Out Of Poverty: Getting Ahead

How Money Used To Be Made

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Golf . . . in the dessert?

My grandfather prided himself on making an honest fortune. He grew up dirt poor in the hills of Virginia during the Great Depression. He got married young. My mother came along soon thereafter.

The best job he could get as a young man was working as an electrician at a rayon plant, which he described as a sweatshop. The sulfur and ammonia fumes permanently damaged his eyesight and lungs. He worked there for exactly five years and nine days.

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He was a multi-millionaire by the time he retired in the 80s. He said he could have been far richer had he been a crook, like other people he knew in the real estate game. . . . But he wanted to prove to himself and others that a person could succeed in this country without cheating.

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When the War started, he joined the Merchant Marines and worked as a Chief Engineer for the better part of a decade. His best story from this period . . .

Once, when they were carrying supplies across the Atlantic for D-Day, he was on deck taking in the cool breeze and admiring the handsome convoy of battle ships that surrounded his cargo vessel. Then he went below — which meant descending a maze of stairs and ladders — to get back to work in the engine room. He heard a distant explosion and felt a shudder. All hands on deck! By the time he got there, a few minutes later, one of the battle ships was gone. Vanished! Sunk by a German submarine. No survivors.

When my mom was in high school, they moved from the hills of Virginia to the coast, where work at the shipyard was plentiful. They bought their first house, thus matriculating from poverty to Middle-class. This was the 1950s, a time when America favored its Middle-class. Yet my grandfather was not content with this status.

He found an opportunity to make some real money by working with one of the big American contractors that built the oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia. Most people today don’t realize that the reason Saudi Arabia became a wealthy nation is because Americans industrialized their one big resource.

Without consulting his family, my grandfather signed a two-year contract to live and work in one of the most desolate parts of the world. My grandmother almost left him. But for him, the decision was easy — a chance to really get ahead, to move into affluence.[/su_column]

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My mom was off at college. So, my grandfather and grandmother moved to an American compound in a remote part of the Saudi desert. Nothing but sand. Even the golf course — built to accommodate the Americans — was all sand. The fairways and greens were set with oil.

To this day, booze is illegal in Saudi Arabia; and that was (and still is) unthinkable to the American working class. So my grandfather had one of his brothers send him a beer-making kit.

Golf in the desert, home-made beer, vacations to beautiful Beirut (the Miami Beach of the Middle East), and a sheik offering to buy my mom while she was visiting during summer break from college — these were the highlights from this period.

$20,000 in 1959. That’s how much my grandfather had in the bank when they moved back to the states. $158,893.43 in today’s money. He took that nest-egg and built a real estate and construction business that flourished in the 1960s and 70s. He was a multi-millionaire by the time he retired in the 80s. He said he could have been far richer had he been a crook, like other people he knew in the real estate game. He could have moved above the Upper-Middle-class position into permanent wealth. But he wanted to prove to himself and others that a person could succeed in this country without cheating.

I was born and raised in this period. By the time I came of age, we were no longer Middle-class. We were Upper-Middle-class.

We joined a country club. My grandfather paid for me to take golf and tennis lessons, and eventually sent me to college.

Once when I was around five or six, he took me to my first all-you-can-eat buffet at the club. There was, then, no greater symbol of American affluence than the all-you-can-eat buffet.

When I finished my dessert, my grandfather asked me if I wanted another. My eyes grew big: “Really!?”

“You can have as many as you like,” he said. “It won’t cost me another cent.” I didn’t understand.

He pointed to the entrance. “Everyone who passes through those doors pays the same price to eat as much as they want. As much steak. As much lobster. As much salad. And as much dessert. Whether you eat one or a hundred of each, it’s the same price.”

I understood. I came back with not one, but two more desserts.
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