The Man Who Quit Money Read Online Free PDF Page B

of hard work. Theirs is a deep idealism in which faith trumps everything, and money never matters much. For all of his eventual rebelling, Suelo’s upbringing actually
prepared
him for quitting money.
    .  .  .
    A T EIGHTY-TWO , Dick Shellabarger is still a lumbering fellow, with a sprawling six-foot-five frame and big hands and big feet. He fills the room like a Clydesdale. His booming voice carries a twang as he drops cowboyisms:
I says to him, no way
and
The Lord don’t care about that
. “Money is the public God,” he bellowedas a way of welcoming me. “They do anything possible—kill, murder, and lie—for it.”
    Dick has been married to Daniel’s mother, Laurel, for more than sixty years. They live in Fruita, Colorado, a farm town that is being overtaken by the sprawl of Grand Junction, fifteen miles to the east. They’re about one hundred miles from their youngest son’s cave. The cul-de-sacs named Comstock and Motherlode are empty except for children on bikes and mothers pushing strollers. American-made cars and trucks fill the double driveways, with bumper stickers that say RESPECT LIFE . The Shellabarger home is a single level of brick and stucco and wood siding, with a pair of evergreens on the lawn. On the front door hangs an inscribed placard:
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.
The house, which is owned by Dick’s older brother, is plain and clean: three bedrooms and two bathrooms, textured walls all the same neutral shade of off-white. In the garage, between meticulously organized hand tools and coiled extension cords, is a nondescript sedan.
    The youngest of five children, Dick Shellabarger was born in 1928, on the cusp of the Great Depression, and raised in Colorado. His father, a mechanic and barber and jack-of-all-trades, hopped freight trains to California in search of work. After working as a truck driver on the construction of the Alaska-Canada Highway, he parlayed his earnings into two cow ponies and a ranch near Denver. Dick grew up on a horse, moving from one place to the next as his dad sold one ranch and bought another. “I was trying to go to high school in Castle Rock, taking two or three buses to get there,” Dick says. “I finally had to quit after tenth grade.”
    The family never got ahead, unable to obtain a loan for the initial livestock. They did keep afloat a dude ranch that offeredhorseback rides, and an old lodge with a bar, jukebox, and dance floor. Dick’s older brothers left home and built an empire of car dealerships, but Dick took after his father, tinkering with one thing and another. After an army stint in Japan, he supplemented his summer income at the ranch by breaking the neighbors’ horses.
    If Suelo inherited his itinerant nature from his father, then his contemplative side comes from his mother. Laurel is a year older than her husband, a real beauty with regal carriage and sparkling eyes and fine cheekbones. Laurel Jeanne Wegener was born in Denver in 1927 to first-generation Americans whose parents had emigrated from Germany. Her father, Charles, was a traveling salesman and woodworker. The family struggled during the Depression, buying groceries on credit. But Charles—who like a European of the previous century played the flute, dressed in dark suits, and never learned to drive, preferring trains and trolleys well into the automobile era—insisted that his daughters learn classical piano and sing in a choir.
    Although the family was nominally Christian, they were not devout. “I went clear through the catty-chism at the Lutheran church,” Laurel says. As she matured into a striking and proud young woman, her commitment to the religion proved thin. One day she walked to church for a field trip, arriving just as the bus was pulling away. She ran after it, waving and hollering, but the bus didn’t stop. “And guess who got mad,” she says. Laurel never went back.
    Perhaps it was her parents’ European refinement, but Laurel was