Troubled Teen Escapes Poverty: Achieves Financial Independence
That’s me, Doug Wallace, top center in the above photo. My siblings and I lived with our parents in the Kirkpatrick Homes housing projects in Granite City, IL in 1955.
There were six of us children back then. Years later, our mother would give birth to two more boys. We lived in abject poverty in a crowded housing project apartment where food, shelter and safety were never assured.
By the time I was fourteen years old I was firmly entrenched in the culture of poverty. In reality I was afraid of being stuck in the cycle of poverty, but you couldn’t tell that by my behavior. As a teenager, my life was following the statistical profile of a troubled teen born into generational poverty–poor language skills, anger, crime, and violence.
I dropped out of high school. My life was rapidly spiraling out of control. I wasn’t afraid of the violent neighborhoods where we lived. It was the only life I knew. But I was afraid of poverty. There was nothing good about poverty. I hated what it was doing to my family–to me.
I was afraid of becoming complacent with poverty, of feeling entitled–strengths atrophy, victim status sets in, and you surrender to the uncontrollable impulse of an entitlement mentality. Yet despite my hatred of poverty, I dropped out of high school, an act that would make it nearly impossible for me to escape my circumstances.
Poverty steals away your life; years go by uncaring and cold, not sparing a single appraising glance at the chaos mounting up all around you. I didn’t fit in with the middle class students at school and I didn’’t want to be friends with the troublemakers in my neighborhood.
After dropping out of high school, joining the Job Corps was my only chance of making it out of poverty—my last lifeline. The single source of my inspiration and strength in joining the Job Corps, was indomitable faith in the words, Everything will be All Right.
I had no contact with any sense of security until I learned that everything I needed was in my heart. I learned this at the age of twelve when God put a floor under all my sadness and fears and uncertainties. In my memoir, Everything Will Be All Right, I describe the epiphany experience in Chapter 12, which is available for viewing by clicking “Review a Chapter.”
I believe that what experienced on that nighttime road—which remains as fresh today as it was forty-eight years ago—happens to a lot of people, in different ways, every single day, in the ordinary miracle of just being, or in the quiet of prayer, or in the silence of meditation. I believe this taste of inner peace and love is the secret to my success.
Three decades after joining the Jobs Corps, I became financially independent when I sold my company, Wallace & deMayo, P.C., to Synovus, a multi-billion, multi-financial services corporation. The epiphany experience I encountered that night was a gift–the gift of Pure Love. Escaping generational poverty was my miracle.
