Milt and Carole were childhood sweethearts. And as the police investigation opened, Milt and the children publicly disclosed her longstanding problems with alcohol abuse, and they put out public appeals for her to please return home, given the possibility that she might have gone on a bender. But there was still absolutely no trace of either her or her 1980 Buick Regal, anywhere. Eventually, the search was suspended, and her case became part of the Wheaton police department's missing persons files.

Then almost five years later in August 1987, while I was in Wheaton visiting my paternal grandparents, a large retaining pond next to Wheaton Fire Station No. 2 was being drained for maintenance purposes, and Carole's body was found submerged inside her car, along with her purse, her wallet and the bag of groceries she had bought that same day she had disappeared. Its location was about four blocks east of where she and her husband had lived.

(I know this area fairly well and the pond in question is rather big, just one of many in the region. When local developers first conceived of Wheaton and the surrounding area as suburban communities in the late 1960s, much of it had been wetlands and bogs. So most of these ponds are man-made, and are used for local drainage and flood control.)

Carole's death was officially ruled accidental. However, this 12-ft. deep pond was not on the direct route back to the Pappas home from Stratford Square shopping mall, where she had earlier been seen the day she had disappeared. Further, given the spot in the pond where the vehicle was found submerged, accident scene investigators determined that she was likely traveling at a fairly high rate of speed in order to have launched herself 25-30 feet through the air and landed smack dab in the middle of the water, where she and her car quickly sank.

Yet even though this was a busy suburban community, how strange that nobody in the immediate vicinity had seen Carole at all, driving what must have been like a bat out of hell, nor did anyone hear her speeding car as it roared by in an apparent bee line toward that pond. And none of the firemen who were in the station right next door to the pond heard the resultant loud splash as she hit the water.

There was no reason to suspect anyone of Carole's murder, because the autopsy confirmed the cause of death as drowning and her body otherwise showed no sign of violence or trauma. But during the initial 1982 investigation into her disappearance, the grocery clerk at the store where Carole had gone shopping told police that she appeared disoriented to him on the morning of her disappearance, and had also smelled of alcohol. Her hairdresser and a clerk at the mall's Marshall Fields store also said the same thing to the authorities. So the logical questions beg.

Had Carole Pappas -- who was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous -- fallen off the wagon once again, as she had done several times before? And if inebriated, did she somehow mistake the short cul-de-sac next to the pond for her own street, and perhaps gotten her foot entangled with the Buick's accelerator in a panic when she belatedly realized her error?

Also, Milt Pappas told police at the time of his wife's disappearance that she had recently become depressed in the immediate aftermath of their son's marriage a couple of weeks earlier. But was she really so down on life, to the point that she impetuously put pedal to the metal, drove into that retaining pond on purpose, and perhaps committed suicide?

Carole Pappas, who was only 42 at the time of her death, took the answers to all those questions with her to her watery grave. It was a very odd case, and just a huge tragedy for the entire Pappas family.

"The soonest that a new $20 note will be issued is 2030," the source said, citing a lengthy process convened by the Advanced Counterfeit Deterrence steering committee, which includes representatives from the U.S. Secret Service, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve.

That process isn't likely to be sped up by the Federal Reserve, which issues the currency, given the work that goes into designing secure technology to thwart counterfeiters.

"The blue security ribbon on the $100 note took over 15 years to develop," the source said. "This level of technology is why our counterfeiting remains at less than .01% of currency in circulation. We should not expedite the issuance of any currency for political purposes."

Future Treasury Secretaries -- of which there will be several -- could reverse or alter the decision regarding the $20, making Lew's announcement far less of a clear-cut victory for the movement pushing to place a woman on American currency.

I'm very relieved about the redesigns in general, taking it as a sign we are safe from total servitude to our banking overlords for at least a little while longer.

It is what they think he knows.