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Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

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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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