Paulls Celebrate Legacy of Strong Dads in Wheeling

Photo by Nora Edinger

WHEELING - There are family businesses. There are father and son businesses. And, then, there's the Paull family and business.

Since the Victorian era, one generation of Paulls after another - a mix of fathers, sons, one nephew and at least one mom - has been offering insurance and, more recently, real estate from an office on Chapline Street.

Lee Paull IV, current president and broker of Paull Associates Insurance/Real Estate, can't help but laugh about the long, somewhat circuitous history.

When his parents - the late Lee Paull III and June Paull - tweaked the business to add real estate in the early 1980s, Lee IV was still a kid. He hadn't yet opted to attend West Virginia University. The moment he would decide that if an economics degree was good enough for then-President Ronald Reagan it was good enough for him, was still years away.

Even after those choices were made, Lee IV still wasn't sure he was interested in the family business.

"I really never talked to him about it in college," he said of interacting with his father, who was then in a full-court press of combining the two sides of the business. "In my junior year, he mentioned it a few times, but he never put pressure on me."

When Lee IV decided he was in, however, he was all in. The summer after graduation from WVU, he got his real estate license and attended an intense training session for insurance sales in Connecticut. By the fall of 1989, he had launched - initially focusing on insurance and learning how to work alongside a father who had exactly the same name.

"At the office, some people would call him Lee III and me Lee IV," he said. "At home, I could always tell from the tone of my mom's voice who she was talking to."

Those early days also included learning how to work for his dad -- as much as with him.

"He sat here and I worked two doors down, but we had a great working relationship," Lee IV joked. "We were always throwing stuff off each other. We didn't always agree, but that was OK. He taught me a ton."

That turned out to be a good thing. While Lee III remained active in the business until a couple of years before his death in late 2020, a stroke that Lee III suffered at age 59 pushed Lee IV into a managerial role earlier than might have otherwise happened.

"I was working with my dad from 1989 until his passing," he said, reflecting on how their relationship evolved over time. "We did have a chance to work a lot of quality years together."

FAMILY STORY, WHEELING STORY

While the Paull's thorough melding of family and business might be unusual, it's a Wheeling story that involves multiple other long-term families from the city working together.

The first Lee Cunningham Paull, born in 1889 to Wheeling natives Alfred and Lee (Singleton Paull), shared his mother's first name, interestingly enough. In 1907, this Lee joined with D.E. Stalnaker in an insurance business that grew to cover 16 states and eventually began to carry the Paull name.

Married to Mary Glessner, the first Lee Paull also had a hand in everything from The Linsly Institute to Ohio Valley General Hospital to city theater and music productions, according to a publication of the West Virginia Biographical Association.

In a double plot twist, Lee Paull's son, Lee II or Junior, wound up training his nephew, Lee III, the son of William Glessner Paull and Katherine (Foulk) Mazer, in the business. But, Lee II later sold the company to Gaston Caperton, then a future governor of West Virginia, Lee IV explained.

This left Lee III, who was bound by a two-year non-competition clause as part of the sale, with choices to make - and an opportunity, Lee IV said.

Lee III and wife June (Welch) Paull decided real estate would work well with insurance, Lee IV said. So, rather than remain idle while the non-competition clock ticked down, Lee IV said they both became realtors and set to work in a new way by the early 1980s.

Their two-person reboot now employs about 40 real estate and insurance workers in offices in Marshall, Belmont and Brooke counties in addition to the downtown Wheeling headquarters.

Who will head the business in the future? Lee IV said that's a mystery that he's fine with for now - life, family and business have a way of going on.

"I have a Lee V and another son, Collin. I would always be open to them," he said, noting his two sisters were not interested in joining the business and that was not an issue in their generation.

"We haven't had the talk," Lee IV said of Lee V, who's a rising junior studying finance at WVU. "I just want him to figure out what he wants to do."

Collin, a rising senior at the Linsly School, is starting to look at colleges, possibly one that will allow him to continue to play baseball, Lee IV added. But, dad can't help but wonder if something that's perhaps Paull-like is already at work.

"He would be excellent in sales," Lee IV mused. "He's got a really open personality."