The number was about $8 million.
Not from a lottery ticket. Not from a rich relative. Ronald Read had built it himself, quietly, over a lifetime, while everyone around him assumed he was barely getting by.
His own stepson never saw it coming. "I was tremendously surprised," Phillip Brown said. "He was a hard worker, but I don't think anybody had an idea that he was a multimillionaire."
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His friend Ellen Smith put it more simply. "You would look at him," she said, "and you would never, ever, ever know."
But the money was only the first surprise in Ronald Read's will.
The second was who he had chosen to give it to.