About Your True North

My autobiography is not a Horatio Alger story, or maybe it is a little bit. Born during the Great Depression, I grew up poor but first tried my hand at being an entrepreneur when I was six or seven years old. I sold bottles of soda pop each afternoon at a neighborhood construction site, and there are still so many similar opportunities for kids today.A decade later, I talked my way into college, though perhaps I did not really belong there. I was able to pay all of my tuition and expenses by always working and by being forever frugal. Soon after graduation, I made a point of paying back a single $50 scholarship award by making a $50 contribution to my alma mater, and I have continued giving to the university—and many other recipients—ever since.I became a serial entrepreneur in earnest, and then a philanthropist, after first working all over the country with two national consumer-products firms. In 1964, I spent $4,000 to purchase my first real business, a hundred-year-old manufacturer of fruit-juice-beverage