Maximum optimist

Philanthropy | Philanthropist John M. Templeton turned others’ losses into billions of gains | Warren Cole Smith

With the country emerging from the Great Depression and war on the horizon, 1939 was probably not a wise time to speculate on Wall Street. But that's what John M. Templeton did, borrowing $10,000 to buy 100 shares of stock in 104 companies that were then trading at $1 a share or less. The rest, as they say, is history. Templeton's innovative investment strategies made him one of the world's richest men, and his riches allowed him to be an equally innovative philanthropist. He died on July 8 at age 95.

Templeton's life, career, and theology defied easy characterization. He was born in 1912 into a poor and poorly educated Presbyterian household in rural Tennessee. He became the first person in his family to graduate from college, supporting himself with odd jobs while studying enough to finish near the top of his class at Yale. From there, he earned a law degree at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and then went straightway to Wall Street, beginning a career there on the eve of World War II. By war's end he was a wealthy man.