American philanthropist, investor, janitor and gas station attendant: Who is Ronald Read?

Read serviced cars at a gas station for 25 years, then swept floors at JCPenny for 17 years. When he was thirty-eight, he bought a two-bedroom house for $12,000 and lived there for the rest of his life.

She was widowed at the age of fifty and never remarried. A friend recalls that his biggest hobby was chopping wood.

Read died in 2014, aged 92. And that's when the humble janitor from the countryside hit the headlines of the international press. 2,813,503 Americans died in 2014. Fewer than 4,000 of them had a net worth of over $8 million at the time of their death. Ronald Read was one of them.

Ronald James Read (October 23, 1921 – June 2, 2014) was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant. Read grew up in Dummerston, Vermont, in an impoverished farming household. He walked or hitchhiked 4 mi (6.4 km) daily to his high school and was the first high school graduate in his family. He enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving in Italy as a military policeman. Upon an honorable discharge from the military in 1945, Read returned to Brattleboro, Vermont, where he worked as a gas station attendant and mechanic for about 25 years. Read retired for one year and then took a part-time janitor job at J. C. Penney where he worked for 17 years until 1997.

In his will, the one-time janitor left $2 million to his stepchildren and over $6 million to the hospital and library where he lived.

Those who knew Read were astonished. Where did he get all this money?

In the end, it turned out that there was no important secret involved. Read had neither won the lottery nor inherited money from anyone. He had saved every penny he could and invested in stocks of blue chip companies. Then he waited for decades until his savings exceeded $8 million.

* JCPenney: It is a chain of stores serving 840 locations in 49 states in the USA and Puerto Rico. In addition to selling traditional products, JCPenney stores also have sections dedicated to Fine Jewelry, Salon by InStyle, and Sephora.

** Blue Chip Company: Companies that have a high transaction volume and share their profits with their investors regularly every year.

That's it. From janitor to philanthropist. A few months before Ronald Read's death, a man named Richard was also in the news. Richard Fuscone was everything Ronald Read wasn't. He was a Harvard graduate with an MBA; He was a senior executive at Merrill Lynch and had a successful career in finance when he retired in his 40s to pursue philanthropy. Former Merrill Lynch CEO David Komansky praised Fuscone's "business wisdom, leadership skills, sound judgment and integrity."

The business magazine Crain once included him in its list of "The 40 most successful business people under the age of 40".

But then, like the tech executive playing dice with gold coins, everything fell apart for Fuscone. In the mid-2000s, Fuscone borrowed heavily to expand his 1,675-square-foot home with eleven bathrooms, two elevators, two pools, and seven garages in Greenwich, Connecticut; Monthly maintenance costs for the house were over $90,000.

Then, in 2008, the financial crisis hit. And his whole being flew away!