America’s unknown millionaire sadhus

The secondary story is the growth of the richie rich list. The US’ robust and expansive economy is spawning more millionaires than ever. More and more people are getting wealthy through stock options offered by booming blue chip companies.

They are generally beginning to be known as Microsoft Millionaires, after the software giant that accelerated a trend. America’s wealthiest ten has three Microsofties. Companies like Home Depot has spun off 1,000 homegrown millionaires by offering stock options all the way down its ranks.

According to the latest count, the US has close to 100,000 millionaires, up from only 13,500 in 1979.

But buried beneath the avalanche of statistics and debris of money is the less often told story of America’s secret millionaires — and philanthropists. More and more American millionaires are beginning to give away their millions. And more often than not, the world does not even know that they are millionaires.

Consider this story. In the 24 years Jacob Leeder knew Ann Holdorf, he kept an unvarying routine. Both were single, and every afternoon, he would drop by her Maryland house and watch the stock market news for hours, because he did not have Cable TV at his house.

She cooked for him the last ten of those years. On the odd occasion she did not or could not, they called in a pizza or went to a cheap restaurant.When he died early this year at 84, Ann learnt that Jacob was worth $36 million. He left her $250,000.

The rest went to his two nieces and several charitable causes, including a packet to animal rights groups and the veterinary schools at the universities of Maryland and Pennsylvania.

“When we first met he talked about us taking trips together, but we never went. As I sat there listening to the lawyer read his will, I thought `You son of a gun. We could have gone anywhere we wanted,” the 71-year-old Holforf said later.

Leeder is one of America’s many silent, secret, millionaire-philanthropists. Men and women who make millions milking a strong and buoyant economy, but whose names do not make it to the richie rich list even in the local rag. These millionaires do not advertise their riches. Some of them do not even know how rich they are. The money is counted only after they are dead, usually by their lawyers.

But regardless of whether they know of their riches or not, many of them are beginning to leave their money to charities and worthy causes, unlike in many other parts of the world where accumulation and multiplication of wealth is considered the end-all and be-all of life.

The mother of all philanthropy stories concerns Anne Scriber, a former IRS clerk, who died last eyar at age 101. Like Leeder, Scriber was a business buff, a scourge of the stock pages. For years after she retired as an IRS auditor, she lived on her pension in a dilapidated $450-a-month Manhattan apartment with peeling paint.

Like Leeder, she lived a Spartan life — so frugal that she went to the local public library each day to read the stock pages of the Wall Street Journal. Over years, through careful investments, she parlayed her $5,000 savings into $22 million.

When she died, she left it all to the little-known Yeshiva University, which had never heard of her. “She wanted to make sure other Jewish women were not deprived of opportunities as she felt she had been,” a spokesman of the university said.

American papers are replete with such examples, little stories tucked away in the corners of newspapers. Like the tale of Raymond Fay in Philadelphia. A supposedly penurious bachelor who lived in tattered clothes in a rundown apartment without a phone or a TV. As a high school chemistry teacher, he made less than $12,000 a year.

After he retired in 1969, he spent the next 26 years reading books in the local public library some 16,000 over his lifetime. The number was revealed because in his decaying house, he kept brief reviews of all the books he read written in 3-by-5 cards arranged neatly in shoe boxes. When he died at 92, he was worth $1.5 million. He left it all to the local public library.

American social scientists are struggling to explain this phenomenon. One possible explanation is that most of these people are old and single and really have no idea how rich they are. The stock market boom of the 90’s, pushing the Dow Jones index from the 1000s to now over 8000, has multiplied their wealth beyond imagination. “Many of them had incredible amounts of money but they did not know about it,” says Daniel Borochoff, a social scientist who advises individuals on philanthropy.

But that does not explain all cases. People like Leeder and Scriber monitored stocks so carefully that their growth would hardly have escaped them. For them, sociologists have another explanation. These are depression era children who were very insecure about money. “Some of them grew up in circumstances where there was guilt attached to having money,” says Kathleen Gurney, a psychologist.

That still does not account for all the bucks flowing into charity and worthwhile causes. Earlier this year, as a flood stricken mid-west battled with the century’s worst calamity in the region, a mysterious donor gave every single affected person a helping hand with a $2000 cheque, an amount toting up to more than $10 million. She turned out to be the heiress of a business empire who wanted to remain unnamed.

Such is the flood of philanthropy that even Bill Gates has declared that most of his wealth will go to charitable causes.