Chapter Eight
Wallace Elijah Welker was born in 1932 in the small town of Akronwood forty-two miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There was nothing particularly remarkable about this town and Wallace's birth did little to change that fact. He went to elementary school, high school, and work without ever traveling farther than twenty miles from his house. At the age of twenty-two, he married his high school sweetheart who was seventeen. She was his high school sweetheart not because they had met while they were both in high school, but because he had met her while she was in high school and she was sweet. The marriage was typical for the small town in which they lived, in that it was filled with regrets, poor decisions, and three children. Importantly for the purposes of our story, the middle child was a boy who was named Wallace Elijah Welker Jr., aka Junior.
Junior attended the same elementary school and high school his father had and seemed headed down a similar life path when fortune smiled upon him with the untimely death of his mother. It was not the death that was fortuitous. That was just sad. No, what changed the path of Junior’s life was the money that came from her death. In a final kick in the nuts of her high school sweetheart, whom she had grown to affectionately refer to as “that sick stalker jerk who robbed me of my best years,” Junior’s mother left to her three children five hundred acres of farmland that her parents had given her on the stipulation that the title never be given to “that loser husband, whom we despise.”
Junior's brother and sister sold their shares of the land immediately and did with the few thousand dollars what most people in small towns forty-two miles north of Pittsburgh do when they come into extra money--they got the hell out of there. Junior was not the most ambitious of men and decided to do nothing, because he liked Akronwood just fine and eventually he was going to finish that certification to become an electrician and he’d be making plenty of money then. Besides, he lived by himself and the trailer had plenty of room. He didn’t give the land another thought until a letter arrived via FedEx, which was not how his mail usually arrived. He was intrigued (my word, not his).
The letter was from a law firm in Pittsburgh and in three extremely well-written and persuasive paragraphs it made very clear that a client of theirs was interested in purchasing Junior's land. The reason that the law firm’s client was so interested in Junior’s land was because it was sitting on top of a natural gas deposit that the client would like to exploit to the financial benefit of everyone involved, especially Junior.
In short order, Wallace Elijah Welker, Jr. became the wealthiest man in Akronwood. He was also super bored, as his ambitions had not changed and the incentive to work had now been eliminated. Searching for a distraction, he ventured one day the forty-two miles into Pittsburgh and found some ambition in the form of Sarah Parker King, the youngest daughter of a Congressman. She was similarly bored and a little pissed off at her father for making her take the job at Target to “get some perspective.” It was love at first sight when Junior rolled into the store’s parking lot in his custom Dodge Dart painted the orange and blue of his high school colors with a Chinese symbol on the hood that he thought meant “God is good,” but actually translated as “good God, really?”
They were married three months later, moved to Pittsburgh full-time, and in short order welcomed none other than Wallace Elijah Welker, III into the world. Things were good. Despite the odds and the conflicting motives that thrust them together in that fateful parking lot, Junior and Sarah actually grew to love each other. Junior didn’t need to, but he finished getting his electrician certification and spent his free time fixing things around the house and volunteering at the local community college. Sarah forgave her father and even agreed to volunteer on his campaigns for Congress that came around every two years. She and Junior also gave large amounts of money to those campaigns and to the local university, which was where Wallace Elijah Welker, III was when a small, but really stupid decision made three months earlier by his father changed everything.
You know those emails and phone calls that litter your in-box and voice mail system asking for your help or threatening you with jail if you don’t send the IRS a McDonald’s Gift Card or something? Well, 97% of people hit delete and don’t give it another thought. This is a story about what can happen to the other 3%.
It started as most tragedies do, with an email. And Junior immediately felt badly for his sister. They had not spoken in several months and, in fact, he had been unaware she was even traveling in Europe. That seemed unlike her, he thought. Yes, she’d left Akronwood, but leaving meant moving to another small town on the other side of the state. As far as he knew, she’d never been on an airplane, much less flown across the Atlantic Ocean. But, who would have thought he’d be a millionaire living in Pittsburgh. Strange shit happens, you know. So, when the email showed up in his in-box, he was horrified to learn that she was stuck in the airport, having been robbed of her passport and money. She was clearly upset as she had never before called him Sir Elijah Welker, but he’d said some things over the years that didn’t make a lot of sense when he thought back on them, so who was he to judge how people handled a crisis. He wired her the money she needed immediately. Then he sent the account information she needed for the bank in London to validate his identity. Then he scanned a copy of his license, so they would release the cash to her immediately rather than making her wait three days stuck alone in the airport. He felt terrible for her.
Tripp had just started his senior year of college when Congressman King came to visit him with a job offer.
“Tripp, I have bad news,” he began. “Terrible news, really. Your father is dead. Took his own life. I don’t know what to say. It was very sudden. No warning signs or anything. Sarah is distraught. She’ll be moving back in with your grandmother and me. Oh, and the money’s all gone. Fool got swindled by some Nigerian scammer and sent them everything. Unlikely they’ll ever catch the bastards. Too bad that. Water under the bridge, I suppose. Got yourself some challenges going forward I’m afraid. School’s gonna want payments you don’t have anymore. I’ll help you out, but you’re going to need to work if you want to finish this degree, which I can’t emphasize strongly enough how important that is to your future, especially now with not much of a support system except Grams and me. Not much that, I’ll even admit. Get that degree, though, and I can get you set up with a guy I know out west who just might have some interest in running for President someday. Hard to imagine honestly. Bit of an asshole, if you ask me, but maybe that’s what people want these days. Anyway, you’ve got a job after graduation, if you graduate, if you want it.”
Yeah, so let’s cut Tripp a little slack going forward.
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