Monday, September 8, 1997
Third- and
Fourth-Generation Fools
by
TMF Style
My children's paternal great grandfather turned 100 years old last January and still lives alone. I have known him most of my life. Harry Kaplan has been investing in the stock market most of his 100 years, and as a young child, I remember him in the summertime reading investment materials. He was investing when there really was a ticker tape that came into his store and people held their stock certificates in their hands. He believed then, as today, that stocks are bought for a long-term investment. Today you can find him glued to the CNBC ticker tape all day, watching his stocks, reading the Wall Street Journal, all his annual reports, and calling his broker once a day.
Harry Kaplan was born before running water, airplanes, cars, televisions, and radios were givens in society. I always thought growing up around him that he had missed so much by not being raised with all the technology our world had to offer when I was a kid in the 1960s. I never could imagine what it would be like to have a major development come along that wasn't around most of my life.
But now, here I am the retail Fool, with thousands of pieces of information at my fingertips, stock quotes, earning and estimates, securities filings, all the news I could possibly read in a day and a computer with word processing that I would have killed for when I was in law school. Perhaps if all this technology had existed when I was younger, I would have invested in the stock market at an earlier age. It is this technology that has allowed the Motley Fools to be successful at what we do, which is to help educate individual investors. Grandpa was a Motley Fool before technology, when it was a lot harder. My twelve-year-old daughter, a major Motley Fool, has a joint account with me at PCFN, picks her own stocks, and has three mock portfolios that she follows on America Online.
I am still amazed at cellular phones, e-mail, and the web. At times I envy my children, as Grandpa might have envied me, that the world is as close as their modems. So what has kept Grandpa Harry going on like the Energizer bunny? Granted, Grandpa never smoked and has basically never been sick, (yet buried a wife and two children). I am convinced that investing in the market and his love to pick up the newspapers and turn on CNBC continue to have great daily meaning in his life. I hope my daughter will benefit from the good genes and love of the market.