The below article is extracted from Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (2003) by Philip Fisher.
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From it, you can know how Kenneth Fisher - Philip Fisher third son, respected him. Been reading the book the second time, and still like this part (and still touches me, especially the phrase - But he is my little, old man. You can feel the love and respect in it.)…
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By Kenneth Fisher
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This is among the most beloved investment books of all times, among the bestselling of classic investment books, and now 45 years old. My father wrote his original preface at my childhood home in September 1957. It remains herein. 45 years later in October 2002, in my current home, I dare write this, this book’s first new preface in all those decades.
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If you’ve read my revised preface, you might think my father is deceased. No. As I write, he is 95 and alive. But he is reduced by the awesome wreckage induced by late stages of aged senile dementia and probably by Alzheimer’s disease (there is no right way to be sure). He is at home, in bed, about thirty feet away from where he wrote Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and his other writings.
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He deteriorates steadily. To those few of us taking care of him, it is startlingly quickly. By the time you read this, he may well be deceased. He will never read these words- were they read to him, he couldn’t follow their meaning for more than a sentence or two before losing the thread in dangling disconnects cut by his dread disease. He was a great man but is now just a little, old man very late in life. But he is my little, old man. What this disease routinely does to people is nothing to be ashamed of; it is just a disease, not a failing. When I wrote my third book, based on one hundred cameo biographies of dead pioneers of American finance, I defined it as "dead" pioneers only on the premise that dead people don’t sue, just in case I got anything wrong. But I also did so because I purposefully didn’t want to cover my father in any regard. I didn’t want to say anything that might hurt him if I interpreted him differently than he might have wished, which I well might have.
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Now I need not worry about that because he won’t know what I say here. So it is time to tell you a bit about the man who wrote one of the best beloved investment books of all time. I’m best qualified to do so because I know him better than anyone if you combine business and personal matters. Oh, certainly, in other ways my mother, his wife, knew him far better than anyone. My aunt, his sister, knew him longer than anyone. But their relationships were basically personal, not business. Yes, I have an elder brother who worked very closely with him briefly and was temporarily my business partner and to whom I’m close. But Arthur’s professional time span around Father was fairly short. He evolved to academic humanities, where he is today. Father always loved Arthur foremost of his three sons, and Arthur was more emotionally linked to Father than I was. But Arthur would be first to tell you I spent vastly more business time around Father over many more years and had a day-to-day relationship with him when Arthur couldn’t, materially because Arthur lived a thousand miles away.
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Beginnings
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My paternal ancestors were Jewish, mainly from Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, all arriving in San Francisco in the early 1850’s. My father’s paternal grandfather was Philip Isaac Fisher and was both Levi Strauss’s original accountant and the person who opened and closed Strauss’s first store for him on a daily basis and served Strauss his entire career. My great-grandfather was not wealthy but at his death was financially comfortable. His wife died young, and his eldest daughter, Caroline or Cary, donned an important role caring for her siblings. My grandfather, Arthur Lawrence Fisher, the youngest of eight, adored Cary, who played partial surrogate mother. Born in 1875 in San Francisco, Arthur Lawrenece Fisher grew, graduated from UC-Berkeley, and attended John Hopkins Medical School, graduating in 1900 and returning to San Francisco to practice medicine as a general practitioner. Later (perhaps in World War I but maybe earlier, during post-doctoral scholarship based research at Rockefeller Universtity), he developed a specialty in orthopedics, becoming the third orthopedic surgeon west of the Mississippi and a founding member of the Western Orthopedics Society. In 1906, Philip Isaac Fisher died, stalling briefly Arthur Fisher’s marriage to Eugenia Samuels. The marriage stalled again behind the infamous 1906 fire and earthquakes. Finally they married, and my father was born the next year, on September 8, 1907. He was named originally Philip Isaac Fisher, after his recently deceased grandfather.
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4 years later in 1911, my father’s sister, his only sibling, was born. She was named Caroline after Aunt Cary. Aunt Cary had married well, to a Levi Strauss relative named Henry Sahlein, who was introduced to Cary through her father. Aunt Cary played an important role in the lives of Fishers for two generations, those of both my grandfather and father. Aunt Cary not only secretly bankrolled my father’s education (something he never, ever knew), but also secretly gave my grandfather money to buy a car for Father that became serendipitously seminal to his career evolution. And Cary provided ongoing family social structure that enriched Father’s fragile emotional existenece as a child - a process that continued for decades. If my parents had had a daughter, she would have been named Cary, as was their first grandchild.
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Unlike many doctors, my paternal grandfather was largely uninterested in money. He did a great deal of charity work and academic medicine, but he didn’t care for business or money. When his private practice patients couldn’t pay, he simply cared for them anyway. When he sent out bills that went unpaid, he ignored rebilling or collection attempts. He was thought of by myriad people as saintly for his kind, warm, and generous persona. Fortunately for his immediate family, he had Aunt Cary to "secretly" bankroll him behind the scenes. Without Cary, you likely would never have gotten this book.
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Father was originally privately tutored. My grandfather didn’t believe in the elementary schools of the day, and Aunt Cary could afford better. Later, Father was enrolled in San Francisco’s prestigious Lowell High School. He graduated at age 16. Smart, too young, well educated from tutoring, Father was also awkward and lacking in social skills other children normally learn in elementary school. He was frail, brittle, and uncoordinated sports-wise; and being young by comparison, he was small relative to Lowell classmates. So he felt socially insecure, which was furthered by his mother’s incessantly critical and negative nature. At 16, Father started at UC-Berkeley; but later, will financial aide from Aunt Cary and a car paid for by her, he transferred to smaller and friendlier Stanford University. That transfer also proved fateful.
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He dutifully returned to San Francisco on weekends, which began with a ritual Friday night family dinner at Aunt Cary’s and Uncle Henry’s. These dinners spanned almost 50 years, starting before Father’s birth, and included even distant family members. The dinners were central to building Father’s early social skills. (The ritual still existed briefly when I was a child.) My grandparents always attended. Father arrived directly from Berkeley or later Stanford. Cary’s house, which if it existed today would be called a mansion, was built in the 1890’s by Uncle Henry on Jackson Street, just off Van Ness. The multi-course feast involved much discourse and after-dinner debate that often turned various family participants combative, something my grandfather loved watching. There Father became a particular favourite of Uncle Henry, which made these events particularly memorable to Father - his one chance as a young man to stand out in a crowd. After dinner, Father returned home with his paretns, heading back to college Monday morning.
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To Father, Stanford was spectacular. Warm, beautiful, laid-back, prestigious, he felt more comfortable at Stanford than at Cal or pretty much anywhere else. Upon graduating at twenty, and still insecure but feeling safe at Stanford, he remained in the then brand-new first class of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, again secretly underwritten by Aunt Cary. Father never knew about Cary’s fiancial largesse on his behalf. Multiple other family members knew. Cary and my grandfather believed it was better if the beneficiary of the largesse thought it came from a father who earned his savings rather than from a rich aunt who married money.
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Stanford didn’t then have an investment class as it does now; but as Father has described in other writings, there was a class that traveled to visit and analyze local businesses. Father had a car and volunteered to drive the professor, Boris Emmett; so they spent a lot of time together, which had a profound effect on Father. He felt he learned more from those car rides with Emmett than from all his other time at Stanford combined. He described all that better than I could in his 1980 Financial Analysts Research Foundation (FAF) mongraph, "Developing an Investment Philosophy" and so I won’t thread there. In his original preface to Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, he described his early business years, so I won’t thread that turf either.
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To be continued
