Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

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ROBERT H. STOVALL
Robert H. Stovall is about as all-American as they come. He’s a
twelfth-generation Yankee, who traces his roots back to a Quaker
named Bartholomew Stovall. Bartholomew arrived from the little
town of Albury in Surrey, England, as an indentured servant at the
Hampton Roads seaport area of Virginia in 1684. In the 1790s, Robert’s
branch of the Stovall clan migrated west to what is now Kentucky.
His dad, Harold, was born in 1893 to a family of Kentucky farmers.
Stovall’s mom, the former Agnes Hinkle, was three years younger
than his dad. She is the descendent of German-Americans, a group
whose members are still numerous in Louisville and the Ohio valley.
“Mom’s people came to America in the 1840s,” Stovall shares. “That
was when a lot of Germans fled to the States to escape squabbles
among all of the baronies, dukedoms, principalities, and the various
revolutions taking place in their native land.”
Stovall’s parents met at a party in Louisville during World War I.
They courted for years, but didn’t get married until both were in their
late twenties. “Their families objected to the union because they came
from different religious backgrounds,” Stovall explains. “My father’s
people were Masons and Baptists, while my mother’s were Roman
Catholic.” They eventually tied the knot in 1923. Stovall was born
three years later. He has a younger sister, Joanne Perrot, who is four
years his junior. “She is a former art historian for the Corning Museum
of Glass,” Stovall says. “Joanne married the Corning Museum’s thendirector
Paul N. Perrot. He’s also an art historian and conservationist
who spent 12 years as the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
He was later director of the Virginia Museum of the Arts,
and is currently chair of the visitor’s committee of The Getty Museum.”
FROM FEED STORE TO WALL STREET
When Robert Stovall was born, his dad worked as a clerk at a