HEIR TO £50,000

Hokitika Guardian, 19 November 1929, Page 7

HEIR TO £50,000

SYDNEY BARBER'S FORTUNE

NO DESIRE TO SPEND IT

SYDNEY, November 9.

Sydney was startled the other day when it read the story of one of its youths who has inherited a fortune of £50,000 and lias no desire to spend it. This steady young man is John Henry Curtis, aged 19, a journeyman barber, ol Croydon-—and he intends to remain a journeyman harbor.

It sounds incredible, hut this young man can calmly go on shaving and hairrutting while £50,003 is begging ior him to spend it. To him the fleslinots that such a sum of money could ouy mean nothing. Up to date he has not given a single thought to the spending of any portion of the vast sum he has inherited.

“No,” says Curtis, “that money was carefully earned, and I am going to carefully look after it.”

IV bile fishing at Kinkumber on -August 28th of this year the father of the young barber, Charles William Curtis, was accidentally drowned. He had amassed a considerable fortune in real estate and shares, and he left the whole of his money to his son and Jiis widow. Btefore he died he had expressed his intention of setting his son up in business on his own account as a barber and tobacconist next year. Because of this expressed wish, John Henry is determined to become a

hairdresser on his own account, despite his fortune. He will go on just as i'f his father were still alive. And in the meantine he will continue to work for an employer at something above tho basic wage, and this should leave his fortune intact, in case, some day; he should become unemployed. “I lost the best pal lam ever likely to have,” said Curtis, as he quietly prooeeded about the business, of administering a face massage to a customer. “My dad and I were great friends. He always wanted me to be steady, and for his sake I will go. on just as if lie were alive. My mother and ‘T do not intend to alter our ways of living to. any great extent. She and T are quite satisfied: No 1 am not going to get married until I am 35.”