In The Vallian Trilogy: An Inventive Life. Part I: The Engineer, Larry Wahl describes the unique experiences that eventually brought him to where he is today at 83 years of age. In this first book of three, this account of the first 20 years of his life unfolds as intense, with pathos and unexpected humor, and lays the groundwork for his future occupation as an OSS (now CIA) assassin and his later transformation into a creative, productive citizen.
Taken away from a loving father and his birth home of Goble, Oregon, he was brought to Chicago by his mother and her mob boyfriend (Tony) to live in one of Al Capone’s brothels where he saw Tony kill an important member of Capone’s gang, resulting in the banishment to Portland’s Italian/Jewish ghetto. Larry’s existence, before the age of six, was a compendium of neglect, loss, despair, violence, and sex. But after being abandoned by his mother at 6, he lived as an orphan among 200 nuns at Providence Academy in Vancouver, Washington until he was adopted by the Wahl family at age 10. While it may seem that his life should have changed for the better, and it did, in terms of food and lodging, the buried and not-so-buried early experiences resulted in him never bonding with any family. How he managed to flourish, in a manner of speaking, was by acquiring a group of friends—he claims they were mostly misfits like him—and pursuing his one goal in life: learning everything about everything!! Books were his lifeline, libraries his most revered institutions, and schools—while a disaster the first two years of high school—embedded in his mind the means to educate himself, even though his curriculum wasn’t necessarily on the schools’ agendas. Learning was his savior: It rescued a damaged, abused, neglected, full of rage child from total spiritual annihilation. Through his episodic stories, insights into his life and the individuals who peopled it emerge, not unscathed!