When he was living in the bathroom of the Oakland subway station with his son, or on the streets and benches of San Francisco, Chris Gardner did not think he would someday own his own successful stock brokerage firm, three houses with closets of designer suits and be hanging out with Nelson Mandela and Michael Jordan.
Chris Gardner's story is truly the stuff of movies.
And the actor Will Smith will be starring in a movie produced by Sony and Columbia pictures based on Gardner's life, titled The Pursuit of Happyness (happiness with a Y.)
Chris is an unlikely success story. He started out life never knowing his real father because he only saw him once before he went to his funeral.
His stepfather was abusive and his mother thought the only way out was to burn down the house. While she spent many years in state prison, Chris was shuffled between relatives and foster homes.
To escape the nightmare of his living situation, he joined the Navy at age 17. His uncles had been military men and the Vietnam Draft was on. Chris worked as a medic at Fort Legeune in North Carolina.
One of his Navy bosses liked his work so much that he hired Chris as an assistant. That is how he moved to San Francisco. Then he quit that job to become a medical supplies salesman.
One day in the hospital parking lot, he was ogling a red Ferrari.
He told the owner that he would give him his parking spot if the owner answered two questions - what he did for a living and how he got to do that. It turns out that the man was a stockbroker earning more than 80,000 dollars a month.
Immediately Chris started applying for stock broker trainee jobs. But it took him ten months to find a position as a trainee even though the firms paid a salary barely above subsistence levels. At the time, Wall Street was not putting out the welcome mat for black men without a college degree and no connections.
Unfortunately, his new boss at the stock brokerage firm that he finally joined was shown the door and Chris with him. Then even worse, Chris was thrown in jail for $1200 dollars of unpaid parking tickets.
His girlfriend had had enough. She disappeared with their son and all his clothes. Chris was forced to go to his interview at Dean Witter in the same clothes that he had been wearing before entering jail ten days earlier. Chris decided to be honest and tell the interviewer what had happened. Honesty paid off and Chris got the job as a Dean Witter trainee. His new boss had been through a divorce and was sympathetic.
Unexpectedly, his girlfriend showed up at his boarding house with their son. She said, "It is your turn to take care of him now." Chris agreed to take on the responsibility of his son but he was forced to leave his boardinghouse because they did not allow children.
Chris and his son were forced to live on the streets, in flophouses or at a small corner of Union Square because his one thousand dollar a month salary could not support the two of them.
Sometimes, they washed in the sinks of public bathrooms. At one point, he begged permission from a minister to live in a women only shelter so he could provide a better environment for his son.
He and his toddler son used to eat meals at the Glide Memorial Church Soup Kitchen. There, Reverend Cecil Williams took an interest in Gardner after noting his devotion to his young son. The Reverend introduced him around town but more importantly became the father that he never had.
With the help of the community program Glide based in the rough section of San Francisco called the Tenderloin district and his slow but steady success as a stockbroker, Chris was able to break free of homelessness in a year. Living in the shelter allowed him to save enough for a deposit on a rental house in Berkley.
He soon switched to the brokerage firm Bear Stearns and then later started his own firm Gardner, Rich and company. It is a multi million dollar brokerage operation with offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
Once he started his own firm, he finally did buy the Ferrari that he had once coveted - from basketball player Michael Jordan.
Now Gardner, age 51, will be selling his brokerage firm for "a nice piece of change."
Recently he was deservedly honored as Father Of The Year by the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI).
His own children a son, age 24 and a daughter age 19 were there. NFI's mission is to improve the well being of children by increasing the proportion of children growing up with involved responsible and committed fathers.
These days Chris Gardner is keen to spread a message that anything is possible if you put your heart and soul into it. Most importantly he stresses, never to give up.
Gardner has not forgotten his past and the place that gave him more than nutritional sustenance. He often returns to the Glide Memorial Church and helps to support the place.
Like in Hollywood, there is a happy ending where the boy gets the girl. Chris Gardner is in love with a woman that he saw on the subway more than 23 years ago. Now he hopes that they will get married and have children together.
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Chris Gardner
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