Chapter 1: Life Before the Day

Randi was asking for stories about people who suddenly became wealthy. Examples were like some guy in the mid-West who buys a Lotto ticket that wins a multi-hundred-million-dollar prize. That is NOT my story.

Obviously, I’m changing my name, but I’ll go by Kevin Walker for purposes of this tale. Changing my name isn’t that odd to me; I have several passports in different names. They are all legal and authentic. With the super-wealthy, even governments will cooperate with providing you with legitimate ‘false’ identities for your protection.

In my case, my family was already damn well off.

My father, James Walker, was a cosmetic dentist, very skilled and highly sought out. Suffice it to say, he could charge a great deal for his services in our wealthy East Coast community.

My mother, Angela Walker, had a degree in accounting with a minor in math. She took calculus as an easy ‘A’ class for god’s sake! She had a CPA (not used for auditing for many years) and was the Chief Financial Officer for a large firm. Not Apple or Alphabet large, but large. And mostly anonymous itself. If it was a public company, it would make the Fortune 500 list.

Dad was about 6 feet tall and at the time of our metamorphosis, his hair was salt and pepper (more pepper than salt). He is slim and retains his good looks. Not supermodel handsome, but good enough that I’m sure he was fending off women his whole adult life.

Mom, like Dad, is still a fine-looking woman for her age, lean and athletic looking, yet with a ready smile and an outgoing personality that almost everyone finds attractive. I’m sure that she too, like Dad, has had to fend off the periodic optimistic predator.

Having described them, I will merely say that they do not play a huge part in the story, other than the infrequent pieces of advice or in one case, a very important bit of information that I will impart anon.

I was an only child; my parents often indicated that they would have been happy to have more children, but alas, that was not to be. It was suggested that my father had an illness that left him infertile; I only understood these passing comments after I was an adult.

As you might have guessed, we lived in an area rife with other upper-middle to lower-rich class people. Doctors, lawyers, successful businessmen, and so on.

Like most of the other children in the neighborhood, I attended private school. There were several private schools in our part of the city, as well as a number of religious schools. My school was a ‘preparatory’ schools that focused on academics to ensure that the scions of the well-off families would be admitted into the top schools of their choice. It was one of the small prestigious colleges that I attended, and I think they did well by me.

An aside to explain a little bit of my day-to-day life.

As a family we would take vacations during the Winter and Spring breaks. During the Winter breaks we would end up either in the mountains skiing, or on some warm beach where we would leave the cold weather behind. During Spring break, we would fly off to London, Paris, Rome, or some other destination that would be educational for me (museums, sights and just the introduction to other cultures) and pleasurable for my parents.

But what I did during my summers is the real key to my current wealth. I spent every summer from the time that I was eleven years old with my Uncle Jack.

My Uncle Jack was, simply put, a character. At least that was my first impression.

He was as tall as my dad, his brother, but he wore a bushy beard and was most often dress in old jeans and wool plaid shirts. If it was cold, he had an old sheepskin jacket that was his go to coat.