Early Life
Wallace Wilkinson was born on a farm in Casey County, Kentucky, about 5 miles (8.0 km) southwest of the city of Liberty, on December 12, 1941. The son of Hershel and Cleo (Lay) Wilkinson, he had two older brothers and a younger sister. His parents were farmers and also operated a small general store. When Wilkinson was four years old, the family moved to Liberty, and the family opened Wilkinson's Grocery. During his childhood, he delivered newspapers, sold popcorn from a street stand, and co-owned a shoe shine parlor with a boyhood friend. He also accompanied his father to sell produce from the back of a truck. It was during one such trip that he met Martha Carol Stafford, whose parents owned a grocery store about 10 miles (16 km) away. The two dated throughout high school and were married in 1960. They had two children: Wallace Glenn Wilkinson, Jr. (b. 1970) and Andrew Stafford Wilkinson (b. 1972).
Wilkinson was a member of the freshman basketball team at Liberty High School. Using profits from his early business ventures, he purchased a business wardrobe that earned him the title of best dressed member of his senior class. He graduated from high school in 1959, but the poor curriculum there left him without the credits he needed to gain admission to the University of Kentucky's engineering program. He began selling livestock feed in Scottsville, Kentucky, and also worked at a venetian blind factory while taking classes at Campbellsville College to earn the credits he needed. In 1962, he moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and enrolled at the University of Kentucky. While in college, he worked at Kennedy Book Store in Lexington. Later, he and two friends borrowed money to open the Kentucky Paperback Gallery in Lexington; Wilkinson left school later that year to attend to the business full-time. At the time, Kentucky high school students were required to purchase their own textbooks, but there was no marketplace for buying and selling used books; Wilkinson's business catered to this market and was highly successful.
Read more about this topic: Wallace G. Wilkinson
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In the early forties and fifties almost everybody “had about enough to live on,” and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)