Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

KIRK KAZANJIAN
magnate Joseph Wharton. After just one semester at Penn, Stovall
volunteered to serve his country and enlisted in the Army. “In those
years, everyone at Seton Hall was encouraged to volunteer for duty
to fight the fascists,” he says. “It was a very different environment
from what we have now. We all volunteered early on to get into those
military programs that supposedly would guarantee to let you continue
your education for awhile before going on active duty. Most boys
went into the Navy or Marines, if they could pass the physical. Unfortunately,
I always had weak eyes and didn’t qualify, but the Army
took me and sent me off to engineering school for two semesters at
Alfred University. It was a small college in Alfred, a tiny frozen town
in northern New York state. The politicians kept the brightest students
in colleges like this to prevent them from collapsing. They needed
warm bodies in the classroom because just about everybody coming
out of high school had been or was waiting to be drafted. There were
few deferments such as those offered to people in the 1960s during
the Vietnam War.”
In 1943 and 1944, after the military began to take some bad casualties
in the war, the Army’s specialized training program (ASTP) was
eliminated and these troops were sent to fight on the front lines.
“Coincidentally or not, three divisions of my ASTP colleagues with
very little training and no combat experience were sent to the Ardennes
region in Belgium to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. That was
in December 1944,” Stovall remembers. “The casualties were terrible.
For some reason, the Higher Power always seems to watch over me.
I got shipped to Italy instead. I might have been the only one in my
ASTP college contingent from Alfred University to go there. Everyone
else that I knew went to Germany and many of them were casualties.”
During Stovall’s two-and-a-half-year military tour of duty, he was
a foot soldier in the combat medical service. He was later assigned
to a motor ambulance company, which transported the wounded
around Italy. During this time, he rose to the rank of corporal. After
being discharged from the Army, he went back to Penn and continued
to study finance and commerce.
FIRST STOCK PURCHASE
It was about this time that Stovall bought his first stock. Even
though he had lived around the world of investing all his life, he had
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