The world had not been deprived. Some six months later Archimedes was born. The birth took place in Colorado, a setting Carlotta had decided was superior to Switzerland because her child would then have no problems of citizenship.
Shortly after Archimedes’ first birthday, Carlotta met Jasper Philip Jones. For Jones it had immediately been a case of wanting her—-not just for a night, but for forever. And what Jasper Philip Jones wanted, he was used to getting.
J .P. Jones, as he was known in the world of high finance, had started out in life wanting a bicycle. A poor boy in a Milwaukee slum, he had earned the money for the bicycle by collecting old newspapers and selling them to trash dealers by the bale. Soon he was collecting and selling other forms of trash. By the time the bike was his, he had two other kids running around and collecting the trash for him, and was turning it over at a profit. He’d learned the first rule of business: the way to make money is to capitalize on someone else’s labor.
The rule stayed with him. By his twenty-first birthday, J. P. Jones owned his own junkyard and employed eight people. But that was only the beginning. By the time he was twenty-five, he was gaining nationwide attention as the Junk King of Minnesota. Then, when he was twenty-seven, he picked his time carefully and sold out all his junkyard holdings for a cool million dollars.
The million went into the stock of a large but somewhat shaky company. Jones fomented rumors that the management of the company was milking it. Perhaps it was true. Whether it was or not, Jones showed up at the next stockholders’ meeting with enough proxy votes so that when they were added to his own shares, he was able to force out the management group and take over as chairman of the new board himself. He, himself, did not milk the company. Instead, he spent two years building it up, and then, when its business was at its peak, he began selling his stock off slowly to keep the price up. His biographers estimate that he came out with close to ten million dollars.
Other deals followed. Jones bought and sold a transit company and ignored the public outcry when it was realized that the profit he’d extracted from the municipality which bought it from him was coming out of the taxpayers’ pockets. Then he got into the market in earnest, and soon had a new title: The Wolf of Wall Street.
Some looked at Jones as Horatio Alger come to life. Others saw him as a modern-day robber baron. But nobody could gainsay his wealth and power. And nobody could deny that he always got what he set out to get.
It took him less than a year to get Carlotta O’Toole to agree to marry him. He was a vigorous man in his early forties, and she was still in her twenties, but it wasn't a case of his buying her in any sense. He wouldn’t have wanted her that way, and he didn’t get her that way. He got her because he made the effort to ensure her falling in love with him. And if part of what she fell in love with was his aura of power and wealth, that was all right, because that was a part of the man Jasper Philip Jones was. But there were many other facets to his character, and Carlotta found much to love in them as well.
Shortly after they were married, Jones legally adopted Archimedes as his son and gave him his name. He knew all the details of the boy’s birth, and none of them in any way lessened his regard for Carlotta. Through the years, never, by word or deed, did J. P. Jones act toward Archimedes in any fashion but that of a loving father toward an adored son. Perhaps the fact that he was unable to sire Carlotta’s children himself had something to do with it. Whether that was the reason or not, Archimedes adored J. P. as much as he did Carlotta.
She’d told Archie of his real parentage when he was very small. With J. P.’s approval, it had been made possible for Archie to spend time with his real father, Albert Stynestein, during his growing-up years. Here too the boy established a warm relationship. Never had he felt that there was anything wrong with having two fathers. He knew only love, from them and from his mother as well.
Along with this love, Archie was given all the advantages that wealth could provide. These included emotional advantages. He began a full-time psychoanalysis just before entering puberty. And he continued with it throughout his adolescence. Also, he was sent to an extremely expensive and extremely progressive school of the Summerhill type, where his brilliant mind and his childhood aggressions and digressions were allowed the widest latitude. When he reached high-school age, he left this establishment to attend one of the finest and most exclusive boys’ prep schools in the country.
However, Archie’s education wasn’t limited to its formal aspects. Possibly the most important part of it was the people with whom he came in contact. They included the greats of three worlds. Through his mother he became acquainted with some of the most creative minds in the theatre, art and literature. Carlotta had persuaded J. P. to live in New York throughout most of the year, and her Park Avenue salon was a Sunday afternoon and evening gathering place for celebrities from Greenwich Village to Harlem. Writers, painters, actors, directors, concert musicians, composers, conductors, choreographers, sculptors —all flocked to the Jones mansion, and Archie met them all. They adored him. His keen mind and flights of creative fancy enchanted them. Few of them treated him as a child. Most thought nothing of spending an entire evening engaging him in serious conversation. They delighted in how quickly his child’s mind could grasp the most abstract concepts of modern art, existentialisrn, and theatre-of-the-absurd. Indeed, he became a prime attraction of Carlotta’s salon.
Adaptable as a chameleon, Archie was equally at home with the contemporaries of J. P. Jones. Quieter and more serious with them, he listened to their talks of mergers and stock transfers and debentures and blue chips with a genuine air of absorption. He absorbed it all and retained it. He never ventured an opinion unless he was asked for one, and then only if he was sure of his ground. But when he did say something it was usually succinct and to the point, and he gained the respect of J. P.’s associates while still in his teens. They predicted he would become a giant in the world of high finance when he reached maturity. Archie, however, wasn’t so sure he wanted to be a financier, and J. P. never pressed him. Like Archie’s mother and his real father, J. P. felt that it was the boy’s life to do with as he wished.
Often it looked as if he might wish to follow in the footsteps of Albert Stynestein. Through his father, Archie met the leading scientists and mathematicians of the world. His natural curiosity was heightened by such contacts. On his own, he began a wide program of scientific reading. It ranged from biology to nuclear physics. Abstract mathematics fascinated him, and he startled a small group of Stynestein’s friends one evening by announcing that he was trying to write a paper on the obscure field of nuclear biology for the Scientific American. They questioned him with the tolerance of the very wise toward the very young, but with the sharpness of his answers their tolerance changed to respect and his age was soon forgotten in the ensuing discussion of the greater implications of the theories he was projecting. His brilliance so struck some of these men that they later wrote to him to expound ideas of their own on the subject. Archie answered these letters, and thus sprung up a correspondence with renowned scientists which was continuing and fruitful.
If Archie was an early-hatching egghead-—and he was -- he wasn’t the type who was looking for an ivory tower in which to seclude himself. A natural athlete, he loved sports and enjoyed the feelings of using his body to its full potential. Here, again, J. P.’s wealth played its part. Archie was taught golf and tennis by the finest pros in the country. A former channel swimmer gave him swimming lessons. A trainer of champions taught him to box. A master was imported from Japan to instruct him in the arts of Valli Tudo and Karate and Jiu Jitsu.