The ChoiceA Story by Matthew The true story about how a choice my grandfather made in 1957 cheated me out of millions of dollars, and I'm not upset about it. He made the right choice. We could have been millionaires…. In the 60s, my grandfather started a construction business in a small town on the coast of NC with one of his old war buddies and two other men he met after the war. He met them at the local hardware store, where they frequently ran into each other on the weekends. They are all handymen. They became friends and, after a few drinks at the bar one night, they decided to buy a run-down house down the block, use their construction skills to fix it, and then sell it at a profit. Today, this is called “flipping” a house. After the agreement was put in writing, they pitched in $600 each to purchase the house. They spent six weeks rehabbing it, and then sold it two months later for a nice profit. They took that profit and purchased another house to flip. And they continued, time after time, finding places to flip at a profit. My grandfather was making a lot of money, but it was also taking all of his time. He didn’t spend much time with his first-born son, my father. Eventually, all of the men, including my grandfather, quit their day jobs and became full-time flippers. At my grandfather’s urging, they formed a legal partnership. Then he and his wife had another child, my aunt. It was obvious within a year of her birth that something was wrong with her. She wasn’t hitting any of the normal growth milestones. She had mental retardation and began suffering seizures by age two. She required a lot of medical care. Back then, it was normal for children like this to be sent away to state-run homes and forgotten about. At the time, the nearest state-run home for children like my aunt was in Raleigh, a full three-hour drive from where my grandparents lived. My grandfather was left with two options:
He chose to quit the construction company and move to Raleigh, where there were more resources for children like his daughter. He ended up in a dead-end sales job that he hated. The three other owners of the construction company bought him out of his share of the company, and that was it. He was done with it. Throughout the 70s, my grandfather’s old company grew. They eventually stopped fixing the houses themselves, and hired other people to do it. Then they eventually began building new houses. Then building entire subdivisions. By 1985, they were one of the largest domestic construction companies on that side of the state. The other three original owners were millionaires. And my grandfather was stuck in a dead-end sales job, barely paying the bills. Until the day he died, my grandfather never expressed any disappointment with his choice to do what was best for his daughter. He even got arrested twice for assaulting people who laughed at his daughter in public. But he also kept a picture on his wall of him and his three friends, standing in his garage, the morning before they went to purchase that first house to flip. I know he liked to think about “what might have been”. Those men have all retired or passed away, and now their children and grandchildren run the company. The company is worth hundreds of millions now. My grandfather died a long time ago. His wife, my grandmother, died more recently. Their daughter is now in her 60s and lives in a state-run home for the disabled. Her only visitors are distant family members who come around once or twice per year, myself included. I live several states away, also stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to pay the bills, like my father and grandfather before me. And stuck thinking about “what might have been”. © 2017 MatthewAuthor's Note
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2 Reviews  Last Updated on March 26, 2017 Tags: disabled handicapped flipping ch |
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