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GROWING RICH WITH GROWTH STOCKS<br />
world in every room. The place has a decidedly Asian theme, <strong>com</strong>plete<br />
with two real-life Siamese cats roaming around from room to room.<br />
Papp has also amassed one of the world’s largest private art collections<br />
from China’s Ming and Qing dynasties. If you desire something else<br />
to look at, you need merely gaze out one of the apartment’s many<br />
windows, which offer a 360-degree view of Phoenix, from the airport<br />
and downtown to Camelback mountain and the surrounding hillside.<br />
MOVING ON UP<br />
This boy from New Jersey has clearly <strong>com</strong>e a long way. He readily<br />
admits, “God has been good to me.” When Papp graduated from<br />
Trenton Central High School in June 1945, he was supposed to attend<br />
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue a degree in engineering.<br />
That was a little more than a month before the end of<br />
World War II, and the Army decided it needed him even more. When<br />
Papp finished his 18-month tour of duty, he decided to go to Brown<br />
University instead of MIT. “After two years of undergraduate work,<br />
I took my first real course in engineering,” he recalls. “I found out a<br />
third of the class got an A, B, or C. A third of the class got a D. The<br />
rest got an E (the equivalent of an F). I got a D. The school didn’t<br />
have enough facilities for all of those who wanted to study engineering,<br />
so they encouraged people like me to change their majors.”<br />
He opted to go into economics instead and loved it. After <strong>com</strong>pleting<br />
his studies, Papp went on to the Wharton Graduate School at the<br />
University of Pennsylvania. By then he was married to his wife,<br />
Marilyn, whom he met during summer school at the University of<br />
Wisconsin in Madison. The head of Wharton’s finance department<br />
encouraged Papp to accept a job at the investment firm Stein Roe &<br />
Farnham in Chicago, and he agreed. While Papp wasn’t specifically<br />
preparing for a career in money management when he first went to<br />
college, his love affair with stocks actually began in high school.<br />
Papp’s parents, who were both immigrants from Hungary, knew<br />
little about Wall Street. His dad, who died when Papp was 18, had<br />
several different businesses, including a golf bag manufacturing<br />
<strong>com</strong>pany and a restaurant. He started them during the Depression,<br />
and none were very successful. Papp’s mom, a housewife, was much<br />
more scholarly. She encouraged both Papp and his older sister to get<br />
a good education. By the time Papp was a teenager, he figured out<br />
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