volunteering or donating money,
tend to have lower blood pressure,
less stress, and longer lives. One 2011
study even found that older volun-
teers had a lower risk of dying in a
four-year period than nonvolunteers.
They certainly understood the im-
portance of planning for the future.
Careful, conservative investing—
putting money in the stock market
and leaving it there to grow—has
always been the ticket to a comfort-
able retirement, and that’s how these
working-class benefactors built their
legacies. For instance, when Sylvia
Bloom was a young legal secretary,
part of her job was to keep track of
her bosses’ stock purchases. She’d
take note of which stocks the lawyers
were buying and buy a few shares for
herself. “She invested in the market
and didn’t spend it,” says Lockshin.
“She followed the rules.”R
onald Read was a blue-collar
guy with blue-chip smarts.
A gas station attendant and
JCPenney janitor in Brattleboro, Ver-
mont, he read the Wall Street Journal
every day, following his investments
in Ford, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and
CVS Health. When he died in 2014 at
age 92, he was worth $8 million.
But while he had watched his
money carefully, he rarely touched it.
After one of his last meetings with his
attorney, Laurie Rowell, she insisted
on walking her frail client to his car.
They proceeded up a steep hill,passing empty parking spots as they
went. When they got to Read’s 2007
Toyota Yaris, Rowell realized why he
had chosen that spot: There were no
parking meters at the top of the hill.
“You would have thought he was pen-
niless if you met him,” she says. (In
fact, Read didn’t even want his lawyer
to walk with him to the car, because
he thought she might charge him for
the time.)
Read’s frugality was sometimes mis-
taken for actual poverty. One morning,
the man ahead of him in line for cof-
fee noticed Read’s tattered clothes andpromptly paid for his drink. He got his
coffee that day, and most others, at
Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, which
served some of the best java in town.
“That coffee shop was beloved by a
number of people,” says Rowell. “They
took good care of him.” When Read
died, hospital officials were surprised
that he had left the bulk of his estate,
nearly $5 million, to the hospital.
“Some of us knew he had some in-
vestments,” his stepson Phillip Brown
told the Brattleboro Reformer, “but
obviously he had a whole lot more
that we didn’t know about.”“IT’S A WONDERFUL
SURPRISE TO WAKE UP
AND FIND A WOMAN
WHO CARES GREATLY.”rd.com 77Good Deeds