A One-Dollar Bill Leads to Almost $20,000 for Pancreatic Cancer Research
A one-dollar bill started it all. In 2011, John and Andrea Pitera had just opened Mojo’s on the Harbor. Brooke Williams, their very first customer, paid in cash and signed their first dollar for good luck. He had no idea that he was starting a trend that would lead to thousands of dollars for cancer research.
John and Andrea Pitera, the previous owners of Mojo’s on the Harbor, a popular seafood restaurant on Bald Head Island, North Carolina, spent the last afternoon of their business taking down thousands of dollar bills, which decorated the walls of the restaurant for almost a decade.
“It was a wonderful afternoon,” says John Pitera, who sold the restaurant in October 2019. “We had 25 friends who came to the bar and helped us take the bills down, count them, put them in piles of hundreds to be ready for the bank, and clean up all the tacks and pins that were all over the place.”
The majority of the money was in one-dollar bills, but there were some hundred-dollar bills and fifty-dollar bills. The bills added up to $19,461. Pitera did not plan to cash in the dollar bills. He and his wife, Andrea, decided to donate them to the Duke University School of Medicine to support pancreatic cancer research in honor of their good friend, Brooke Williams of Bald Head Island, who died from the disease in 2012.
