From homelessness to med school to medals to $millions$

Ebony, Dec, 2001 by Charles Whitaker

CHRISTOPHER GARDNER

A huge elephant head hangs on the wall of Chris Gardner's 60th floor high-rise office. It is a symbol of the multimillion-dollar deals Gardner negotiates as the president and chief executive officer of Gardner & Rich, an investment house in Chicago that traffics largely in the big-money world of public finance.

"We bag elephants," Gardner says of the high-powered investment deals he negotiates daily. "That's our motto. We go after the big deals because it takes just as much effort to land a $500 account as it does to land a $5 million one."

It's hard to believe that Chris Gardner, "elephant bagger," is the same Chris Gardner who was homeless. But 20 years ago, with his infant son in tow, he was "bathing" in public rest rooms, eating in a soup kitchen, and scrapping and scratching to make a way in the world. "I had two suits," he recalls. "One was blue and one was gray, just like the Civil War. And man, I alternated those suits every day. But I swore that if I ever made it, I was going to have more than two suits."

Today, Gardner, a 47-year-old self-made millionaire, has more than 200 suits. He also has four homes and a custom Ferrari that once belonged to Michael Jordan. But on the road to his present-day riches, Gardner endured the sort of poverty and homelessness that would have broken the spirit of a lesser man.

With intense dedication and singular focus, this high school dropout drove his dreams to the top and now lives a lifestyle he hardly could have imagined in his youth.

He grew up in Milwaukee, the only son and second-oldest in a family of 12 children. His single mother was a schoolteacher by training, but took a variety of jobs to provide for her children. Young Chris' ambitions were always fanciful. At first, he wanted to be Miles Davis. He studied trumpet for nine years, but eventually realized, "I had the attitude, but I didn't have the talent," he says. "Besides, there was only one Miles Davis and he already had that job."

His goals then became a little less specific, career-wise. "I just wanted to make a million dollars," he says. "But I couldn't sing and I couldn't play ball, so I said to my mother, `How am I going to make a million dollars?' And she said to me, `Son, if you believe you can do it, you will.'"

It was the faith of his mother that set Gardner off on the incredible journey that led to his current success. It was a rather circuitous journey, however.

A bright but indifferent student, Gardner decided early on that college wasn't for him. He dropped out of high school, lied about his age and joined the Navy, hoping to see the world and become a medic. But the farthest his naval career got him was North Carolina.

Working in the Navy's medical corps did help him make an important connection with a cardiac surgeon who was also in the service. When both were discharged, Gardner traveled to California and became the doctor's clinical research assistant at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. The work was fascinating, but Gardner was still only making $7,400 a year, a paltry salary even in 1973.

He contemplated becoming a doctor, but staring down the road at medical school loans and wisely anticipating the managed care crisis, he decided that medicine wasn't going to be the best way to make his million.

He latched on as a medical supply salesman, boosting his income slightly to about $16,000 a year. Then one day as he was loading his car with the samples and catalogues that are a salesman's calling card, he spotted a guy in a bright red Ferrari. Gardner took one look at the car and fell in love. "I asked the guy two questions," he says. "One was, `What do you do?' The second was, `How do you do that?'"

The man was a stockbroker, and when he told Gardner that he earned in the neighborhood of $80,000 a month, Gardner decided that his future was in investment. But there were a few obstacles to overcome: He had no education, no experience in the stock market and no connections. Undaunted, he scouted about for an investment firm that would take a chance on him. He convinced the manager of a training program at one brokerage firm to give him a shot, but on the day he showed up for work, he discovered that the manager had been fired and no one else in the company had ever heard of Chris Gardner or the deal he'd been offered. It was a devastating blow, especially since Gardner had already quit his sales job, intent on making it big selling stocks.

Undeterred, he took odd jobs to make ends meet while still trying to break into the investment arena. The San Francisco office of Dean Witter was the only firm to nibble, but they were skeptical and took him through 10 months of interviews. But by this time Gardner also had a family to support--a girlfriend and an infant son. One day he returned home from a house-painting job to find his girlfriend, his son and all of their belongings gone. To compound his troubles, a policeman ran the plates on Gardner's car and discovered that he had $1,200 worth of unpaid parking tickets. Penniless, he was sent to jail for 10 days, with his release scheduled for the day before he was to have his final interview at Dean Witter.