AGA TOPICS Newsletter - PDC 2006

The Pursuit of Happyness

Christopher P. Gardner, founder, president and CEO of Gardner Rich & Company, Inc., and author  of “The Pursuit of Happyness,” shared  his riveting tale of rising from homelessness to being the subject of a Will Smith film due out later this year.

He described his current life as being, “out of control. They are making a movie out of my life with one of the biggest movie stars in the world.” Gardner said handling fame and success is a challenge in and of itself. “Being a millionaire is a highly overrated experience,” he said.

The news show “20-20” followed him for three days from New York to San Francisco to Chicago and then cut the three days down to 16 minutes. “You hope it’s the best 16 minutes of your life.” The day after the interview aired in 2003, Oprah called and asked him to be on her show and he said no. The rationale, he said, was the “20-20” thing went well, now leave it alone. “I’d been five minutes away from Oprah Winfrey for 15 years and she never said hi to me,” said Gardner, a longtime resident of Chicago where Winfrey’s production company is headquartered. “I said, no, I’m not going.”

Then he received a call from a producer wanting to do a reality show on homelessness that offered lots of fancy prizes. “Homelessness is not a game and if you think it is, I’ve already won so send me the money,” he told the producer.

He was amused when he was asked to “take a meeting” in Hollywood. “I’m from Chicago, we take a train or a nap, not a meeting.” When it’s done, he said, you almost feel like you want to wash your hands. However, Gardner said he was blessed to meet with a group of producers who were regular people and wanted to make a quality movie.

When Will Smith’s name came up as the actor tapped to play Gardner, he was nervous about it. Gardner’s daughter put it in perspective for him when she says, “Pop, if he can play Muhammad Ali, he can play you.”

Gardner said people ask him all the time how he and his son became homeless. Was it drugs? No. Alcohol? No. “It was my favorite four-letter word: Life. Life happens. Everything that could go wrong did at the same time.” Gardner said he had a great job, fell in love, had a child—his son Christopher. Gardner grew up without a father, but had a stepfather who reminded him every chance he got that he wasn’t Gardner’s father.

“I made a  promise to myself as a little boy that became a commitment I kept as a man that when I had children, they would know their father,” Gardner said. “I would break the cycle of children who didn’t know who their fathers. It is still the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Since his career in science wasn’t paying and he had a family to support, Gardner went to work for a distributor of scientific products in Silicon Valley where he worked with people who made up to $80,000 a year. Through that job, he met a stockbroker who was making $80,000 a month, and became friends with him. “I walked into a Wall Street trading room and found what I had been looking for 14 years,” he said. “I was 28 years old and I thought, this is where I am supposed to be.”

After having this epiphany, Gardner found that breaking into Wall Street was harder than he thought it would be. He was told “no” by many firms. It wasn’t racism, he said, it was “placism.” He didn’t come from a politically connected family, had no money, and no relationships lined up to give him business. “That’s placism,” he said. “But I kept coming back.”

He had one guy finally say yes because of Gardner’s persistence and offered him a job in a training program beginning the following Monday. “I quit my job and showed up on Monday to find the guy who made me the offer had been fired the previous Friday,” he said. “Now did you all hear me say I quit my job? What does that mean? No unemployment benefits.” Remember this,  he said, “Unemployment will not help your relationship.”

Determined to keep his family together, Gardner did whatever he it took to make money, including cutting grass, painting, cleaning basements and “whatever anyone needed while still pursing my dream of Wall Street.” He split with the woman in his life, who took “everything but the dust” when she left. The most important thing she took was his son. “I can’t tell you how that devastated me.”

Right around that same time, he learned that he had $1,200 in unpaid parking tickets. “I could’ve paid the tickets or paid the rent. I chose the rent,” Gardner said. “I was taken to jail for the first, last and only time in my life for parking tickets.” He was put in a cell with a murderer, a rapist and an arsonist. The first thing you learn is, “No one in jail did it.” I told my cellmates, “I’m in here for attempted murder and I’ll try it again. I couldn’t say I was in there for parking tickets.” This happened on a Friday, so court was closed until Monday. He was sent to a state penitentiary where the most famous inmate had hacked 20 people to death with an axe and “I am there for parking tickets. I was there for 10 days and all I can think of is where is my son? Does he know I’m not there because I’m in jail?”

An empathetic guard allowed him to make a single phone call to change an interview he had scheduled with a Wall Street firm the day before he got out of jail. He showed up to the interview wearing the same clothes he’d worn for 10 days in jail and was forced to tell the potential employer the truth about where he’d been and why. The guy appreciated his honesty and admitted him to a stockbroker’s training program.

On his first day, Gardner wore a suit that was one size too small and shoes borrowed from a friend that were two sizes too big. “I didn’t care,” he said. “I was getting my shot.” His “shot” consisted of making 200 phone calls a day in the trainee program. He held up a finger that he says is permanently deformed from dialing a rotary phone. He moved into a boarding house and studied every night for his licensing test, but he was in pain because all he wanted to know is where his child was. Gardner said his ex would call him, let him hear the baby screaming crying and then hang up. This was before *69 or caller ID, he said, adding that parents in the room would understand that you could hear 1,000 babies crying and you’d recognize your own kid. “When it comes to our children, I think all of us have caller ID in our hearts,” he said.  

So, now he’s making $1,000 a month and his ex shows up at the boarding house and hands him the child, saying she doesn’t want him anymore. “And that’s how we became homeless.” They were kicked out of the boarding house that didn’t allow children and moved into a $25 a day place, which is hardly feasible on $1,000 a month. They moved to a lower class hotel for $10 a day—“Imagine who some of your neighbors might be at $10 a day.”

In the basement of a church in San Francisco, Gardner discovered “Mo’s Kitchen,” which now serves 1 million meals a year. Today Gardner’s son is six feet, nine inches and weighs 280 pounds, but he ate a lot of meals at Mo’s. “We were homeless but not hopeless,” he said. For a year, Gardner and his son lived in bus stations, hotel lobbies, airports, the bathroom of the subway station in Oakland and homeless shelters. “No one thought anything of a man, a child and a lot of bags in an airport,” he said. “An experience like this causes little things in you to change. I cannot throw bags away. I have a closet in my house full of bags.”

After the first night they spent in an apartment after a year on the streets, Gardner’s son, who had seen his father carrying everything they owned everywhere they went for a year, couldn’t understand why they didn’t take all their stuff with them when they left the apartment that first morning. “I said, son, we’re home. We have a key.”

Gardner also discovered the “food chain of daycare” in our country. At the top is the au pair, licensed daycare center, trusted babysitter, etc. At the bottom of the food chain is a “woman who keeps kids” but who is not licensed or certified. “The most painful thing in the world to me was leaving my baby with someone I didn’t know,” he said. “But I had no choice. I got lucky, found some good people in my community.” He eventually found a daycare center with the word “Happyness” in its name (thus the name of his book, “The Pursuit of Happyness”), but his son had to potty trained to get into the center. “So, we went to potty training boot camp.”

Gardner said his lowest point came on the night he had to give his baby a bath by candlelight. This was long after they’d settled into an apartment, but having the electricity shut off tested his spirits more than even homelessness had. “I didn’t know if I was going to quit, crack or cry, and my son stands up in the tub and says, ‘Papa, you’re a good papa.’ My son is 25 years old and he’s never said anything that meant more to me. It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t have, I had broken the cycle of children who didn’t know their fathers. Nothing meant more to me.”

Gardner eventually  landed a job at Bear Stearns & Co., where he stayed for four years. He was told that Bear Stearns wasn’t built by people with MBAs, but by PSDs—poor, smart and a deep desire to be wealthy. “I had found the promised land,” he said. “In my business, it’s not a black thing or a white thing. It’s a green thing.” People care about money, he said.

Gardner is working now on some business in South Africa where he’s had the opportunity to meet with Nelson Mandela, an experience he said was like meeting Jesus Chris, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny at the same time.

When Mandela shook Gardner’s hand and said, “Welcome home, son,” Gardner was 45 years old and no man had ever said those words to him. My question was, “What can I do?” to help out in South Africa. The last thing Mandela asked Gardner was, “So, Chris, do you know my friend Oprah Winfrey?” Gardner said. “That chick is stalking me. She’s a nice lady and I’m looking forward to meeting her. It’s going to happen.”

Gardner ended his talk by listing all the good things that have happened to him: the movie is finished. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be huge since it was produced by the producer of Forest Gump and a huge star is leading the cast. The book is out and his editor’s previous book won the Pulitzer Prize. “Across the board, it can’t get any better. But the most important thing, I know for a fact, that I’ve ever done in my life or been associated with is to raise two children and break the cycle of men who were not there for their children. I raised a man who knows what it means to be responsible and I raised a young woman who knows how a man should treat her. By doing this, I have influenced generations of my offspring who I will never meet.”

By: Marie S. Force