Community - A Long Term Investment 3-8-10

Anderson, South Carolina

When Warren Buffet was six years old he bought six packs of Coca Cola for twenty-five cents and resold the bottles for a nickel each, pocketing a twenty percent return on his short-term investment. When he was eleven years old he bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred at $38 for himself and his older sister. The shares promptly dropped to $27. He held on and promptly sold them when they rebounded to $40, a regrettable decision as Cities Service vaulted to $200. The experience taught him one of the basic lessons of investing: patience is a virtue. His investment strategy has been deceptively simple and spectacularly successful - buy stock in those well-managed companies that do a good job of producing basic products, and keep it forever.

By the time he graduated from high school in 1947, Buffet had earned the equivalent of $42,610, delivering newspapers. In 1989 Warren’s equity in Berkshire Hathaway was worth $3.8 billion. In 2006 his positions were worth an estimated $46 billion. He still lives an unassuming life style in Omaha. As one observer points out, “This billionaire doesn't even have a chauffeur - he drives himself around in a 2006 Cadillac DTS, recently purchased after he auctioned off his old Lincoln Town Car, which was famous for its Thrifty license plate. And no, he does not want a yacht or many mansions. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy a good football game in his sweat suit on a big screen television - with popcorn.”

Matel Dawson, Jr, was a forklift operator at Ford Motor Company. Dawson, born in Shreveport, LA, quit school in the ninth grade. In 1940, moving to Detroit, he began working at Ford's Rouge complex in Dearborn, staying there more than sixty years. A hard worker who often worked double shifts, Dawson seldom took a vacation and came to work two hours before his shift started. He maintained his grueling work schedule into his eighties, well past retirement age. He lived simply in a dingy one-bedroom apartment in a rough suburb of Detroit, Michigan and drove a used car without hubcaps, thanks to neighborhood thieves.

He told a reporter at Jet magazine why he felt compelled to work so hard. "I need money to make me happy. It makes me happy to give money away. It gives me a good feeling." In 1991, after decades of investing in Ford’s employee stock purchase program, Dawson began donating heavily to educational programs and universities and by the time of his death in 2002, had given away over one million dollars. Having dropped out of school at a young age in order to work, Dawson was committed to seeing no one was denied an education because of lack of money. "I advise kids to get a good education," he told Ebony magazine. "I have more than what I need, and I'm sharing it with them." He funded two scholarship programs and donated extensively to the United Negro College Fund.

He walked into the UNCF office in overalls and rubber fisherman's boots up to his knees," the UNCF director recalled to Ebony. "In his hand he held a paper bag, and in that bag was a check for $30,000." It was the largest individual gift ever made to the Michigan telethon and it left UNCF staff speechless. Soon the story of the blue-collar philanthropist was making headlines. However, Dawson remained modest, driving his 1985 Ford Escort to the factory before dawn each morning as he had done nearly all his life. "The first time I realized what he was doing, I heard it on the radio," Dawson's supervisor told Ebony. In an interview with Time, Dawson said, "If I was to do anything with my money other than help some of these kids begging to go to school, I'd be throwing it away." A board member of Wayne State University told the Detroit Free Press, "He planted a seed with his generosity and a harvest for all of us."

Grace Groner was an unassuming secretary working in the warrens of corporate America. According to the Chicago Tribune, “she got her clothes from rummage sales. She walked everywhere rather than buy a car. And her one-bedroom house in Lake Forest held little more than a few plain pieces of furniture, some mismatched dishes and a hulking TV set that appeared left over from the Johnson administration.” Orphaned at age twelve, she never married nor had children.

Like Warren Buffet, Grace Groner bought three shares of stock in the 1930s, only she held onto her three shares of Abbott Labs. Over seven decades those shares split countless times and she reinvested all the dividends.

She died at 100 years on January 19, 2010. The president of Lake Forest College received a phone call informing him she had made a surprise bequest of $7 million, funding a scholarship foundation. “The foundation's millions should generate more than $300,000 a year for the college, enabling dozens more students to travel and pursue internships. Many probably wouldn't be able to pursue those opportunities without a scholarship: 75 percent of the student body receives financial aid.” according to the college’s president Stephen Schutt. One student, nearly in tears said, “It’s giving hope to people to allow them to live a little big bigger than they might have.”

"She did not have the material needs that other people have," said William Marlatt, her attorney and longtime friend. "She could have lived in any house in Lake Forest but she chose not to. She enjoyed other people, and every friend she had was a friend for who she was. They weren't friends for what she had."

The Tribune reports “The study and internship program is not the end of Groner's legacy. She left that small house to the college, too. It will be turned into living quarters for women who receive foundation scholarships, and perhaps something more: an enduring symbol that money can buy far more than mansions.”

Three lives, three stories, three legacies, three individuals with vision for building community for the long term, enabling others to reach their fullest potentials, to build a better world. Three ordinary people of commonplace means with extraordinary vision set out on journeys spanning many decades, taking countless others to the places of their dreams.

One life, one story, one legacy. Show me your check book register and I will show you the extent of your legacy.

But lay up for yourselves treasure in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.