Lessons From My Father

ONLY RECENTLY HAVE I realized that many of the philosophical underpinnings of this column come from my father. It's not so much that he loved to regale me and my younger sister and brother with tales of his adventures in the stock market, although he did. I wonder now whatever became of Lawter Chemical, a stock that seems to have been to my father what Google may become to a new generation of young fathers. To hear him tell it, Lawter Chemical put us through college and gave us a roof over our heads. Dad taught us to read the stock tables with the zest that many fathers reserved for baseball statistics or the track results. Every day the market opened, new opportunities beckoned. When I said I wanted to buy shares in American Motors — even though I had no money to speak of — my father bought the shares for me. I followed it closely as the share price seemed to go nowhere but down. When he was satisfied I'd learned my lesson, he sold the stock — and absorbed the loss.

Those experiences, much as I now appreciate them, proved less important than some more fundamental qualities that permeated not only my father's investment philosophy, but his entire life. Here are just a few:

Enjoy what you do

If you're going to invest in stocks, have fun doing it. This may be the most important lesson my father taught me, since he stressed from an early age that people who love what they do excel. They are motivated. They are energized. They are committed. They have an enormous competitive advantage over those who don't enjoy themselves. If you don't like doing something, hire someone who does.

My father's professional calling emerged at an early age. In the depths of the Depression, he discovered a nest of baby mice in the barn. He sold them door-to-door as pets. Naturally, he went into his career in sales, leaving a secure job at International Harvester to join a local television station in the early 1950s — back when television seemed like a bigger long shot than the Internet ever was. People thought he was crazy. But he loved his work.

Play to win

My father had many loves in life, but golf surely ranked near the top. He loved everything about the game, from the swaths of green fairway (he was also a fanatic about his lawn) to the genteel code of conduct to which he faithfully adhered throughout his life (I remember how it pained him when a rule had to be passed banning fishnet T-shirts on the course). My father never really subscribed to the view that "it's how you play the game," or that you're in competition only with yourself. Playing to win is a sign of respect for other players. Playing to win is more fun.

It's only now that I realize he didn't win all that often. The city championship eluded him. And though he had a single-digit handicap, when I surveyed his golf memorabilia recently, I noticed just a few first-place trophies. Still, I often caddied for him, and one thing I remember is that no matter what the score, he was always in contention until the game was over.

This applied to investing, too. You invested to make money, and that was the measure of your success. There was no reason to apologize for or gloss over the profit motive or pretend you were trying only to build character.

Be an optimist

My father was the most optimistic person I ever met. He believed in progress, democracy, the free market and the essential goodness in human nature. He believed that anything was possible, and when you were with him, you believed anything was possible too. His unshakable belief that the stock market over time would rise gave him the strength to buy during market downturns. He was vindicated many times. This, too, has been a basic tenet of this column.

Learn from your mistakes

To my father, a mistake was an opportunity, a gift, something to be savored and probed until it yielded its secrets. He didn't like making mistakes (who does?), but they were often so interesting that their lesson more than compensated for any losses they may have caused. If you embraced your mistakes and tried to understand them, you didn't make them again.

Cultivate a sense of humor

My father was a master of both the scripted joke — his repertoire ran into the hundreds of jokes — and improvised situational humor. In this regard he reminded me of Johnny Carson, a man he admired greatly. "Sears made it and a sucker bought it," he liked to say of his striped summer suit. Not only did he learn from his mistakes, but he usually got some laughs out of them as well.

Don't follow the herd

My father loved to poke fun at conventional wisdom. We shared a love of cars, and he was very opposed to Detroit's decision to "downsize" and homogenize its vehicles in the 1970s. So he held on to his massive Lincoln to protest the new models. Some years ago when everyone was making "living wills" and saying they didn't want their lives extended, he said he wanted to be frozen and shipped to the moon in a canister for later revival, if that was the newest frontier of medical science. He liked to ask me rhetorically if I was man or sheep.

When it came to investing, my father recognized that conventional wisdom was often right, but not always. Since conventional wisdom was already reflected in stock prices, a contrarian view — if correct, of course — was a big profit opportunity. He was undaunted if he felt he was right and the market moved against him. This philosophy was the subject of the very first Common Sense column I wrote back in 2000.

My father died in November at the age of 80. You may wonder why I'm writing this column so soon after his death. As I said, my father loved his work. He was on his way to his office at television station KHQA in Quincy, Ill., when he had to go to the hospital instead. Even when he was discharged to a nursing home and hospice care, he asked for a cellphone to finish a national ad sale.

My father was proud of me and this column, which my mother read aloud to him in recent years after his eyesight failed. I know he'd want me to keep writing. Indeed, he'd expect it. That's another quality for which I have my father to thank.