drop off was somewhere in the park.
Gaddy had heard about the most recent @HiddenCashChi puzzle on television, and later on WGN before she set a Twitter notification to alert her of all @HiddenCashChi tweets; “#HiddenCash drop tomorrow will def be in Humboldt Park. Look for a spinner,” the original tweet read, posted with a close-up of the cash clue.
“I sort of drove around at first, thinking, 'If we find it, we find it, and if we don’t we don’t.’ But when the tweet came out I said, ‘Ha! I know where that is.’ It was a half block away,” Gaddy said Monday.
She spotted the blue spinner set near a Humboldt Park statue within a few minutes of reading the tweet, she said. An envelope with $60 was tucked between the bricks containing a note that read, “Please take this gift and pay it forward. We can make a difference.”
So that’s what Gaddy did after talking a short walk to one of her favorite neighborhood spots, Knockbox Café, 1001 N. California Ave.
“At first, I was going to go wherever, but I figured it happened locally, so I should shop locally,” she said. “I was able to get some coffee for a guy in front of me and a guy behind me.”
“The guy in front was skeptical, but the guy behind me was all about it,” she added. Sometimes our immediate reaction when someone wants to do something nice is that they must have an ulterior motive, but this was just about paying it forward.”
Gaddy praised the person running the show at Hidden Cash Chicago, who she said was not the same person behind the popular Hidden Cash social media campaign in New York.
“They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Whoever it is, they mentioned on Twitter that they were doing several drops throughout the day,” Gaddy said.
It was a fact not lost on several @HiddenCashChi fans, several of whom tweeted their appreciation Monday, along with some suggestions in their own neighborhood where the good Samaritan might strike again.
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