Legacy

There’s no place like home.  Truer words were never spoken, at least as far as Grover W. Renshaw was concerned.  Grover was born in 1938.  Born and raised in Everest, Kansas.  Everest, Kansas was a small rural area town of about three thousand people.  Not a huge community by most standards, but a bit more than a wide spot in the road.

 

Everest was a peaceful community where almost everyone knew each other and there was no need to even lock doors.  It was a patriotic and God fearing community. A wonderful place to raise a family.  Some would say it lacked the bright lights and cultural excitement of the big city.  A boring place by some standard’s. Maybe boring is a misused word, as many don’t find peaceful, laid back, and crime free to be boring; many find that to be a slice of heaven.

 

However Everest as a community did well to hold its own population wise.  As is the case in many such communities, young people didn’t find many so called opportunities and left for greener pastures as soon as they graduated high school.

 

Grover W. Renshaw was not one who saw greener pastures elsewhere, he saw them right where he was.  Lets flashback to where this story really starts.  At age twelve, Grover was like any other typical boy in the area of that age. He liked baseball, picnics, the fourth of July, the Band that played each Saturday night in the small city parks bandstand.  Fishing when he got a chance was also a favorite thing to do.

 

Things really started with a marble game one fine midsummer day.  Grover liked to play marbles as did most boys his age, but Grover wasn’t the best of players.  As a result his pile of marbles kept going down and his meager earnings from mowing lawns went fast replenishing marbles.

 

Now Grover liked marbles, the more he had the better he liked it.  Grover had a different outlook on the game of marbles, it wasn’t about keeping score or the excitement of winning or the disappointment of losing; it was about amassing marbles.  Especially the ones called shooters as they were usually very distinctive and highly desirable.

 

Grover always took an interesting slant on things; yes he was somewhat a unique little person.  Grover figured that his end goal was to amass marbles, the more the better, as they were a sign of wealth among boys.  So Grover though there must be a better way to amass marbles than losing them.  After all the idea was to grow the quantity, not shrink it.  Grover stopped playing marbles and started trading marbles instead at his little in front of the house marble stand.  Like a lemonade stand, only marbles instead.

 

Grover invested a bit and bought a couple of dozen really nice shooters from the local combination grocery and general store.  This was his initial stock at his marble stand.  Grover put up a sign that read Grover’s Marble Emporium.  The terms were simple, it was a place where one could buy, sell or trade marbles.

 

Specifics were if you wanted one of Grover’s marbles, your choice that is, you had to give Grover three of your marbles, usually the less pretty of course.  Grover didn’t mind, he was after quantity and functionally a less pretty marble worked just like a pretty marble.  Also if you wanted some quick cash, Grover would buy your marble, but say because its pre owned, he could only give you a forth of what the general store sold them for.  That wasn’t a point of happiness for the sellers, but where else could a kid sell a marble.  Then there were those acquired in trade and so forth that got graded as premium shooters,  that even used Grover charged twenty percent more than the General Store.  A case of desire, supply and demand.

 

Then on the run of the mill marbles, Grover had bargain prices that were only half off what the General Store charged. They were a popular item with kids who had lost their marbles in a marble game and wanted to replenish their game playing stock.      Their money went farther with Grover than it did elsewhere and that made them happy.  It made Grover happy also since he was still doubling his money even at that rate.

 

Now let’s look closer at the way the trading ratio worked.  If someone made three trades with Grover, they ended up with three marbles and Grover ended up with nine marbles.  Then if they made a forth trade they ended up with one marble and Grover had an eleven marble profit from the finality of being out just one marble that over four trades brought in twelve, a profit of eleven marbles.

 

Indeed Grover was getting to be the wealthiest kid in town, marble wise.  One might say Grover had all his marbles in more ways than one.  Then the inevitable happened, and Grover had to start diversifying his Buy, Sell, and Trade business.

 

A boy who had lost all his marbles, (pardon the pun), was low on cash, but still wanted more marbles to try again.  So this boy offered to trade Grover something besides marbles just to get marbles.  Grover wasn’t to sure about that idea.  It seemed risky, but intriguing, so Grover traded that boy a bag of twenty marble for his good mumble de peg knife, a nice cast iron toy tractor, and a spiffy harmonica.  That was in terms off fair value a very, very, bad deal for the kid that got the bag of twenty marbles.  But Grover rationalized that he didn’t personally want the stuff and wasn’t sure he could make anything from it.  After all that getting into other things was a new experience for Grover, who wasn’t sure about sailing unchartered waters so to speak.

 

Grover was pleasantly surprised and started viewing possibilities with fresh eyes.  For you see, he started with a twenty marble investment in those three items.  He got one hundred marbles out of the knife, fifty marbles out of the tractor.  Then he traded the harmonica for a working BB gun, a sling shot, and a yoyo.

 

Grover was grooving, by the time Grover was fifteen, he’d taken over his father’s garage which was Okay, since his father didn’t own a car and worked within walking distance as a schoolteacher. The garage was getting pretty full of a great variety of things and our little enterprising Grover was making money  hand over fist and expanding his inventory of salable and  tradable items at the same time.

 

Grover’s father was proud of Grover for his success, but a little taken back by the fact that his fifteen year old son was making more money than he was, and the kid still had two more years to go before graduating high school.  Still Grover’s father was supportive of Grover’s efforts.

 

After Grover graduated High School, Grover took the significant amount he had saved and bought an empty Livery Stable on the edge of town.  He fixed it up and made it weather fit for year around use.  He moved the inventory which was starting to get impactions in the garage to the former Livery Stable where he could spread it out and display it better.  It also had pretty good space to expand in.  Things were looking up for Grover.  While a lot of recent graduates were leaving town, Grover found his greener pastures so to speak right in his own back yard.

 

Now there were only two or three of what one might call well to do families in Everest, and they were pretty much old money as opposed to recently made successes.  In that department there was only Grover.

 

At age eighteen Grover also bought himself a brand new 1956 Ford, two tone at that.  Now it’s important to know that by then most people living in Everest had caught up with more modern times and had automobiles, including Grover’s father who could now use the garage.  However, in his age group only Grover had a car, and a new one at that.  Needless to say, the local girls took notice.

 

Grover was aware that the girls were very friendly but didn’t really put two and two together at that point because Grover was single minded, and mostly interested in building his business.  Grover succeeded at that quite well.  In fact that was helping the entire community because it was beginning to attract people from other small or smaller surrounding communities.  That brought more money into Everest, which in turn allowed other businesses to start up, such as a small restaurant and a filling station as a beginning.

 

Grover was so successful that he built next to the former Livery Stable a new two story building, which became “Grover’s Furniture and Appliance Store”  The store was on the first floor and Grover’s,  living quarters on the second floor.  Grover even put in a small line of Farm Equipment out back of the former Livery Stable.  Grover was getting to be wealthy and he was only twenty four at this point.

 

As was said earlier, Grover wasn’t into girls a whole lot, he’d date now and again, and yes he did like girls, they just weren’t his main focus.  Unfortunately Grover became the main focus of the prettiest girl in town.  Her name was Loretta Johnson.  Loretta was determined to get her hooks into Grover and she did.

 

The marriage only lasted a year, and fortunately there were no children.  It didn’t take Grover all that long to figure that Loretta was interested in only three things. Herself, strutting her stuff, and Grover’s money.  Grover was lucky to get shed of her.

 

Being more than a little disappointed in his first serious relationship, Grover stayed away from girls for about three years.  But at age twenty eight, nature was working on Grover and he really wanted a wife and family.  Only this time he decided he would do the pursuing.

 

He focused on one Jennifer Wilson, age twenty six and a rather pretty girl; not the prettiest in town, but pretty enough.  That along with taking note of the fact that Jennifer had shown herself to be honest, have proper values, be  family oriented, and  smart with a good business acumen, was all Grover needed to know.

 

Grover set his cap for her and after about six months worth of serious wooing, she said yes.  Shortly after they were married one of the fancy old money houses in town became available and so Grover bought it and that’s where Grover and his bride Jennifer started their family.

 

The upper part of the two story building housing the Furniture and Appliance Store was turned into a dress shop which Jennifer operated quite successfully.  Family wealth was growing exponentially as was the family. Grover now had three children, two sons and a daughter.  The marriage was good and solid.  Grover and Jennifer were happy.  Everest never became a large town, but thanks to things imitated by Grover it gained about five hundred more people.

 

As one thing leads to another, Grover became an employer as he needed sales clerks to help take care of things while he was busy elsewhere.  Elsewhere you say, what do you mean by that?

 

Well let’s say this shouldn’t be that big of a surprise given the normal course of some human events.  Grover had to spend time on his other job, as Mayor of Everest.