The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy by Paul Sullivan

Author:Paul Sullivan [Sullivan, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-03-10T04:00:00+00:00

Susan Beacham is a disbeliever. While she does not see spending money on test prep to get kids into college as entirely useless, she believes in a more important opportunity: to teach kids how to make money on their own. Her view, which she has imparted on two college-aged daughters, is born of her own hardscrabble beginnings. She grew up working-class Irish on the gritty South Side of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, where she was far from being a star student. She hadn’t even thought of college until she was taking the bus to the Loop shortly after finishing high school and saw her sixth-grade teacher. “She said, ‘Why aren’t you in college?’ ” Beacham recalled. “I told her, ‘I’m going to work.’ ” The teacher convinced her that she needed to continue her education, something her parents hadn’t discouraged but certainly had not pushed. Her father worked as a sales manager for Sears Roebuck, her mother stayed home, her older sister was already married and raising a family. They were blue-collar, and their lives had turned out fine within that enclave. But Beacham decided to go to what was then called weekend college—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. (“I did that in three years,” she told me. “There is nothing more motivating than when you’re paying your own bills.”) When she finished, she went into banking. She had wanted to work at Continental Illinois Bank, then the most prestigious name in the city before it became the biggest bank failure in America. They wouldn’t hire her so she went to Northern Trust, which offered her a job in the back office. She took it, even though she still makes the point decades later that the back office was where the bank put people from the South Side, the implication being it was a lesser role and carried with it less opportunity. Her future husband was working several floors above her in the trust department because he came from an affluent Chicago suburb—at least that was why she believed he got the better assignment.

After a few years, Beacham left, having decided she wanted to go to law school. Only she couldn’t get into one. Family lore has it that her father called the pope to get her into Loyola Law School, but that’s not plausible. Why would the pontiff take her father’s call? It was more likely he talked to a local priest who reached out to a Jesuit friend who got her admitted. She said her father insisted that she get in because he had paid for Catholic school her whole life and a Catholic law school should accept her. Alas, this isn’t a story of her proving everyone wrong. Those admissions officers were right in turning her down. She graduated and got a job working in the state’s attorney office when Richard M. Daley was in charge of it. But after she failed the bar exam the third time, she said Daley brought her into his office and asked if she was trying to beat his record.

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