MORGANTOWN — Ora Butler loved to read the newspaper.
In particular, she enjoyed reading the newspaper and discussing the day’s events with her grandson, Glenn Walker.
Walker smiles and rocks back in his chair as he speaks about his grandmother. He’s sitting in the front lobby of the High Street accounting business he founded on June 1, 1972.
“She was way ahead of her time. Her mom and dad were born into slavery and my grandmother, I think, was born in 1898. She had a third-grade education, but she was a very astute woman,” Walker recalled. “And there was no sleeping in on Sundays with her. So I learned the Bible and I learned how effectual God is in our plans, even if we can’t see it.”
Both his faith and his desire to learn would be lifelong, and often intertwined, themes.
When the Morgantown native, then a teenager, followed his parents to Warren, Ohio, it was his desire to achieve that prompted him to seek out the college-preparatory curriculum at Warren G. Harding High School — a school that dwarfed anything he’d seen back home.
But it would be his faith that kept him going.
“There were very, very few Black students in those classes. There would be classes – organic chemistry, physics — and there would be one Black kid in the class … me. So going through high school I recall just kind of gradually being separated from a lot of the Black students,” Walker said. “They had integration, but there was still that wall.”
Walker’s grandparents convinced him to return to Morgantown for college in 1957. He was one of a handful of Black students enrolled at WVU at the time and, ultimately, the only Black student in the college of business and economics.
“I met a lot of racial prejudice along the way. I had classes where the professor wouldn’t speak to me. So it was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ You become accustomed to it and you don’t allow it to become a hindrance to you,” he explained.
You find that being positive and walking by faith are consistent themes for Walker. He credits a chance encounter with a dog-eared paperback for planting that seed.
“I was at a yard sale one day and they had a used book by Norman Vincent Peale called ‘The Power of Positive Thinking.’ I can tell you that by the time I got rid of that book both covers were gone. It was held together with a rubber band. I wore that book out,” Walker said. “And I started seeing that if you look beyond your environment and set your sights on a goal, and you believe in that goal, you can achieve it. You’re not going to know how right away, but you work towards it.”
So positive was his thinking, in fact, that Walker jokes about expecting a job offer by the end of his college graduation ceremony. It didn’t happen.
Over the next few years he interviewed constantly and held a number of jobs, including with Hotel Morgan and the city’s sanitation department. He had enrolled in graduate school and was working as an instructor in the college of business and economics when a colleague introduced him to the Tanner & Tanner accounting firm.
He interviewed. They didn’t call. So he started showing up every day. After a month, they relented.
“I worked for them for five years and my experience working with them was truly awesome. They allowed me to work on any and all cases, impossible cases — diplomats, medical groups, state agencies, large retailers. It was experience I could not have gotten otherwise,” Walker said.
It’s believed that during his tenure with Tanner & Tanner, Walker was the only Black CPA working in West Virginia.
“After I left Tanner & Tanner, probably 10 years later, I ran into one of the partners and he told me what really happened. They had a lot of clients complain because they had a Black man working in their office, but they never said a word about that to me. It was never once mentioned,” he said.
Walker will have 50 years in business this June — a milestone he likely didn’t envision as a new entrepreneur in 1972, when he would fill his open schedule by reading newspapers.
Now he dodges questions from friends and family about when, if ever, he plans to hang up the calculator.
“Sometimes my wife will ask me, ‘Glenn, when are you going to retire?’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh, I hadn’t really considered that,’ ” he jokes. “The only thing I’m going to do is change the music. I’m still going to dance the jig, but I might just change up the music.”
And possibly add mentor to his long list of accomplishments, both as a CPA/fraud examiner and a spiritual leader in the community.
“Opportunity starts in your mind. Ask yourself, what can I say or do in order to let the people around me know they can have a different life if they want it,” he said.
“Of all the kids in the 20-25 block area where I lived, I was the only one who went to college. The only one. What happened that I was able to see that vision? I couldn’t see the destination. I didn’t envision being a CPA in Morgantown, but I knew that if I believed it, I could achieve it. And I knew that because of a book I found one day at a yard sale.”
