Chapter 3
Pockets of Wealth
It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. —Edwin Lefevre
Before the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 and the Great Recession of the late 2000s, there was a devastating stock market crash in 1929 that caused the deepest and longest economic decline in American history. The Great Depression, as it was called, lasted for almost ten years from August 1929 to June 1938. During those years, a young girl named Judy Hart learned to use setbacks as opportunities and retired in affluence.
In the summer of 1931, her world came to a screeching halt. Judy needed to drop out of high school to assist her parents in keeping the household running. Years later, she married but become a widow and was forced to raise two daughters alone. She did so with her personalized American Dream of owning a home and having financial stability to give her children a better life.
As impressive as that was, she found a way to invest in the stock market using the same techniques that made her successful as a mother and homemaker. Her investment skills made her even more remarkable. By the end of her life, she had amassed great quantities of personal, social, and financial capital in one of the hardest and scariest times in American history.
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During the production of a radio segment engineered at Minnesota Public Radio, I took a needed break and was put under the charge of someone known as the station’s best volunteer—Judy Hart. She had moved to Minneapolis to be close to her children and grandchildren, but she believed in keeping busy in retirement. Her smooth skin, silver hair, and blue eyes reminded me of my own grandmother we called Nana, and I was taken in by her warm, ageless personality.
The following weekend, I was happy to meet Judy again at a fundraiser for a food drive in a local park. I was invited as a guest of the station manager, and Judy and I spent the entire evening talking about her life, her philosophy, and her most important lessons on saving and investing. Reminiscences of her lessons still apply for me today and prove history is a trustworthy teacher.
Coming to book stores November
