Ronald Read (philanthropist)

Ronald James Read (October 23, 1921 – June 2, 2014) was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.

Read grew up in Dummerston, Vermont, in an impoverished farming household.

He walked or hitchhiked 4 mi daily to his high school and was the first high school graduate in his family.

He enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving in Italy as a military policeman.

Read was born on October 23, 1921, to George and Florence Ray Read into an indigent family that managed a farm.

He was raised in Dummerston, Vermont, in an extremely tiny house.

To travel to high school, he daily walked and hitchhiked 4 mi to Brattleboro.

Read graduated from Brattleboro Union High School in 1940 and was the first high school graduate in his family.

He had an older brother, Frank.

During World War II, he enlisted in the United States Army and was deployed to North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific Ocean theater.

In Italy, he worked as a military policeman.

He reached the Army rank of technician fifth grade.

Upon an honorable discharge from the military in 1945, Read returned to Brattleboro, Vermont, where he worked as a gas station attendant and mechanic for about 25 years.

Right before Christmas 1945, he finished his deployment, was honorably discharged, and traveled back to Brattleboro.

Read worked for almost a quarter of a century as an attendant and mechanic at Haviland's Service Station, a gas station that he and his older brother, Fred, later purchased and then sold upon retiring.

The Wall Street Journal noted that his roughly $2,380 purchase of 39 Pacific Gas and Electric Company shares on January 13, 1959, grew to $10,735 by the time he died.

Read bought many shares of The J.M. Smucker Company, CVS Health, and Johnson & Johnson and held for long-term several blue chip companies, including Procter & Gamble, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, and Dow Chemical Company.

He focused on companies that paid generous dividends, which he would reinvest into purchasing additional stock.

He did not invest in technology companies and the stock du jour because he concentrated largely on companies he knew about.

When he died, he had no fewer than 95 stocks that were diversified in many industries such as healthcare, telecommunications, public utilities, rail transport, banks, and consumer goods.

March had two teenaged children including Phillip Brown who was in college when Read and March married in 1960.

Read purchased for US$12,000 a house where he lived with his wife and stepchildren.

He financed his stepchildren's college education.

His wife died in 1970 of cancer and he did not remarry.

Read's hobbies included wood chopping, stamp collecting, and coin collecting.

He frequently drove his car to his family's homestead and stored firewood he chopped there, and looked for tree branches on the ground to use for the wood-burning stove at his house.

Read frequently patronized Brattleboro Memorial Hospital's coffee shop to drink one cup of coffee and eat a breakfast of an English muffin with peanut butter.

After the coffee place shuttered, he began to eat breakfast at Friendly's.

He retired in 1979, which lasted a year.

Read retired for one year and then took a part-time janitor job at J. C. Penney where he worked for 17 years until 1997.

He then worked part-time at J. C. Penney where he did custodial and maintenance work before retiring in 1997 after working there for 17 years.

Read met his future wife, Barbara March, at Haviland's Service Station when she was a customer and he worked as a gas station attendant.

Read met the hospital development director, who suggested he check out the library and helped him secure his first library card in 2007.

He regularly visited the library to return a pile of books and check out another pile.

Reader's Digest's Juliana LaBianca said Read was "a blue-collar guy with blue-chip smarts".

Although he owned shares of Lehman Brothers when it went bankrupt in 2008, the bankruptcy minimally affected his returns because his investments were diversified.

In a safe deposit box at his bank, Read stored his stock certificates, which when piled together reached five inches high.

Read died in 2014.

He received media coverage in numerous newspapers and magazines after bequeathing US$1.2 million to Brooks Memorial Library and $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital.

Read amassed a fortune of almost $8 million by investing in dividend-producing stocks, avoiding the stocks of companies he did not understand such as technology companies, living frugally, and being a buy and hold investor in a diversified portfolio of stocks with a heavy concentration in blue chip companies.