In May of 1978, Resorts Casino Hotel opened the first legal casino in the U.S. outside of Nevada. I had never bought shares of stock in my life up until that time, but I read in the daily newspapers that Resorts stock was being sold at one dollar a share. I could not believe the price, knowing that Resorts would be a money-making machine with gamblers coming from all over the East Coast to hand over their money to the casino.

I looked in the phone book (remember phone books?) for the names of stock brokerage firms and called a few, telling them that I wanted to buy about 2,000 shares of Resorts stock. I figured the worst I could do was lose $2,000, but the upside was limitless.  However, every brokerage I called wanted me to fill out an application before I could open an account, telling them all about our jobs, income, assets and liabilities, etc.

At the time my wife, a nurse, and I, a newspaper reporter, were both making less than $200 a week, so we were not exactly putting a down payment on a Porsche. We were turned down by the brokerage firms because of our unimpressive financial status, so we never did get to buy the coveted Resorts stock. If we had, that $2,000 would have turned into $152,000 if the stock (now MGM Resorts International) was sold in 2007.

Ever since I can remember, I have been reading articles about how we all have to plan for retirement and save and invest our money wisely so we do not wind up in our old age with nothing but bills we can't pay, lots of physical ailments and a nursing home bed. So I started reading about how to prevent such a dire retirement filled with suffering.

One article I read in the business section of the Philadelphia Bulletin was about John Bogle (1929-2019), who in 1975 founded what would become the Vanguard Group, Inc., based in Malvern, because of his frustration that the major brokerage firms he had worked for directed all of their attention at wealthy investors and would not take on new clients who did not already have significant financial resources. 

After Bogle started Vanguard, he took on anyone as a new client, even if they had just $100 to invest. He kept expenses low and revolutionized the entire industry by inventing index funds with very low commissions. (An index fund tries to match the returns of a financial market index, such as the S&P 500, while an actively managed fund tries to beat market returns.)

Bigshots in the industry said Bogle's ideas would never succeed, that he would be wasting time and energy with working-class and middle-class investors who would never have enough money to make Vanguard successful. I think it is fair to say that Bogle proved the naysayers 100 percent wrong since Vanguard today manages $7.2 trillion (that's TRILLION) in investors' funds, ranking as the second largest financial investment company in the United States. 

Although he could have lived like a Trump, Bogle lived a very modest lifestyle, drove a regular car and lived in a normal-sized house in Bryn Mawr. He gave countless millions to charities.

And he always remained an advocate and cheerleader for the middle class. For example, in 1981 my wife and I were audited by the IRS, and we had to produce certain documents, one of which was a check I had written on a Vanguard money market account. I called Vanguard at least three times over two weeks and each time asked for a copy of the canceled check. (Vanguard did not routinely return canceled checks, as most banks did at the time.) Each time I was told it would be done, but it was not.

Finally, with just 10 days to go before the audit, I was starting to panic. So I called Vanguard and asked to speak to John Bogle, expecting this would at least get me a return call from an actual supervisor who would take care of the problem.

A few hours later the phone rang, and the voice on the other end said, “Hi, this is John Bogle. How can I help you?” I explained our problem, and he apologized profusely. “I guarantee that you will receive the canceled check tomorrow by overnight mail, and I will get to the bottom of this to see that it does not happen again. If you do not get the check by 3 p.m. tomorrow, please call me at my private number (he gave me the number), and I will have someone here drive it to your house right away!”

I then said, “Mr. Bogle, I never really expected you to call me back personally. Your company is handling hundreds of billions of dollars, and we are very, very small investors. I still cannot believe you called me. You could be spending this time on the phone with the CEO of one of the biggest corporations in the U.S. or with a U.S. senator. Why didn't you have one of your many employees call me back?”

“In the first place,” he said, “how do you think we got to handle hundreds of billions of investors' dollars? It was by putting the customer first and by making it clear to every one of our employees that there is no such thing as a small investor. You and your wife are precisely the kinds of ordinary people this company was founded to represent. If we do the job that you deserve and remain as loyal to you as you have been to us, then someday your relatively small investment will become a significant nest egg for you and your family.

“And this call WAS a valuable use of my time because you will probably tell many other people about this call in the future. (Bogle did not know I was a reporter.) And maybe some of the people you talk to will become interested in our products. Too many corporate executives spend much of their time talking to other corporate executives and lose touch with the people they need to communicate with the most, their customers.”

Of course, we received the canceled check the next day. And when Bogle was forced to retire as Vanguard CEO in 1996, I wrote an article of praise about him in the Main Line Times. A week later I received a wonderful hand-written letter from Bogle, thanking me.

Many people who have 401k’s don't even know some of their money is invested in Vanguard funds. They and the millions of Vanguard customers owe a huge debt of gratitude to Bogle, who has probably done more to enrich the lives of middle-class Americans than anyone else in history, with the possible exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com