Rich or Poor?

How do I begin this?

As I wrote this book, that’s the question I kept coming back to time and time again, and draft after draft. I couldn’t decide. I wanted to introduce my dad and show you who he was and where he came from. I wanted you to know the person that he was before Alzheimer’s stole it all away. So I wrote pages and pages of where my dad grew up, bits of our family history in that area. I went into detail about his early childhood, meeting my mom, and their early marriage. But in the end, though I was very attached to that part of the book, I decided it had little to do with the story I was telling. I removed around 80 or 90 pages, and rewrote the entire first few chapters, condensing everything down. You need to understand who my dad was and where he came from, but I want to get you to the meat of the story. Hopefully, I accomplished that.

So where to begin? 

Since my story has much to do with my dad’s wealth, I decided to start with the question I often asked myself as a child.

Are we rich or poor?

Excerpt of A Life Well Stolen

Chapter One beginning…

By the time my dad’s life was stolen he had become a multi-millionaire.  His net worth at that time would have been considered a fortune to some and pocket change to others. Many people that knew Russell Byrnes said he was rich, but whether or not he was is debatable and subjective. From my point of view, for the lifestyle that he led, I would say he was well off.

When I was a kid my dad had yet to become a millionaire but he did have quite a bit more wealth than the majority of the people where we lived. I say that now, but I didn’t know that then. I don’t remember being better off than most. In fact, I thought we were poor. We lived in an old log cabin and I remember many times eating pinto beans and cornbread or creamed corn and biscuits for weeks at a time because my dad said we didn't have enough money for food. I remember my younger sisters having to wear hand-me-downs from our older sisters and me getting clothes only once a year, at the start of the school year and only because my old clothes no longer fit.  I remember making my own toys because we rarely received them. When I looked around at my friends, it seemed so many of them had so much. They had new clothes or new toys frequently. They seemed to have all the latest electronics, video games, and sports equipment.  So when people said we were rich, I had to scratch my head because but I sure didn’t see it.

But my dad did. He saw it because he was driving the cash buggy and he held the reins to his finances in a death grip. My mom, Catherine Byrnes, tried to get him to let her drive every once in a while, but my dad wouldn’t allow it.  She could suggest which direction they went, but he would do the driving. She was just there for the ride, as we all were.

I also know now that a significant portion of his income was going toward savings and investments. You had to put away every penny you could, he told us, because you never knew what tomorrow would bring. He knew that first hand because he'd grown up during The Great Depression.  His family suffered so much more than we did the few measly times we had to eat pinto beans or creamed corn, or the times we didn't get new clothes or new toys.  Not often, but occasionally he went without meals because there just was no food. He frequently went without shoes and very rarely received any new clothing. Compared to how he grew up, for us hand-me-downs and the occasional poor man’s meal were small sacrifices for the security he wanted to provide for our family.