How one retired janitor became a multi-millionaire
A quiet, frugal Vermont man shocked locals when he gifted $6 million to a library and a hospital. What was his secret?
When elderly Ronald Read died last year, he was a retired janitor and gas station attendant.
So when residents of his hometown of Brattleboro, Vt. learned that he had left about $6 million to the local library and hospital, they were appropriately stunned.
"You'd never know the man was a millionaire," Read’s attorney, Laurie Rowell, told Reuters.
Friends agreed: Read was both private and frugal. He spent his days dressed in well-worn flannels and a baseball cap, and was “an ardent outdoorsman” who cut and gathered his own firewood, according to his obituary in the Brattleboro Reformer.
Yet somehow Read left $4.8 million to the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and $1.2 million to the Brooks Memorial Library, the largest individual donations either institution had ever received, the Reformer reported.
How did he did do it?
A regular reader of The Wall Street Journal, Read turned out to be just as savvy at picking stocks as he was at chopping firewood.
"Investing and cutting wood, he was good at both of them," Rowell told Reuters.
Graduating from Brattleboro High School in 1940 – the first in his family – Read was a veteran of World War II, serving in North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific before coming home toward the end of 1945, the Reformer reported.
He was an attendant at a local Haviland gas station for about 25 years, then worked as a janitor at JCPenney before retiring in 1997 at 76.
