Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

ONE-ON-ONE
DONALD YACKTMAN
Donald Yacktman has been an expert at math and playing with
numbers since he was a little boy. As a preschooler, he was cared for
during the day by a childless old woman he called “Nanny.” He remembers
sitting on Nanny’s floor counting pennies by the hundreds.
Then, in the first and second grades, he was the top math student at
his Catholic school. The nun who taught his class would hold races
to see who could add up long columns of numbers the fastest. The
winner got to compete head-on with her. Yacktman easily defeated
his fellow students and proved a formidable challenger to the nun.
One of the great ironies in Yacktman’s life is that he and his wife,
Carolyn, were both born in the same Chicago hospital just nine days
apart, but they didn’t meet again until they were in college. “I kid her
about the wink she gave me in the nursery. Our mothers were both
in the hospital for about ten days,” he explains. An only child,
Yacktman spent his early years in a two-flat home near Chicago’s
Rose Hill Cemetery. His parents divorced after 17 years of marriage
when he was eight. He then moved with his mom to Salt Lake City
and returned to Chicago each June to spend the summer with his dad.
FROM RAGS TO RICHES
Although both of his parents came from impoverished backgrounds,
Yacktman’s father’s life was a modern-day Horatio Alger story. His
given name was Ignatz Yacktman, but he often went by the more
Americanized “Victor,” the male version of Victoria, which was his
mother’s name. Victor’s father immigrated to the United States from
Poland. His mom had been a chef for the Waldorf Astoria hotel in
New York. In 1909, when Victor was five, his father disappeared, and
he and his half-sister were sent to Poland to live with their aunt. Four
years later, they returned to New York, and lived with his mom and
a man named William Morsdorf, who was “Grandpa” to Don. Yackt-